Sat Dec. 17 The Hour of Unknowing (Red Mountain Music)

"Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries." 

 -1 Corinthians 4:1

        


     There is a lot that I don’t know; more that I don’t understand. I’m not even counting the day I was absent from biology when they covered the Mendelian Square. Although, perhaps it was my years of somewhat mediocre scholarship that accustomed me to living in a space of unknowing. On a wider scale, in our modern American culture we don’t really like not having things figured out.  There is a way in which we seek to and, in large part, can control our environments by figuring out systems, workings, cause and effect; sometimes. The only problem is that God can not be controlled by us, or figured out, or systematized.  God is full of mystery.

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers,
wearing
their colored clothes; caps and bells.

And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at tall,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

-Denise Levertov, Primary Wonder

                                                   Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

          I usually only hear today’s song sung at Christmas Eve church services. So when I hear it images of people gathered late at night in candlelight come to my mind and it reminds me of a moment during this season that I love. It is an hour when unknowing reigns, when we are ok with giving ourselves over to the mystery, surrender to wonder; when we remember that our faith story tells about a Deity that inexplicably came into the world as a baby and dwells among us still in ways of love and welcome that confound us, sometimes to the point of silence.  And perhaps that is the way that we learn to live with mystery, to keep silence and embrace the moments when the Great Mystery surrounds and embraces us.

Teach us to dwell in you, Divine Mystery.