There is something that is no longer appreciated. Perhaps it was never really liked. We live in a world filled with mystery, yet, many people seem to see mystery as something to be overcome. In our insatiable drive to eliminate mystery for the world, there has been an explosion of knowledge.
“In his 1982 book Critical Path, futurist and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller estimated that up until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By 1945 it was doubling every 25 years, and by 1982 it was doubling every 12-13 months. IBM estimates that in 2020 human knowledge will be doubling every 12 hours.”1
All that is needed to start a research project is to say that something isn’t known or perhaps that our prior knowledge was wrong. There will be somebody somewhere who is willing to “search out the truth.” This isn’t bad. I love research and understanding the meaning of research.
However, this drive to understand everything leads us to reject anything we can’t explain. If it can’t be tested and the results reproduced, then we tend to reject it as untrue. That isn’t a valid scientific approach. If we can’t test something, the most we can say is that “it is unproven.” Because of the desire to “know” the truth, people tend to translate “unproven” as “false.”
John O’Donohue, in his book Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, says: “The light of modern consciousness is not gentle or reverent; it lacks a graciousness in the presence of mystery; it wants to unriddle and control the unknown.”2
One of the biggest mysteries in life is spirituality. I once was in a group that includes the term “spiritual” as a part of its name. There were many long discussions about what “spiritual” means. The answer depends in part on who you are talking to. For some, the meaning always has at least somewhat of a religious connotation. For others the connotation (religious or not) is centered around the world we live in.
The bottom line is that “spirituality” and “things of the spirit” are a mystery. People each come to terms with that idea in their own unique way. Once a person decides what “spiritual” means to them, they want to “be sure” their understanding and knowledge of spirituality is the correct one. Anyone who disagrees with them is a heathen or trying to destroy the truth as they know it.
At the risk of being run out of town, I would affirm that at the present time no one has a totally clear picture of what is called “spirituality.” It remains a mystery. Because it remains a mystery, we should be very gracious in how we handle other people’s spirituality. If someone has a different understanding than I of what is spiritual and what isn’t, I want to tread carefully. I will tell them my understanding, but I do so realizing that my picture of what my spirituality is may not be totally correct. Nor can I say with certainty that the other person’s concept of spirituality is wrong.
I must admit, I want to be right and I want anyone who disagrees with me to be wrong. It’s this idea that has driven people over and over to try to prove the existence of God. In the end, God’s existence is spiritual,3 it is a mystery and cannot be proven using human methods. That doesn’t by any means say that God isn’t real. All it does is recognize that we aren’t God and that in things of the spirit, we still have a lot to learn.
I invite you to enjoy the mystery of the spirit. How God does things, why God does things, is not in our purview to know. What we can do is always hold our ideas gently, being ready to change them as more evidence becomes available.
I believe in the mystery of godliness. I believe in the mystery of the trinity. I believe in the mystery of why God would love us so much to send Jesus to die for us. However, I know they are mysteries and, comfortably or uncomfortably, I choose to live with that fact.
In one sense, to have faith is to accept the idea of mystery. In Hebrews it says that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”4 Faith is what is needed to deal with uncertainty, with things we can’t understand. Trying to be absolutely sure of something is the opposite of having faith.
May your faith increase and be strong, by the grace of God. I hope you are able to embrace the mysteries that come to you.
- https://www.modernworkplacelearning.com/cild/mwl/the-effect-of-information-explosion-and-information-half-life/ ↩︎
- O’Donohue, John, Harper Perennial, 2004, p 86. ↩︎
- John 4:24 ↩︎
- Hebrews 11:1 ↩︎
Ross T Lucas 