Openness to Mystery

In today’s Gospel from St. Mark, we are told that when people brought their children to Jesus for his blessing, they were rebuked by his disciples. We are also told that Jesus was indignant at the rebuke, telling his disciples, “Let the children come ot me; do not prevent them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” He further told them that “however does not accept the Kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.” (As I read the last line of the Gospel, which tells us that Jesus “embraced the children and blessed them, placing his hands on them”, I was reminded of some of the pictures I’ve seen of Pope Francis embracing children.)

What is it about children that causes Jesus to say this? What gives them a special ability to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?

Certainly part of it has to do with children’s acceptance of their utter dependence on another – the essence of the first Beatitude: poverty of spirit. (I posted the other day a retreat talk I gave last weekend on poverty of spirit.)

But I think another part of it has to do with the fact that children possess an openness to mystery far greater than adults generally possess.

Edith Stein once observed that insights into the “truths of faith” do not require scholarly education and that “one need not believe by any means that these deep mysteries exceed the child’s powers of comprehension.” She further suggests that “[t]he strong desire to be introduced to the mysteries of God is often stronger in small children than in adults.”

I don’t know if I would phrase it as a stronger desire on the part of children, but it does seem to me that children do have an openness to mystery and an ability to experience it with bare awareness, in a way that may be more difficult for at least many adults.

Perhaps we might observe children so that we might learn something of their openness to mystery.

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Let The Children Come to Me

In today’s Gospel from St. Matthew, Jesus’ disciples rebuke people who were bringing their children to Jesus “that he might lay his hands on them and pray.” Jesus responds by instructing them, “Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

What does Jesus mean? What does it mean to say the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these?

What qualities do children have that we might learn from?

I can think of at least two.

First, children often possess an openness to mystery that adults sometimes lack. Edith Stein once suggested that insights into the “truths of faith” neither require scholarly education nor are beyond a child’s powers of comprehension. And, she observed, “[t]he strong desire to be introduced to the mysteries of God is often stronger in small children than in adults.” I don’t know that I agree with Stein that children posess stronger desire, but I do think children have an openness to mystery and an ability to experience it with bare awareness, that does not come so easily to many adults.

Second, children have a greater awareness of their dependence than do adults. Poverty of spirit, the first of the Beatitudes, has little do to with material poverty and everything to do with our recognition of our absolute dependence on God, of our appreciation that all we are and all we have is gift from our loving God. Acknowledging that dependence is something many people have great difficulty with; we like to think of ourselves as self-sufficient, able to to everything on our own. Perhaps Jesus is holding up the children’s recognition of their dependence on others.

Those are the two qualities of children that come to my mind when I read this passage. Perhaps you can think of others.

At Present I Know Partially

I’ll be flying back to Minneapolis this morning from Boston, where I’ve had three days of book talks. Saturday evening, I spoke at Kurukulla Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies, which was the first time I’ve spoken about Growing in Love and Wisdom in a Buddhist center.

Not surprisingly for a Buddhist center in the United States, many of the Buddhist practitioners in the audience were people who had been raised in a Christian tradition. Some others were Christians who have incorporated some aspects of Buddhism or Buddhist meditation into their practice. (One was a Congregationalist minister who was looking for language to be able to present some Buddhist concepts in a way her congregation could understand.)

As always the question and answer portion was engaged, thoughtful and left me with things to continue to ponder.

One of the things that came out of the dialogue were reasons many had left their Christian communities (both Catholic and Protestant). Sadly, many of those comments reflect a failure on the part of Christian Churches to share enough about the contemplative strand of our Christian tradition and others reflect genuine grounds of criticism of catechesis or our own failures to live up to our Christian ideals.

One of the questions that evening helped me articulate another reason that I do not identify as a Buddhist-Christian. (There are several reasons that is the case; and the question comes up often.)

Someone has asked me what I had originally found most profound in Buddhism. Before addressing the “most profound” part, I started by saying that what had first attracted me to Buddhism was the Buddha’s insistence that no one had to believe anything because he or anyone else said it. Rather, the truths he had realized were open to all through their own meditation experience. If you sit, this is what you will realize.

