Return to First Unitarian Church Website

Mystery

This talk was delivered by Paul Schilling on October 8, 2000.

Corner a Christian logically and sooner or later you will hear the phrase: mysterious are the ways of the Lord - for most of my life I took this to be a cop out. But the more I read the more I've come to realize that Mystery is central to religion.

The Lakota and the Taoists are the spiritual traditions I've read about most willing to face up this element of the religious experience. The first lines of the Tao Te Ching are : The way that becomes a way is not the Immortal Way, the name that becomes a name is not the Immortal Name. Our ways and names limit the unlimited.

The Lakota believe that there are two facets to the universe: the sacred and the secular. They know which is which by what they understand. If they understand it, it is secular. If they don't understand it, it is sacred. Such is why their religious experiences are so individualized. Even their religious languages, which are considered to lose their power once translated, are individualized. Each shaman has his own sacred language for speaking to the spirit world.

Should we try to understand God? 14th poem of the Tae Te Ching:

We look but don't see it and call it indistinct
We listen but don't hear it and call it faint
We reach but don't grasp it and call it ethereal
Three failed means to knowledge

I weave into one
With no light above
With no shade below
Too fine to be named

Returning to nothing
This is the formless form
The immaterial image
This is the waxing waning

We meet without seeing its face
We follow without seeing its back
Holding onto this very Way

We rule this very realm
And discover its ancient past
This is the thread of the way.

All this implies that God cannot be known. That we will just have to put up with Mystery. Perhaps God had good reason not to let mere humans see His Face. The difference between Christianity and Taoism is that in the Bible God is blindingly bright, while in Taoism it can be dark as night and you can get lost.

Let us assume a Mysterious God.

A Mysterious God is not very useful for ethics. After all, one way to catch a Christian is to remind him how many times God violated or ordered the violation of the "Thou shalt not kill" commandment. Mysterious are the ways of the Lord they say, as a cop out to trick you into obedience. To the other extreme, Taoism can be used to justify a 'go with the flow' attitude that is ultimately unconstructive for social justice, since the flow is run by those in power.

Rule based ethics, while superficially easy to understand and not very mysterious, generally run into problems as anyone who tries to program a computer or raise a child can tell you. Tell a child to tell the truth and they will to your dismay. Explaining tact is next and a little harder, and explaining when to not say anything can be the hardest. Hopefully, after learning a variety of rules of thumbs and having experience in life, the child learns how to cope with different situations. But situational ethics demands not mystery but reason, thought rather than obedience or passivity.

Any ethical system demands that your decisions matter to the future. If I walk up to a person and say they are ugly and they are neither hurt nor pleased, then I have not done something ethical or unethical. It also demands evidence to base decisions upon. If I am faced with a choice but have no evidence as to the potential results, how can I make an ethical decision? Mystery is representative of the random factor in life, but we don't hold each other accountable when it rears up and smacks us down. If we are driving a car and the brakes give out, it is a surprise but doesn't make us a bad person.

If not ethics, then what? Metaphysics?

If Mystery is accepted then it is useful for allowing religions to get along. After all, one can then say that the different religions are exploring different parts of God just as different sciences are exploring different parts of the universe. But if God is used to explain the universe, then science is in fact chipping away at the human understanding of God. God has been used to answer human questions, about the weather, about human behavior, earthquakes, and so on. But science has replaced Zeus and Poseidon, and social sciences very well may replace Ares and Athena too.

Mystery can be used for dangerous purposes. The Medieval Church used Mystery to control the population. Latin was the sacred language of the Bible, and the Bible was a rare document that had to be hand printed. This made it easy for the Church to control the mindset of population. When the Bible was translated into more mundane languages, the Catholic Church lost some of its power. Of course, a lot of educated people knew Latin, so perhaps this effect has been over-stated. More important I think was the printing press, which allowed Bibles to eventually be common place instead of rarities. It allowed as never before an individual to think for themselves spiritually, and freedom of thought became the justification for making all those copies of the Bible. And this same freedom of thought is half the reason why Protestants keep splintering off into separate denominations. The other half is a bedrock certainty in being right that makes it hard for them to live with each other. How the Catholics have managed to have a growing theological tradition and hold together is harder to understand. It may be the slowness with which the Catholic bureaucracy handles theological improvements, it may be the focus on saints, it may be that priests overlook a lot of things that are merely cultural differences instead of theological ones, or it may be that the Pope whispers improvements so that it doesn't cause shock waves.

In today's Christianity Mystery is used in different ways to control people. It is used to brush aside logical fallacies and contradictions. It is used to hush reasonable disagreement. It is even used to justify thoughtlessness and to appeal to the human weakness for easy answers. Thus, in an age of science, over a third of Americans still believe in the six day creation story as literal truth and all the intellectual deadweight that comes with the fundamentalist package.

This is not to pick on Christianity, it is merely the religion I am most familiar with. Every religion that gets mixed up with Earthly power has its own sins, and used its religion to justify them. The Hindus acknowledge Mystery, and turned reincarnation and karma into a system of rewards and punishments to maintain the status quo. The Taoists embrace mystery, but it didn't stop China from centuries of oppression and warfare. The idea of Mystery, in of itself, is insufficient.

The Mystery that the Lakota and much of Asia have made integral to their religion is what so often tears apart Western society. Every time something moves from being a mystery to something that can be understood through reason and observation, it begins moving from the sacred to the secular. We don't pray to God to get rid of locusts, we spray pesticides, but farmers might still pray for rain because there isn't a reliable technological fix to the weather.

