O Magnum Mysterium!

O Great Mystery,
And wondrous sacrament,
That animals should see the newborn Lord
          lying in the manger.

-Martin Lauridsen

Life itself, and our individual lives, are shrouded in mystery. Why, in singer songwriter Iris Dement’s words, can we not simply “let the mystery be”?

It is in the attempt to define mystery away that religion goes wrong. The British Catholic journalist G. K. Chesterton was right, I think: when you have mystery, when you allow the mystery simply “to be,” you have health. It is when you try to explain mystery that you create dis-ease, for explanation is always doomed to failure

I confess that it is the sense of mystery, more than the desire for answers, which has always attracted me to religion. I care less for the answers than for the questions. From the time I was a child I have always had a sense of “something more.” This may sound strange coming from a Unitarian Universalist, but I guess I am the type of whom Anton Chekov wrote, that “He was a rationalist, but he had to confess that he liked the ringing of the church bells.”

I have always shied away from other peoples’ hard and fast definitions. The theologians I like most, and the ones you will most often hear me quote, are the ones who have accepted the mystery which lies at the heart of things, the ones who are comfortable living with the questions.

Our job as religious people is always to search for the truth, of course. It is to seek always, but it is also paradoxically to recognize that we will never find precisely what we are looking for. Our job, I would claim, is to live always amid uncertainties.

For it is the certainties, in religion as much as in anything else, as much as in politics or race or the law, that kill. The letter always kills the spirit. It is as true of our particular religion as of any other, for there is a fundamentalism of the left as well as of the right.

Every great religious holiday has mystery at its heart. It is this mystery which attracts me and which has always attracted me and which holds me even when I am disgusted with what the world does and says about religion.

I am convinced by what I have read that the Christmas story is not factual, but I love it all the same, for it points to those eternal realities of which Victoria Safford wrote in the morning’s reading. The Christmas story is true even if it is not factual. One could even say I believe it.

For I want to believe that the divine is present in the world, and though I often doubt it, there are times when I am as sure of it as I am sure of anything. Not sure enough to make absolute claims, perhaps, certainly not sure enough to kill for it, but sure enough that I can choose to live my life as if it were so.

What we are all searching for, I believe, is evidence of what Paul Tillich called “the eternal now.” We know, or should, that we will never grasp it fully, but we can catch occasional glimpses of it. We will occasionally have that sense of “something more” which I believe is at the heart of the religious impulse. It is that for which I live.

Sometimes, it seems frustratingly close. I can almost touch it, it is so tantalizingly near.

The great religious holidays like Christmas provide a way for us to be in touch with the eternal now, as do sacraments such as our child dedication ceremony, as do practices such as meditation and prayer, as does beneficient action on behalf of others.

Evelyn Underhill, the great 20th century student of mysticism, once wrote in a Christmas message,

I do hope your Christmas has a little touch of Eternity in among the rush and pitter patter and all. It always seems such a mixing of this world and the next--but that after all is the idea!

I love the sense that there is something more, the sense of expectation, the sense that what I am seeking lies just around the next corner. I love the sense of mystery: it is real, even if the shadowlands are not. And I want to live in that feeling as often as possible, and not to explain it away or deny it because it cannot be empirically proven, because the only evidence is in my heart.

I often get a sense of heightened expectation from a great poem or a great work of art or music. I think it comes when we remain open to the possibility of the “something more” in life. I think this is what Howard Thurman was getting at when he wrote,

There must be always remaining in every one’s life some place for the singing of angels--some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and by an inherent prerogative, throwing all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness, something which gathers up in itself all the freshets of experience from drab and commonplace areas of living and glows in one bright white light of penetrating beauty and meaning--then passes. The commonplace is shot through with new glory--old burdens become lighter, deep ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. A crown is placed over our heads and for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear. Despite the crassness of life, despite the hardness of life, despite all of the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels.

Today is Christmas. In David Rhys Williams’ wonderful words, “Let us withdraw from the cold and barren world of prosaic fact if only for a season: that we may warm ourselves by the fireside of fancy, and take counsel of the wisdom of poetry and legend.”

O Magnum Mysterium! “O Great Mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the newborn Lord lying in a manger.” Of course it is ludicrous: God born in a feeding trough, in a barn, to a virgin mother, in poverty a helpless human baby, with only animals as witness. Yet there is something to this story which has captured, and continues to capture, the human imagination. It has done so now for nearly 2000 years. It has created countless works of art. It has inspired countless people to live good lives. Why attempt to explain it, knowing that the attempt will always fail?

Thank God for the mystery! As Gordon Kaufman writes,

The only possible check against the monumental deceits which human religiousity works on our gullibility--and on our desire for certainty in a terrifying world--is the constant reminding of ourselves that it is indeed mystery with which we humans ultimately have to do; and therefore we dare not claim to know the right and the true, the good and the real, but must acknowledge that in these things we always proceed in faith, as we move forward through life into the un- certain future before us.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock