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| "Pillars of Creation", from James Webb telescope |
I've been thinking about wisdom this month, thanks to a challenge from a mentor - reading Proverbs and thinking about what makes a wise person. I believe that the biggest key to wisdom is to fear God. But a second, related, hugely important piece is to realize how much you don't know and to come to terms with the huge volume of things you don't understand. This post is my thoughts on being comfortable with mystery.
1. Mystery is hard - I like to know things deeply. If there's something I really care about, I'm going to be Googling, listening to podcasts, and reading books about it. I'm going to do my best to know that subject inside and out. If I hit a brick wall in trying to understand a medical condition, or a question about faith, or just whatever it is I'm wanting to learn about, it makes me feel *frustrated*. Knowing the answers, understanding how things work, feels like power and control and reassurance. Not knowing feels like weakness and ineptitude. It's humbling - not like in the way famous people say they are humbled to receive this award - but like in the way where you are taken down several notches.
2. Mystery is reality - there are things we will never understand. Millions of them, if we really start to think about it. Our human brains are limited. Just like our eyes don't have the ability to perceive the full spectrum of color, and our ears can't detect the full range of sound, our brains don't have the facts, the frameworks, or the processing ability to know it all. This has been known for the entire history of humanity, but I think because we live in this information age with the Internet giving us access to exponentially more information than ever before, it might be easier for us to deny our limits. But there are so many mysteries in the hows and whys of life, so many questions that Google can't answer, and it's a good thing to be reminded of this truth.
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| Pluto!, from James Webb telescope |
3. Mystery is exciting - Like many, I've been oohing and aahing over each new picture that is released from the James Webb telescope. We get to see vantage points into space that are (way!) deeper and clearer than ever before - and one of my favorite things about it is, they're so stunningly beautiful! I've thought about how vast the universe is, and how it all started, and how it all works, but I don't think I ever thought to wonder whether it gets more beautiful the more you see of it. What a thing, to live in such a beautiful place! And we're still barely, barely scratching the surface in what we can see. Isn't it so exciting to think how much universe is out there, and what it might look like, and how we might not yet have seen the beginning of the depths of the beauty? And isn't it exciting to think that this might be true for all sorts of other things as well - such as the human body, or faith, or eternity.
4. Mystery can lead to curiosity, wonder, and gratitude - Life would be pretty boring if everything was known, or if everything even *could* be known. Instead, there are all these questions that we can bounce around in our heads, that we can try to discover answers to, that lead to more questions and imaginings. We can be reminded how small we are, how we're just a dot in the time and space continuum and that our knowledge reflects that. And we can feel awe and gratitude towards the one who DOES know it all, and who keeps it all spinning.
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This post describes how I think about mysteries in factual and philosophical knowledge, but I want to acknowledge that many of the hardest "hows" and "whys" in life are emotional and relational. Those are still very hard and very real, but might not fit as well into the excitement / wonder / gratitude boxes. I do think there is hope in these kind of questions too, in thinking about how we don't understand the whole story - that our hardships now are very real and very painful, but they might be working towards something beautiful in the timeline of eternity that we can't see or know now. This is an enormous topic that deserves book length treatment and not just a footnote to a blog, but I wanted to recognize that these are a big part of the mysteries that float through all of our minds.
