Mystery - Lived, Not Solved

He missed the mystery of my churchy childhood last Sunday.  Our priest decided to base his sermon on Memorial Day, a pretty good sermon recounting the long list of wars in which Americans fought and died in the brief history of our country.  The fact that it was Trinity Sunday was mentioned only on the masthead of the parish newsletter that we picked up on our way out.  Too bad, I thought.  I love a good mystery. 

I was an inquisitive kid.  While the other 10-year olds were out playing baseball, I was in the shade of the hedges playing with magnets, wondering why they pulled at each other one way, but pushed at each other if I flipped one of them around.  By 14 I was in the basement taking old broken radios apart, trying to make one good one out of them.  Back then, what made radios work was glowing filaments in silvery-hazed bulbs, exciting electrons and sending the invisible messengers from anode to cathode, through a mesh screen that, like a controllable magnet, sent some of them forward and some of them back.  Somewhere there was a place called Cedar Rapids, and I knew because late at night after the little stations shut down, the big ones could bounce their invisible signals off the invisible stratosphere and get all the way to Chicago, and to my hungry ears.

Perhaps that same native curiosity about the invisible was one of things that attracted me to God.  He was invisible.  He could see me all the time, I was told, and punish (ouch) or help me, depending on whether I was being good or bad.  His glowing filament exciting an infinite number of those electrons, He is the Great Anode and we all of the pleading little cathodes of the world.  Me God, bless ME, Little Johnny down here in the shade of the hedges!  Or me, goofball Johnny walking to the bus with his homework not done, his chapter not read, dealing as they did with boring, visible stuff.   The nun would teach us the “mystery” of the Trinity, that there was just one God, but three persons.  In all of us little wigglers preparing for Fist Communion, there was a silent, collective, “Whaaaa?” 

A mystery, we were told by the Nun Who Knew These Things, was something we could not understand, but had to believe anyway, to be good Catholics.  Ha!  I was hooked for life.  Just tell me something can’t be done and I all over it.  The Trinity was like the world’s largest pair of magnets, like a radio with a gazillion silvery tubes.  Cool!  But t the idea of it made God an idea, like all of the wars and all of the dead soldiers.  Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi.  Another great mystery, that this Jesus on whom our religion is based was God and man, divine and human.   This person of the three who God is, this person knows our hunger from his own, and knows our thirst from the dryness in his own mouth.  This person of the three who God is pushes us out of the way of the careening truck in the street and gets whacked instead of us.  This person of the three who God is tastes salt on the corner of his lips when he sees us cry. 

Today is the feast of the mystery that calls us beyond mystery, calls us out of our heads, our heads that are all about solving puzzles, how three can be one, and divine can be human.  Today is the feast that calls us to eat, to accept the real food that will never let us be hungry again, to drink what will never again let us thirst.  Today is the feast that calls us not to the invisible, but to the visible, the touchable.  Today calls us to the heart that pumps real blood through a real body, a body with eyes that see the loneliness of our companions and ears that hear the silence of their despair.  Today calls us to see and hear, and to know that the greatest mystery is that we can be infinitely compassionate, fed and hydrated as we are by this endless source.  

This is a mystery we are called not to solve, but to live.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.