In the last two posts, I’ve explored aspects of the internal pilgrimage that we’re all walking using Christine Walter’s Paintner’s gifts of embracing doubt. ( p112, Ch. 7, “The Practice of Embracing the Unknown” The Soul of a Pilgrim: Eight Practices for the Journey Within )

When thinking about mystery, I considered why it is that many folks are drawn to that genre of books, movies, television shows. Our minds don’t like to be left with an incomplete loop– that unanswered question that snags our brains. We use our powers of rational thinking to put together the clues and come up with the answer. Some mysteries are at the level that they cause anxiety in our unknowing.

One of the spiritual leaders I’ve come to appreciate is Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, N.M. He took his Franciscan vows in 1961, and was ordained as a priest in 1970. While I don’t come out of a Catholic tradition, I find his teachings and work as a psychotherapist challenge me in my spiritual growth. In his essay entitled “Utterly Humbled by Mystery” featured in the This I Believe series on NPR, here is some of what he says:

“I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don’t think so. My very belief and experience of a loving and endlessly creative God has led me to trust in both.”

https://www.npr.org/2006/12/18/6631954/utterly-humbled-by-myster

He goes on to say:

“My scientist friends have come up with things like “principles of uncertainty” and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answersthat are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of “faith”! How strange that the very word “faith” has come to mean its exact opposite.“

I’m guilty of wanting “answers that our always true” in my faith, too. It provides a “certainty” when I feel vulnerable. I tend to want clear, rational explanations and that has served me well in my education and work as a nurse. As a writer, I’ve been more comfortable with essays than poetry. Sometimes my essays may border on “explaining away” life. With poetry, there are hints and clues, and like an abstract painting, I’m not spoon-fed the meaning; it’s left free floating and sometimes difficult to grasp. Essays, rational thinking make me feel my feet are stepping on level ground; poetry makes me feel I’m floating, falling; it feels unsafe for my body which loses it’s anchor when turning in space.

Paintner describes a time in her life when the “theological framework that had sustained her” fell apart; it was when her mother died. Paintner’s spiritual director encouraged her to stay in the places of doubt and unknowing. She found being in nature and creative expression were two essential components in her own journey to explore mystery. She says that “the wild spaces of creation, both inner and outer, offered me a place to be with my unknowing , to rest into mystery without having to figure things out.” It offers us the unexpected when we set aside our expectations about how the world works.”

Today, I want to embrace more mystery. I’ve struggled with this post because I haven’t been one to “fall into the mystery” but rather have tended toward being too analytical. Reading Paintner’s words has inspired me to let go and be in those wild spaces of creation, the place of unknowing. So with that in mind, I end this blog post-essay with a poem Paintner includes by Henri Frédéric Amiel ( 27 September 1821 – 11 May 1881). He was a Swiss  moral-philosopher poet, and critic and wrote this in his famous work Amiel’s Journal:

An Altar for an Unknown God

“Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for an unknown God.”

Best to you in the week ahead as you plunge into Mystery and the discoveries of your pilgrimage.

Connie