Do you have mystery in your life?
Moving Into Mystery III
“Even a cold front porch on a rainy Sunday morning can become a chapel of the heart.”
~Michael Bever (2013). In The art of pausing: meditations for the overworked and overwhelmed . p. 59.
“Wonder”, says John O’Donohue, “is the child of mystery”.
O’Donohue wrote a short passage called Wonder Invites Mystery to Come Closer as a section of his book, Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Yearning To Belong , and which is the foundation of this essay. Here he, as he always does so well, transcends and connects what is concrete in our lives to that which is mysterious and magical and wonderful. He uses language in ways that swaddle your heart.
Do you have mystery in your life? “There is always a vitality and excitement about a person who has retained a sense of his or her own mystery…such a person is a living presence”. It is “deadening to be trapped in the company of someone who has a predictable and ready-made reaction to everything”, he says.
You know the type. Someone who has all the answers. Has no questions. Owns the truth. Anyone who disagrees is wrong. Is predictable. Follows what is popular. Has no curiosity. “The words [these people] use to describe their self-discoveries are all borrowed. This jargon has no color and no resonance of any mystery, opaqueness, or possibility. Real wonder about your soul demands words which come from the more submerged inner thresholds where different forces meet. Unlike the fashionable graffiti of fast-food psychology, they hold the reverence to which mystery is entitled.”
“Wonder, as the child of mystery, is a natural source of prayer,” he says. And religion, at its best, is a petri dish which allows a snatch of wonder to build into a culture of profound relationship to mystery. Ritual and disciplines and practices – like prayer or contemplation or fasting or worship or service – at their best, build that relationship.
Wonder, with mystery as its parent, sees with new eyes, opens possibilities, penetrates beyond imagination, discerns further than rationality. Blows away. Immerses. Reveals. Fascinates. Asks. And asks.
Do you have mystery in your life?
References:
O'Donohue, J. (1999). Eternal echoes: exploring our yearning to belong . New York, Cliff Street Books.
Valente, J., et al. (2013). The art of pausing: meditations for the overworked and overwhelmed. Chicago, IL, ACTA Publications.