We are also more and more likely to go to the doctor than a holy person if we are physically sick because the body is not as mysterious as it used to be. It still surprises us from time to time, but less and less each year. Religion still plays a role in mental health, for while we understand a lot about our body our mind is mysterious. This divide between our approaches to physical and mental health will continue well into the future, for while we are learning to read the human genome, the brain is far more complicated still. The most complicated known aspect of the universe, so flexible that allows six billion unique individuals to live on our planet, and that only counts the living. The human brain might always be mysterious to us.

But the side effect is that as science expands, people feel that religion contracts. Darwin is posited against Creation, Freud against original sin, Skinner against free will, and so on. Some people reject God, more people reject science or find some new balance and walk along an increasingly thin and vague tightrope, most people don't think about it and just muddle along with whatever they are told.

But for all the tension between science and religion in Christianity, it isn't comparable to the tensions between denominations. The Catholic Church and many Protestant Churches have accepted science, but there still remains a divide between Christians who accept Biblical interpretation and those that do not. The more extremely conservative branches of Christianity don't care about better translations or historical background. They fight tooth and nail against using reason because it becomes a threat to cherished beliefs. It is no surprise that they are also the ones who deny science. They would rather say mysterious are the ways of the Lord then try to understand the Bible better.

This leads to the dangers of being trapped in thoughts and ways don't allow change. They fought against the civil rights movement and the women's movement, and now in favor of homophobia. All this, because they are afraid to face the foundations of their life. They are so afraid that reform will weaken their position in life, and perhaps it does, that they can't see it as justice. Therefore, even while proclaiming the Mystery, they are afraid to face it and find out they were wrong. God isn't really a mystery to them. He's a magic mirror who tells them they are the fairest of them all, and don't take it well when a Jesus, Buddha, or King comes along and tells them otherwise.

But again, we are faced with mystery as integral to religion vs. mystery as a cop out.

So let us turn to the concept of infinity: an intregal part of mystery. God and the universe are both infinite, and therefore there will always be mysteries because we can't know everything. This is something of a relief, and indeed exciting if you are the type of person who loves to explore. Could exploration of the universe be a type of spirituality for scientists and theologians alike? Could exploration of the mind be a spiritual path for Zen Buddhists and psychologists?

Exploration is the yin to the yang of mystery. What is called the High Middle Ages corresponds with the high point of their scholarship. It was the time of both Saint Albert, the patron saint of natural sciences, and his student Saint Thomas Aquinas, the patron saint of Catholic schools. Saint Albert was an explorer who gathered folklore from France to the Black Sea, and developed laws trying to unify that knowledge, and Saint Thomas promoted the idea of using reason instead of force for conversion. Indeed, he wrote and entire book for that express purpose.

Buddha went a step further. He told his followers to continually debate ideas, and if he, Buddha, was found to be wrong, than even he should be open to correction. Combining that with Enlightenment as their goal, it is no wonder Buddhism has a reputation for being open to new ideas. The courage it takes to be so open to mystery, to surprise, to face the possibility of being wrong, is probably why Buddhism is one of the smallest of the major religions.

But exploration implies that there is something to be found. Perhaps this is why scientists, and science fiction writers, have been so obsessed with exploration and illustrate exploration so well. The desire for power and control or even necessity may be the driving force behind technology, but the desire to learn is what pushes science. And science has revealed more about the way the world works in only a few centuries what religions did in thousands of years. And it is speeding up. We've learned more in the last century than the preceding four, especially now that science and technology are working more and more together.

But for all the power of science, mystery is essential. Without a sense of mystery to pull scientists forward, scientists, just as their religious counterparts, get lazy and arrogant. Mystery keeps explorers humble and hungry. Some once said that Einstein had it all wrapped up, that the universe would soon be understood, but even within his lifetime, they found quantum mechanics and the spirit of exploration was reborn.

But the power of science lies on the fact that the physical universe is understandable. If every part of the universe is understandable, then it is only mysterious because it is unexplored. If it is explored, then it is understood and if it can be understood than it can't be the Mysterious God. Therefore the Mysterious God can not be the mysterious parts of the universe. It would have to be external to the universe if it is to exist at all.

If God is separate from the universe, we again return to the problems of metaphysics and ethics I posed before. Is God simply an alternative to "because I said so" or "I don't know"? What use is a God that is external to the universe and cannot be understood? Well, I don't know. I feel better believing in God. I also feel better after drinking vodka or maybe eating ice cream, but that doesn't make them good ideas.

What I can tell you is that while mystery is an essential ingredient to any healthy religion, mystery must be explored if anything useful is to come of it. If mystery is not explored, then dogma is left to stand. If discoveries are not acted upon, then religion is useless at best and dangerous at worst. Theologians all across our nation know that homophobia is based on misunderstanding, they know the contradictions in the Bible mean it can't be taken literally, they know that much of the Bible's morality statements are outdated justifications of old human evils, but they say nothing. Most of them sit around and write papers for each other to read. There was a time when theologians took their duty to society seriously, but that was a long time ago. Few today take a stand for what they know is right, and because their comrades say nothing those few lose their jobs.

Mystery is not an excuse, it is a challenge. Whether or not God exists is not the point of this speech. Whether or not God can be known to exist or not is not the point of this speech. The point is that exploration of the mystery is the most important aspect of a growing spirituality, even if you are an atheist. And this is an ever going process, finding deeper and deeper layers as we go on. This too, is encouraging, for it means our children can become better than us, or at the very least can enjoy making discoveries of their own.

Please note that Paul recommends the following book: The Conscious Universe: Part and Whole in Modern Physical Theory by Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau.