Dogma Or Mystery...YOU Decide.

Does He really rise?  Was He even really the Son of God?  During this week, I hope we all face this, this unknowing.  As soon as I had typed these two questions, I heard in my mind the howls of dogmatic Catholics calling me an infidel for even questioning these beliefs.  But in asking the question, I show the very faith they might argue against.

Faith is belief in the thing not known.  We don’t have faith that all points on a circle are equidistant from the center; we know (at least those of us who know geometry.)  We don’t have faith that two plus two equals four; we know.

But the gift of this mystery of the death and rising of the Son of God is something that, like love, we can fall into, something that we can allow to submerge us, to embrace us, a cloud into which we can enter.  Karen Armstrong says that the gift of mystery (like the Trinity – three persons in one God) is that it does not make sense, and so it calls us to abandon thinking.  To sit with mystery is difficult, because we want to figure it out.  Figuring things out is important to us.  We figure out what is good to eat, what is safe to give our kids, how to get to work safely, all so that we survive.  To stop and not think is contrary to our learned survival instincts.

How do we handle mystery (or more accurately, how do we let mystery handle us?)  Armstrong suggests three things: prayer, ritual, and charitable acts. 

• Prayer is the practice of the presence of God.  It is not logical or didactic.  It does not make sense.  Like meditation and contemplation, it slows us down, allows us to let go of our attachments, and our body responds with what we call peace but is perhaps a homecoming, and arrival at the place that gave us birth.
• Ritual – it’s really over the top during Holy Week, appropriate to the over-the-top mystery that we’re encountered by, the death and resurrection of the Son of God.  “Smells and Bells”.  Watch kids at a parade.  They’re all eyes and ears.  They’re taking it all in.  They are unaware of hunger, of cold, and even the presence of their parents.  They are taken by the spectacle.  So fancy vestments and clouds of incense and extra-melodic song and the repetition of verse and litany and jeweled monstrance…help us to forget taxes and mortgages and even pains and worries.  While we find it hard to stop, ritual replaces all that we do, and all of it stops.
• Charitable acts bring us to another place that makes no sense – another human face.  Isn’t every person honestly encountered a mystery?  Doesn’t the “homeless person” become so much more when we stand and really look at him…and so much more like us?  Thomas Merton’s encounter with the “bag lady” on the streets of Cincinnati changed his life, and all of us in the circle of his light.

Prayer, ritual, and charitable acts take us outside ourselves, beyond the constraints we put on ourselves.  We are like the Samaritan Woman understanding, the blind man seeing, and Lazarus walking out of his tomb.