Mystery Lost

“It’s mystery.”   We often refer to that we just don’t understand as a mystery.   And we should.   I’m reminded of this by an America magazine May 2 article “Back to Wonder: The search for mystery in a scientific world” by John Savant.   After noting our failures to end war, injustice, poverty and violence and that our institutions, resolutions, and technological wonders have failed us and will continue to do so, he offers the following:

“…when we tossed out myth with superstition; when we confined our sense of the infinite within the constraints of the microscope and the test tube; when we reduced longing to market allure, tragedy to pathology and love to sexuality; when we addressed the ageless evils of war and injustice as problems in strategy and use of force – we betrayed our sense of mystery, our sense of wonder over all we intuit but cannot know.

If we, indeed, must change ourselves before we can change a world in crisis, we can begin by recapturing our lost sense of wonder and mystery.  It seems to me that the recovery of this sensibility is what Christ meant when he cautioned, ‘Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of God.’  

The recovery of this sensibility is, in fact, a recognition of and a response to the mystery that underlies the whole story of creation, the mystery that is the very first business of religion, the radical stimulus of the arts – and, indeed, the source of the wonder that forever drives science once perceived as a the foe of religion and myth.”

I provide the above quotes if for no other reason than I baptized six babies on Sunday.  I usually use the Gospel passage: “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of God.”   Now, I’ll mention that we adults tend to lose our sense of wonder and awe, but not children.   It’s something we must regain to find the kingdom of God – never mind enter it.

Deacon David Pierce