Entering into mystery

Lately I have been reading a lot about mystery and how we mortal beings really like to know. We don't like being kept in the "dark" as it were.

John Shea has an interesting view on such things. In his book Story of God  he quotes Kazantzakis's description of mystery, which calls it the luminous interval between two darknesses. He then notes that when the reliability of all we have constructed is brought into question, we enter the dimension of Mystery (25).

In our desire to know, to be in the light, we forget that unknowing can contain something positive and fulfilling. This is the difference between faith, and having a vague spirituality with no particular beliefs.

But some say, are you just trying to put a good spin on pain and injustice? Are you making light of sickness or poverty or emotional distress? I don't think so. Science bears out the fact that having the ability to find something good in a bad situation actually speeds healing. But what Shea is speaking about is more. It is about discovery, and sometimes we don't really search until our world falls apart. Then we find that what has up till now proven good enough is no longer sufficient, and we seek something better.

Shea speaks at some length about the need for our ready answers and expectations to fail. He says Disenchantment is a traditional and well-established path to the awareness of Mystery...the beginning of mature religious consciousness (28-29). Shea's statement is obvious: I suspect every one of us can look back over the times in our lives when we entered into a new spiritual consciousness, and can track it to some form of  disenchantment we experienced.

Mystery. It is not something to be feared, but something that invites us to enter more deeply. And only after we enter, do we discover.