If you are lucky and work hard enough, you may someday experience freedom from the known.
*Jiddu Krishnamurti
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Is this a fitting prayer -
Deliver me from the known
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A late friend, an Episcopal priest, handed me a written sermon and asked me to read it. Someone else had written it. Why wanting me to read it? For a story of mystery.
The clergyperson told of being a boy playing in the basement of the family home. His dad had told him not to go there - off-limits. He began digging into the ground. His dad discovered the boy, told him to leave, and the boy left something in the ground.
Just before his dad caught him on forbidden ground, the son had come upon something in the dirt, but he did not have time to dig it up. Later, the family moved from that house. And the boy, now the clergyperson, shared how he lived, wondering what he had almost uncovered. He shared, then, on the value of mystery to our lives.
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I, too, learned to love mystery, and live with the Mystery. I am still learning that. Regardless of how I have found answers through many years of study and spiritual practice, mystery leads to mystery. The more I know, the less I know. And this means the more I know.
There is always something - Something - immaculately lovely just out of my reach, and I am thankful for its elusiveness. I have fallen in love with that Something. Yet, it is the same love by which I can love those moving about a store, though I speak not to them or know anything of them. You can do the same. True?
Now, what is that Mystery? That Something? What is this I feel so close to, intimate with, as though enticing me to yield more and more into the bright darkness that is so bright to be the immaculate Light? I need no answer. Do you?
Mystery remains mute to the intellect, but seduces the heart. I have been wooed into wonderment. Born into wonderment, may I die rejoicing in the Mystery, is my wish. This, I see to be what most call death - the threshold to another revealing of this unknown.
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The mystery is part of our everyday relationships. Pick up your fork or spoon - it is there! Thump your head - it is there! Laugh - it is there! Cry - it is there! There... There... There!
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I leave you with a Thomas Merton quote and opening informal letter to friends -
Came upon this [Thomas Merton quote] in a writing I did years ago; struck the 'yes!' cord again... Could it be everything is too clear to understand? That we are always framing an idea automatically (well, the brain is doing it) based on memory, fitting this fresh moment, person, experience into a cage prefab - even if the cage is a nice, comfy cage? I can only know you, for example, in the moment, and that means you never fit in my memory ... you are ever-fresh: you may, then, surprise me :-) I cannot even know myself but now, and when now is memory, I have lost it again, but can know again. Some thoughts on a feeling winter coming night ... hibernation, and the craving for carbohydrates attacking ... and not doing well saying "No!" ... now, does anyone have some pizza to share, or homemade biscuits, or a croissant :-)
Some things are too clear to be understood, and what you think is your understanding is only a kind of charm, a kind of incantation in your mind concerning that thing.