Coming from a tradition where, as a teen, it seemed like the answer to every question I had was “it’s a mystery” or “you just have to take this on faith,” that was very appealing. I embraced the Buddhist notion that I could know all fully by my own meditation practice.

Only as I was sharing this on Saturday night did I articulate that it is in this that I truly am no longer Buddhist. I believe firmly in the necessity of experiencing God in prayer (and not just talking about or reading about God.) But, I have also come to believe that, in the words of the First Letter to the Corinthians we heard at Mass on Sunday, “at present I know partially.” I have come to believe that in this life there are things I cannot fully understand, that my ability to comprehend certain things awaits the point at which I reach full union with God. It is only then that “I shally know fully, as I am fully known.”

For The Truths that Still Confound Us

As Mass yesterday morning at Our Lady of Lourdes, the post-Communion reflection (sung by Elena) was For the Fruits of All Creation, with text accompanying a traditional Welsh melody. The song is recites various thing for which we thank God: the fruits of all creation, the harvests of the Spirit, for the wonders that astound us, and so on. For all these things, “Thanks be to God.”

The line that struck me was “For the truths that still confound us…Thanks be to God.”

My first reaction was, “Why be thankful for the fact that there are things we do not understand?”

But before that question was even fully formed in my mind, I apprehended the beauty of the song’s line of praise and thanksgiving. For a God we could fully grasp, who said or did nothing that confounded us, would be a very small God indeed. A God as small as ourselves.

That there are things we don’t fully understand, “truths that still confound us” reminds us that our God is bigger than we are, that God is mystery. That whatever we think we understand about God and God’s ways, there is still even more we do not and cannot understand.

Thanks be to God for the truths that still confound us.

Magical, Not Magic

I’ve mentioned before, Shane Claiborne et al’s, Common Prayer, which I occasionally use as part of my daily prayer. In addition to prayers for each day, the book includes some side notes for reflection.

One of the side notes the grabbed me is titled Liturgy is Magical, but not Magic.

The note talked about the origin of the phrase “hocus pocus,” which is said to have originated from people hearing the priest intone “Hoc est corpus Christi” during the consecration and “marveling at the mystery and magic of the moment.” Not being educated in Latin, hocus pocus was what the people thought they were hearing.

The note then observes that, while there no magic going on at our Eucharistic celebrations (and other worship services), there is something in our prayer and worship “that remains at some level incomprehensible,” that “gives us a taste of something dazzling and transcendent.” Not magic, but mystery. Our liturgies remind us “that God came to earth and died and now lives in us.” They point us to a world beyond our own.

I was particularly struck by the end of the note and its contrast of the image of the stage:

Perhaps one of the sure signs that we have worshipped God is that we walk away saying, “I didn’t understand everything that happened there. It must be bigger than my comprehension.” Too much of our worship has boxed God in as if we were going to see a play on Broadway. But in worship we become a part of the play. Though we can’t understand it all, we can come onstage and participate in the divine drama.

I think was so strikes me about that passage is that so often our inability to understand everything is a source of great frustration for us. Frustration would be an understandable reaction if God were like a play that we stand outside of, that we can fully examine in the way I studied a Shakespeare play in college. But if we realize that we a part of something much bigger then ourselves – that we are “a part of the play” so to speak, our inability to fully understand is much easier to (humbly) accept.

Children and the Kingdom of God

In today’s Gospel from St. Matthew, Jesus objects when his disciples rebuke the children who were brought to him. “Let the children come to me,” said Jesus, “for the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

What is it about children that causes Jesus to say this? What gives them a special ability to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?

Perhaps it is that children possess an openness to mystery that adults sometimes lack.

Edith Stein reminds us that insights into the “truths of faith” do not require scholarly education and that “one need not believe by any means that these deep mysteries exceed the child’s powers of comprehension.” She further suggests that “[t]he strong desire to be introduced to the mysteries of God is often stronger in small children than in adults.”

I don’t know if I would phrase it as a stronger desire on the part of children, but it does seem to me that children do have an openness to mystery and an ability to experience it with bare awareness, in a way that may be more difficult for at least many adults.

