Our Catholic doctrine has a strong structural framework that gives a good foundation for our belief. We see this in the systematic layout of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, where the key elements of our Creed are broken down, phrase by phrase, to give Catholics the fundaments of our rich faith. It has plenty of footnotes which reference both Sacred Scripture as well as writings from the Fathers of the Church, with giants like Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine, and the Eastern Fathers to name a few.
But as much as we have a rich heritage that has helped us to have a good ‘lay of the land’ as far as our doctrine is concerned, it doesn’t pretend to be an answer book to everything that the Church holds dear in terms of doctrine and faith, and this is largely because we are essentially dealing with something that is organic and living, and at the heart of the matter is not anything that is physical but meta-physical. The faith is after all, a relationship with God, and this makes the enterprise of learning about God so challenging.
Because God is not one of the many ‘things’ that we can study, but is above all, the things that we can say about God fall very far short from the truth of who God is. In many ways, theologians tend to approach God from a via negativeway, saying what God is not, than to say what God is. This is because God’s categories are beyond what our finite minds can wrap around. After all, to put limits on God and to define him in strict and concise terms would be to deny his omnipotence.
It is for this reason that the Church rightly attributes to God the term ‘mystery’, which is definitely no saying that God is mysterious. To say that someone or something is mysterious is to denote that there is something shady or sinister that is kept hidden, often with a disingenuous intention. God is certainly not disingenuous.
Mystery is a term that is used by the Catholic church to speak of the attributes of God that are beyond our ken, and more often than not refer to God’s beauty, truth and goodness. These aspects or attributes of God are endlessly deep and profound that there is no way one can exhaust and plumb their depths. Like an endlessly long corridor where one opens one door after another after another without reaching an end, so too are the mysteries of God.
We need to be comfortable with this truth as baptized members of the Body of Christ. I think way too many of us are not comfortable with mystery, and that is why so many also flounder and become anxious whenever they experience the more challenging mysteries of God, like the mystery of redemptive suffering and the mystery of sacrifice. To want clear-cut answers when things become ‘foggy’ somehow does require a big step of faith. And when there is a reluctance or unwillingness to do this with a willingness in one’s heart may reveal that one is not yet quite ready to accept and to understand the term ‘mystery’ as it is used by the Church.
Last weekend, the Church was graced with the Beatification of Carlo Acutis, Servant of God, who had been graced with a deep appreciation of the mystery of redemptive suffering. There is much to learnt from how, even in the throes of suffering from his blood cancer as he was approaching his death, he was able to offer up his sufferings for the intentions of the Pope and for the Church. For an adult in the faith to do this is remarkable, but for a 15 year old to do this should leave many in awe. He was a model of how one ought to suffer for a cause greater than oneself.
‘Mystery’ encompasses the ability to be comfortable with a certain degree of ‘I don’t exactly know for sure, but I am ok with things being this way’. To misuse and abuse the term ‘mystery’ is to attribute to it everything that one cannot give rational (not necessarily logical) answers to, and to just throw up one’s arms in the air and say in some exasperated way that “it’s mystery”. When this happens, and I believe it often does, it leaves the one who is on the receiving end thinking that our doctrine and faith have no need for one to broach the faith with intelligence, and this is a shame.
An astute spiritual writer once said that we need to be humble about language. It can only take us so far. Both our imaginations and our language are limited. We can never speak adequately and with clear delimiting lines about the infinite simply because we are finite. But having said that, good theology is needed because it helps us to think about something that we cannot picture or think about otherwise.
We really don’t need to go as far as God to see the reality of mystery. Most of us are mysteries to ourselves.
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