May 31, 2026
Mystery. This can be a dangerous word for believers if taken to mean “completely unknowable”.
‘God is a Mystery.’ Sounds humble, but to often today it means for secularized folks that “No one can know who God is. Thus, all God-talk is the same – whether Christian, Jewish, New Age, Native Spirituality, Islamic, Hindu – it is all just talk about something the human mind can not know. Sounds humble and inclusive.
Except it is neither.
Think of it this way. If you are going on a date with someone and you start off by saying, “You know, I will never be able to understand you because you will always be a total mystery to me. I am just unable to get who you are – because you are not me.” Sounds … weird. Sure, we can never really completely understand another person – heck, we are mysteries to ourselves are we not? Yet isn’t there something rather arrogant about telling someone that whatever they say about themselves to you will always be beyond your understanding? You are making the rules in the relationship at the outset. I would recommend to whomever you are on a date with to leave you with the cheque and run.
So, if you begin with God telling God, “Lord, you are a mystery beyond anything I know (true) or can know (false)” who is making the rules in the relationship? In other words, who are you to tell God what God can say about Godself? What if God – knowing our limitation and knowing that God is utterly beyond our complete grasp – still shows us, tells us, gives us an experience that reveals to us something of who God is? Do we say humbly – “Wow, thank you, praise you, let me encounter more deeply what you show me who you are.” Or do we say arrogantly, “You are a mystery beyond my – I really can’t relate in any special way to you because I cannot know you any more than anyone else.”
The problem with this word “mystery” arises is if it understood as indicating an impenetrable darkness.
But the word “mystery” is completely helpful if it is understood within the way in which all human persons can know Reality. What does this mean?
First Stage, reality always comes to us. Unless we are deeply psychotic we do not invent reality we ENCOUNTER it.
Stage two, We respond to the reality. If it is someone trying to tell us who or what they are, we are free to accept what they say or not. However,
Third Stage, we must never think that our response is the last word on reality. There is always so much more about the reality we meet to be encountered. There is always a mystery about what we meet that stretches us.
That is the meaning of Mystery – it is something that stretches us. Stretches our minds, or understanding, our way of living in order to properly respond to what comes to us.
“In many and varied ways GOD SPOKE TO US … but in these final days God has spoken to us through his Son.” (Hebrews 1:1)
Jesus has revealed to us that He is the Son of God. The Son has Spoken to us claiming the authority of God. The Son has Given us the name of God – Abba, Pater. The Son tells us that he and the Father will send the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit reveals more and more who is this God – who has told us that God’s reality is of being one God in Three Persons – Father Son and Spirit.
We respond by saying. I believe you Father Son and Spirit.
And we are stretched by meeting this Mystery more and more.
Why are we stretched?
St. Augustine tells us that – made in the image of God – our hearts have no rest until they rest in God.
Pope Benedict deepens this. Made in the Image of God we are made to be the image of God.
“Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God.
But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched.“
This is the True God the Only God – the Tri-une God. The Mystery that reveals itself to us, to invite us into a relationship of knowing, loving, and responding by serving the Triune God.
This is the True God the Only God– the Tri-une God who gives us the gift of responding to the greatness of this relationship.
This is the True God the Only God – the Triune God who impels us into an adventure of being stretched to be filled with God – an adventure that will unfold for eternity.
This is the Mystery that batters us with Love.
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
John Donne
Let us be Holy, Let us be Saints.