ON MYSTERY

Once more with Barbara today. She started with a nice review of "Cinderella Man", and once her thought processes began churning, she began touching upon one of my favorite subjects: Mystery. It is a topic that confounds and frustrates so many so needlessly.

Frederica Mathewes-Green posts another review of "Cinderella Man" here.

Human beings need stories not to provide answers, but to make us comfortable with our lot in life as limited creatures.

It all goes back to Genesis. The ultimate temptation for every person is the rejection of our dependent creaturehood: "You shall be like gods!" God is the only One for Whom there are no mysteries. For us, on the otherhand, life is a matter of bowing gracefully before the melodies that are too delicate for our hearing, and before immense things that we can only see from one side, and before spiritual realities that our bodies distract us from perceiving, and before very old legacies that are new to us, and before minute complexities that we are too far-sighted to see.

Stories are supposed to acclimate us to the omnipresence of mystery as our lot in life. They are supposed to lead us to the peace that most things are too big for us, and that that is okay. As my friend Karen Hall says, "I may not know the answer, but Somebody does." As C.S. Lewis said, "We read to know we aren't alone." And this is what we get from stories too. That somebody else has encountered a particular mystery. We are all in this together. So, you don't have to jump off a roof.

As writers, we don't share THE answers, because we will never fully sound any reality. We share "what we know to be true" always aware that our experience and information is the tip of the ice berg. We share something true about living with the mystery. The mystery remains.