During the summer months at our church, members are invited to offer their thoughts around a theme and formally share them with the congregation on a given Sunday morning. This year’s theme is, “What gift of the spirit would you offer our church?” My husband Case and I offered our gift of the spirit this past Sunday. I loved what we ended up with and wanted to share it with you.
There is a story about twins in their mother’s womb.
And Twin A turns to Twin B and says, “Do you believe in life after delivery?”
Twin B: “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”
Twin A: “Nonsense. There is no life after delivery. What would that life be?”
Twin B: “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths.”
Twin A: “This is absurd! Walking is impossible. And eat with our mouths? Ridiculous. The umbilical cord supplies nutrition.”
Twin B: “I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here.”
Twin A: “No one has ever come back from there. Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery it is nothing but darkness and anxiety and it takes us nowhere.”
Twin B: “Well, I don’t know, but certainly we will see mother and she will take care of us.”
Twin A: “Mother? You believe in mother? Where is she now?”
Twin B: “She is all around us. It is in her that we live. Without her there would not be this world.”
Twin A: “Ha. I don’t see her, so I don’t believe in mother…”
Twin B: “Sometimes when you’re in silence you can hear her, you can perceive her.”
BETH: We enjoy this little story because it jolts us out of the ordinary and gets us thinking about the mysteries we’ve survived, the mysteries we take for granted, and reminds us to have the courage to collaborate with the mysteries that are yet to come.
CASE: We live with mystery every day – despite our best efforts to plan, we don’t know how any given day will unfold. Kurt Vonnegut said in one of his last books, Man Without a Country: “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”
And I try to engage with mystery as a way of life by reminding myself I haven’t seen the whole story yet and I’ve been surprised before. I hold on more loosely to the idea that events are clearly good or bad. But taking that too far feels unmoored from reality. For example, winning a motion at work is usually good. Getting in a car crash is usually bad. I don’t try to deny my experience and understanding, but when I’m having a strong reaction to something, I try to make space for some doubt, humility, and mystery.
Engaging with mystery makes me consider what we can control because there is so much that we can’t. There is a song that I love about just that thing, by singer Iris Dement, from 1992. She sings,
“Some say they’re goin’ to a place called Glory / And I ain’t saying it ain’t a fact /
But I’ve heard that I’m on the road to purgatory / And I don’t like the sound of that /
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly / But I choose to let the mystery be.”
Like, Iris, what I can control is focusing on love and letting some expectations go.
BETH: I recently spent my 45th birthday at what we’ve affectionately named Hillbilly Disneyland, an amusement park called Silver Dollar City in the Ozarks. I have become yet somehow more sensitive as I’ve grown older, and the thrill rides can be a bit intense for me. I’ve found that if I close my eyes, it helps. I’m on the ride anyway, so it’s better if I’m not assessing what’s coming, tensing up, and anxiously anticipating it. Engaging with mystery helps me practice spiritual surrender, which paradoxically puts me in a place to effect more change by being less reactive and more responsive.
Engaging with mystery is not something that comes naturally to me. I find myself doing the typical human thing of wanting to get the conditions right and then I’ll begin. In fact, sometimes engaging with mystery is easiest when the stuff hits the fan. We have no choice but to go with the flow of the river because struggle will wear us out. We have to accept life on life’s terms. When I was pregnant with our first daughter, now a 15 year-old, I dreamed of a water birth at two a.m. Instead, it was noon when I was wheeled into the operating room because when they were checking how dilated my cervix was, they were surprised to feel a butt, not a head. And I almost gave birth in the closet I’d been laboring in at Denver Health with our second daughter, but I got my water birth at two a.m. with our third daughter.
Upon reflection, although each birth was beautiful, my first birth, the one that went “wrong,” holds a very special place in my heart because I was clearly out of the driver’s seat. I knew I could keep my stuff together if the plan held, but giving over to at the least collaboration with mystery when it didn’t has informed my confidence and my parenting to this day. I trusted life enough to not control it. Our first daughter’s birth in 2010 helped me physically learn the truth that at any time, whatever is going on – big or small – we can make a values-based choice to engage with mystery and access the peace of not having to pretend we are God.
One of the ways I’ve patched myself up after trauma throughout my life was to make things as certain as possible, to engage, research, think through possible contingencies, and work really hard towards outcomes. These are qualities that our culture celebrates. And yet it has been the things I could not plan, the things I’ve gambled on, that are my reasons for living. I could not have created this marriage, these children, by charting the course ahead of time. To be alive with them is to travel an unknown and mysterious path.
CASE: Part of the reason this gift felt exciting to us right now is that politically the stuff has hit the fan. We are in the place where we can decide that everything and half the people are bad, and close down. Or we can understand that we can only ever see as far as our headlights allow and that has to be enough. We can be curious, open, and keep ourselves free. This doesn’t mean being open to the proposition that up is down and wrong is right.
BETH: But it means figuring out what we are for instead of what we are against. It means living into our Universalist values of no condemned people and of recognizing the mystery, the divinity that lies in each and every other person. It means living my theology that God doesn’t create tragedies but God also certainly doesn’t want us to waste them by learning nothing and loving less.
A practice that I’ve reignited after contemplating embracing mystery for the past month has been, in the moments before I get out of bed, thinking “Where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say and to whom?” It is a reminder that I don’t have to muscle my way through life, hoping that I can make it happen. In some ways that is the American dream but I want to be a different kind of American dreamer. I want to co-create with forces larger than myself for something more beautiful than little old me could have imagined.
CASE: I’ve been thinking about a treasured experience from when we were in law school. We studied abroad and were able to explore a glow worm cave in New Zealand. Talk about mystery. Each step, each new sight, was unknown. But it was thrilling! Perhaps because we had guides, we didn’t approach all the darkness with fear, but with excitement. We rappelled down into the cave, we walked through underground rivers, but we also turned off our headlamps and jumped through a hole into a pool below! That memory feels like our highest and best selves engaging with mystery.
The gift we wish to give to our congregation is to embrace mystery and approach it with curiosity and courage.
I hope you enjoyed that offering. It was really fun to work with Case, and even more fun to speak at the chancel with him instead of being by my lonesome up there! I’m curious what the idea of engaging with mystery brings up for you. I can tend to get anxious around it – wanting only “good” mysteries, not “bad” ones, which is why it feels like important and necessary work for me to do. It’s that whole idea of “we want our lives to stay the same but also gradually get better and better.” Ha. What is coming up for you around embracing mystery? I’d love to hear from you!
