Truth and a Song

"...great is the mystery..." I Timothy 3:16

The idea of "mystery" has gone foul for many and has been foully used by others, thanks mainly to the permeation and pontification of post-modern pundits. Many today take "mystery" (and similar terms, like "incomprehensible") to mean that which is irrational or unknowable or (what is more likely) both. Such a definition is an infection from our own corrupt culture, a culture fearful of and in denial of absolutes, categories, and certainties. It is an infection that we must strive long and hard to cure.

The old idea of "mystery" (an idea that is still the right and proper one) is the idea of "a hidden truth". Shouldn't such a thing be obvious, though? When we read a book or watch a film subscribed under the genre of "mystery," we never think that the solution to the initial conundrum is going to be irrational or unknowable. Both would destroy the very purpose that defines mystery: to discover, know, and comprehend an answer that is currently obscured. To steal the discovery, knowledge, and comprehension away from us is to make the story no longer a mystery but rather a comedy (which delights in the absurd).

A "mystery" is not irrational and/or unknowable; it has an answer that is rational and knowable and currently obscure. As Chesterton put it, one day we will see "the other side of the tapestry," and current mysteries will be solved, and perhaps new and exciting ones revealed; for mystery gives two things to the universe, two things that the human soul cannot live without. The first is joy, for we feel that we are in a great and exciting game of hide and seek, of search and discovery. Einstein said that it is as if we are small children stepping into a great library, vaguely sensing some sort of structure and order in the arrangement of all the books as well as a great wealth of substance within their pages. To make that substance irrational and/or unknowable is to kill the joy.

The second thing that is gives us is beauty. We sense great and momentous truths behind the veil of things, truths that the artist and the philosopher have sought (and occasionally found) words for, that the common man often lacks words for. Whatever these truths, these realities, are, we sense their numinous glow behind (and often through) the veil of things, though we often fail to articulate it adequately. However, those who assume that our failure of articulation necessarily means that such things are absurdities or non-entities are childish; their thoughts are cop-outs and naivete. The truth is far more exciting: we cannot speak the right words because we do not yet know the language, the language of real things. It to is a mystery, i.e., it too is rational and knowable and waiting to be discovered. We catch fragments of it now; one day we will be encompassed by the whole. Thus, the joy and beauty of the universe, caused by mystery, can be summed up in this: we find by our longings and searchings, whether in whole or in part, that all things are touched by truth and a song.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2009