Perhaps we might observe children so that we might learn something of their openness to mystery.

Representations of God

I mentioned in a post last week that I recently attended a program given by Dr. Ana-Maria Rizzuto on Understanding Religious and Spiritual Issues During Psychoanalytic Psychoterapy. I was sufficiently engaged by her talk that I’ve read several articles or book chapters written by her over the last week.

We all have representations (the term Rizzuto uses rather than “images”) of God. Unable to have a direct sensory experience of God, we resort to analogic representations. Children, needing to find some way to give shape to God when they are first told about him, form their first representation of God based on their experience with their parents. Over time, the adolescent disengages with parental representations. Rizzuto writes that “a normal crisis of late adolescence often involves a comparable religious crisis. From that moment on, ever until death, each new major emotional encounter with people contributes to modifications of God representations. Often they are silent and unnoticed; otehr times they appear as profound crises calling for a reorganization of the person’s religious stance.”

Understanding this process seems to me useful for two reasons. First, it reminds us that our images or representations of God are precisely that – analogic representations that help us give words and shape to the God who ultimately is mystery, who we can not directly experience with our senses. I think people sometimes forget that the image is image and not definition of God. (I’m thinking, for example, of people who were offended by the author of The Shack portraying God “the Father” as a motherly black woman.) Second, understanding the process helps us understand that it is completely natural that our images or representation of God change over time and there is nothing wrong with the fact that they do.

Mystery

Part of our hike yesterday included something called The Devil’s Kettle of the Brule River, an unusual waterfall, to say the least. The river at this point splits into two parts as it goes over the falls. The part on the right looks like a normal waterfall – water comes down the falls and continues downstream. The part on the left simply vanishes into a pothole – the Devil’s Kettle. The mysterious part is that no one knows where the water goes. There is no visible outlet at the base of the falls or any other place downstream. Although it is assumed that the water somehow makes it way out to Lake Superior, no one knows how. It is a mystery.

We don’t tend to do well with mysteries. We assume we ought to be able to determine the answers to most questions if we try hard enough. Indeed, as we were watching the water flow into The Devil’s Kettle, Elena, my daughter, said with some exasperation, “someone must be smart enough to figure out where the water goes.” And people have tried (at least some of whom presumably are smart). They have thrown dyes into the pothole, they’ve thrown things like logs, but nothing ever comes out anywhere that anyone can see.

“It is a mystery” with respect to questions of faith used to frustrate me tremendously when I was in high school. It seemed like so many answers to the questions I and my friends had was, “Well, that is just one of the mysteries of the Catholic faith.” It may be that that answer was given more frequently than it should have been. But the truth is that sometimes the answer really is, “it’s a mystery.” Although we use many words to talk about God, at some level we are forced to admit that God is mystery.

In Doing the Truth in Love, Michael Himes et al write:

The first and most important thing to know in theology is that whatever you think of when you hear the word “God” is not God. However deep, however rich, however noble, however powerful, however loving, however scripturally-based or traditionally-sanctioned, whatever the image is, it is not God because God remains mystery. We must take that very seriously….The word God functions like x in algebra. It is a stand-in for the mystery, just as, when someone works out an algebraic equation, all the attention focuses on x which designates that which is unknown. So, too, the word “God” functions as a handy bit of shorthand for the absolute mystery which grounds and supports all that exists.

We can try as hard to explain God as the people up here have tried to determine where the water in the Devil’s Kettle goes. But, ultimately, we need to simply accept the mystery.

A Sense of the Mysterious

There are some who believe that science and a sense of mystery are incompatible, that a scientific approach requires that we be able to rationally explain and understand everything.  In light of that, I find these words of Albert Einstein’s to be particularly striking.

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.

Even before I reached the last line (and the reference to “attempt humbly”) I was struck by the humble acceptance of that reality that there “is a something our mind cannot grasp”…by the acceptance of the reality expressed by St Paul in the First Letter to the Corinthians that “At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror…At present I know partially.” (Einstein once said that all of our knowledge “is but the knowledge of school children” and believed that “all the finer speculations in the realm of science spring from a deep religious feeling.”)