IT'S A MYSTERY

A REFLECTION FOR SEXAGESIMA SUNDAY

How many times do we ask a Catholic teacher, even a nun or a priest, ‘how can that be?’  We don’t understand a particular article of our faith, and so we “ask the experts,” hoping, expecting even, to get an answer that makes sense of our questioning.  “How is it possible for God to be three Persons and yet only one God?”  “Why does God allow this or that evil to exist?”  “What does it mean that our souls will go to heaven or hell for all eternity.”  We don’t get it, we want to see the answers, but no matter how hard we work our brains, we still just don’t understand.  So we ask.  And then we get the worn-out old phrase that we’ve learned to shrug off, “It’s a mystery.”

 Sure!  We’ve heard that before.  It means that Father is busy and doesn’t have time to explain, or that he doesn’t know either and can’t be bothered to look it up in his books.  Either way, he’s not going to tell us, so we might as well just forget about it.  Of course, when we get older and wiser, we do understand what’s behind that seemingly brash response, “It’s a mystery.”  We come to recognize that there are things in this world that simply can not be explained.  Take UFOs for example.  There are so many accounts of people seeing them, even being abducted by them, that we wonder what they are.  But “it’s a mystery” and we can only guess what those lights in the sky really are.  “Who shot President Kennedy?”  “Do ghosts exist and if so, what are they?”  “How on earth did Joe Biden ever get into the White House?”  There are so many mysteries in life, and no one knows the answer to them.  Nevertheless, they are all mysteries which perhaps one day will be solved. Maybe some long lost footage will appear of men in black shooting Kennedy from the grassy knoll.  Or incontrovertible proof will finally come out showing the plotting and execution of the rigged election of 2020.  They won't be mysteries any more.

There are, on the other hand, those supernatural mysteries mentioned above, to which we will never know the answer, which we will forever fail to fully understand. Our limited, finite minds can never fully comprehend infinity, eternity and true perfection.  We may have words for them, but finite brains cannot grasp the infinite.

Like a wretched schoolboy who refuses to believe his teacher when she explains that the earth revolves on its axis, simply because he looks around and doesn’t experience the sensation of movement, people sometimes refuse to believe God for the same reason that some of the things he has revealed are not apparent to our senses.  We have no other confirmation than our blind faith that, for example, our souls will live forever, whatever “forever” means.  But it is this very faith that will save those souls of ours.  We are pleasing to God when we trust that he can neither deceive nor be deceived.  We become ever closer to him by assenting with our faith even to those truths that we don’t and never will understand.