“Mystery is an embarrassment to the modern mind.” — Flannery O’Connor
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith lives in the quiet certainties of the heart. It is the ever-recurring assurance that reality does not ultimately mock our deepest longings.” — Howard Thurman
In a congregation I once served, I came close to printing t-shirts for everyone (me included) with this declaration across the front: “It’s not about more information!” We were drowning in facts but thirsting for wisdom, for presence, for mystery.
In earlier generations, catechisms played a valuable role in many faith traditions. They provided clarity, distilled doctrine, and helped pass on the essentials of belief from one generation to the next. In their time, they offered much-needed focus and coherence.
But with every gift comes a shadow. The strength of clearly defined faith can become a liability. The danger lies in reducing the vast, living mystery of God to a manageable idea. The moment we say, “We are about X as a church,” we risk letting “X” take God’s place. Catechisms—however helpful—can flatten mystery, nuance, and paradox, which are not weaknesses in faith but its beating heart.
In our search for certainty, we may drift away from what originally gave faith life: relationship, experience, trust. More information, by itself, rarely deepens the soul or builds resilience.
Maya Angelou, reflecting on her journey of faith in a late-life interview with Bill Moyers, said, “I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother, and later by people in the church. Then I began to believe it because I had evidence of it in my life.”
Her faith moved from inherited belief to embodied experience—something lived, not just learned.
The Roman Catholic theologian David Tracy, who died last week, once said, “It is easy to get uniformity in religion… all you have to do is remove the mystery. But if you remove the mystery, you destroy religion at the same time.”
It’s a hard truth. In anxious times, our instinct is to reach for clarity, for systems that promise control. But certainty is a fragile vessel in the face of life’s deeper currents. Paradoxically, it is mystery—not precision—that most deeply sustains us.
Mystery invites us not to solve faith but to enter it. And in doing so, we find that what once felt too vague, too imprecise, is the very thing God uses to hold us fast.
When asked by Moyers to offer a word of blessing, Maya Angelou replied, “Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”
And Howard Thurman, in Deep Is the Hunger, reminds us: “Mystery is not something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand.”
So perhaps the invitation is not to explain mystery away—but to revere it, live with it, and even befriend it. In doing so, we may discover that it is not mystery we should be embarrassed by, but our fear of it.
Ric Paterson
Posted at 18:06h, 07 JuneThank you for this Mark. Ironically it appeared directly under a post oir current pastor had sent. Just as information is not wisdom and work is not progress, both can be useful tools if employed correctly and focused on understanding and growth. I hope you’re doing well. My father still speaks highly of you.