Mystery reconsidered

There is a lot of talk about mystery, and most of it leaves me cold. I’ll pick epiphany and apocalypse and incarnation ANY DAY OF THE WEEK over mystery. Psalm 131 is my favorite Psalm. It is a credo of contentment on what God has revealed, and a resignation on what he hasn’t. Eugene Peterson’s essay “Pastor Paul” in Romans & The People of God has caused me to reconsider mystery, at least a redefined kind of mystery. Eerdmans 1999.

Mystery, in other words, is not a fancy or spiritual word for ignorance that we can conquer by more knowledge; nor does it designate a secrecy that we can penetrate by painstaking search...
Gabriel Marcel distinguished between approaching life as a problem and entering it as a mystery. If we deal with life as a problem we reduce it to what we can do something about; we are concerned with figuring out and fixing. We become myopic, managers, and mechanics of what is immediately before us, with no peripheral vision and no horizons. We miss most of life. But if we approach life as a mystery, we are forever coming upon meanings that exceed our definitions, energy, resources unguessed in our calculations. “Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend” (quoted from Denis Covington, Salvation on Sand-Mountain: Snake-handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, 1995).