Problems and Mysteries

Dear All Souls, 

This summer we went as a family to see The Sheep Detectives. By far, it was one of the better movies I saw this summer. Imagine Babe and Knives Out somehow having a child together.

The story follows a shepherd who spends his evenings reading detective novels aloud to his flock of sheep. When he is suddenly murdered, the sheep decide that, having listened to enough mysteries, they are perfectly capable of solving one themselves.

It led to some conversations about mysteries with our oldest, which eventually introduced her to the world of Agatha Christie. There are worse ways to spend a summer.

Since seeing that movie, I’ve been thinking and writing a good bit about mystery. 

Mystery is a word we use often in the Christian faith. We speak of the mystery of the Trinity. The mystery of the Incarnation. The mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. Every Sunday, after coming to the Table, we thank God for feeding us “in these holy mysteries.”

But I’m not sure we always mean the same thing by the word.

Usually when we hear “mystery,” we think Agatha Christie. There is something we don’t know yet. A clue we have missed. A piece of information hidden from view. Keep investigating long enough and eventually Hercule Poirot will gather everyone into a room and explain what actually happened.

The mystery is over because now we have the answer.

But there is another way of thinking about mystery. It is present in the Great Tradition of the church, the lives of the mystics, in myth and fairy tales, etc. One of the people who has, for me, most clearly helped shape my imagination for this different way is the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel. 

Marcel in his work makes a distinction between a problem and a mystery.

A problem is something that can be placed in front of me. I can step back from it, examine it, gather the relevant information and work toward a solution. A flat tire is a problem. A broken air conditioner is a problem. Figuring out how to fit three meetings, two school pickups, dinner, and a dentist appointment into one afternoon is a problem. Perhaps a more difficult one.

Problems are real. And learning how to solve them is one of the gifts of human reason.

But Marcel thought there were other realities that could never quite be approached that way. He called them mysteries.

The difference is not simply that mysteries are really difficult problems. A mystery is something I cannot stand outside of because I am somehow involved in the thing I am trying to understand.

Love is like this.

So is grief.

So is another human being.

I can study grief. I can learn its patterns and read books about bereavement. But when someone I love dies, grief is no longer something sitting in front of me waiting to be analyzed. I am inside of it. It has become part of the world I inhabit.

The same is true of love. You can learn a great deal about relationships, attachment, communication, family systems. All of that can be genuinely helpful. But none of it tells you what it means to love a particular person or people, in this particular life, through these particular years. That knowledge comes differently. It comes from participation. From presence. 

And I wonder if one of the peculiar habits of our age is that we have become extraordinarily good at solving problems and, because of that, increasingly tempted to treat everything as one. To handle God, our neighbor, how God is at work in our neighbor, how God is at work in ourselves, etc. like a problem. 

There is a technique. A diagnosis. A strategy. Five steps. A book. A podcast. An expert somewhere who can tell us what we are doing wrong.

Sometimes there is. Thank God.

But sometimes there isn’t.

Sometimes the thing in front of us is not actually in front of us at all. We are standing inside it.

A child we do not quite understand. A relationship entering a season for which neither person has a map. A friendship changing. A vocation that suddenly feels less certain than it once did. A grief that refuses to obey our timetable. A question about God that no answer seems capable of making disappear.

Our instinct can be to ask in one way or another, How do I fix this?

There are moments when that is exactly the right question.

But there are other moments when the question itself may be keeping us from seeing what is happening.

Maybe there are moments when what is asked of us is simply to inhabit the mystery.

That takes its own kind of attention. We think, we ask questions, we learn what we can, but all of that happens from within the thing itself. There is no safe distance from which to observe love or grief or faith. We come to know them, in part, by living inside them. We can move deeper into our understanding of mysteries, but we can never remove ourselves from them. They are a part of us and we, them. 

Which brings me back to the language we use each Sunday.

We come to the Table and receive bread and wine, and then we thank God for feeding us in these holy mysteries. 

Feeding. 

Perhaps that is closer to the heart of Christian faith than we sometimes realize. Christianity is not primarily God handing us the answer key to the universe. It is God drawing us into the life of God. A life that has flesh in Jesus. A life we can understand, but we cannot handle like we handle a problem. 

The Trinity is not a puzzle about how three can possibly equal one. The Incarnation is not a theological equation we eventually master. The Eucharist is not something we finally understand once we have found exactly the right language for what happens to bread and wine.

They are realities into which we are invited.

“Abide in me,” Jesus says.

Stay.

Receive.

Eat.

Drink.

Follow.

There are certainly problems in our lives that need solving, and wisdom includes learning how to solve them well. But there are also mysteries. And perhaps part of becoming human, and part of becoming Christian, is learning to tell the difference.

Because some of the deepest things in this life will never yield themselves to us from across the room.

We will only know them from the inside.

For the heart of Christ and the good of his people,

Bliss+