The Voltage of Mystery

Why the soul needs vessels for God I was talking recently with a lovely woman who has been working with Mother Mary and the Seven Sorrows. She asked a reasonable question. Why do we need a priest? Why should anybody stand between us and God? I started talking about the mystery. About the beauty and power of Christian mysticism. About how the divine might simply be too much for most of us to approach alone. Then she said, “Oh. That's interesting.” Something dawned on me too. Perhaps the priest, at his best, acts as a kind of capacitor. He does not own the mystery. He is not God’s gatekeeper. His life is supposed to be ordered around prayer, scripture, ritual, confession, suffering and death. The Church releases him, at least in principle, from some of the ordinary demands of earning, family and survival so that he can remain closer to the mystery on behalf of the community. That does not make him holy. Priests fail. The Church fails. We know this. But failure does not erase the original purpose of the vessel. We think spirituality is all about becoming light. Ascending into oneness. But I don’t think we have any real understanding of what oneness is. We want oneness with all the difficult bits taken out. Everything beautiful gathered into one radiant whole, with the horror left somewhere outside. Christianity will not let us do that. God becomes incarnate. He enters a human body and allows that body to be humiliated, torn open and hung upon a cross. A good man dying in public disgrace, struggling for breath in his own blood. Even God descends into the worst of it. This is the bit we cannot comprehend. It does not mean that horror belongs to God. It does not make evil good. It means that no part of human suffering lies beyond God’s willingness to enter it. The terror itself is not beautiful. The torture of a human body is not beautiful. The grief of a mother watching her son die is not beautiful. But in accepting these things, we become beautiful. Not accepting them as permissible. Not deciding that suffering is somehow good for us or that it should be allowed to continue. Accepting that this is part of the life we are actually living. That pain, grief, betrayal, humiliation and death are here. No amount of talk about light will remove them. Mother Mary does not ascend beyond any of it. She carries the mystery in her body and gives it human form. Later, she stands at the foot of the cross and watches that body being destroyed. She cannot stop it. She cannot explain it. She simply stays. Perhaps this is the real meaning of a vessel. Not something that explains the mystery, but something capable of remaining in its presence. Catholicism is full of such vessels. Mary. The infant Christ. The cross. The tomb. Water. Oil. Bread. Wine. The priest. The mystery is carried through matter because we are matter too. We encounter it through bodies because we have bodies. Without these vessels, mystery can become whatever we want it to be. A private revelation. A beautiful feeling. A spirituality with no blood in it. But life has blood in it. We Christians look away from this too. We polish the cross, cover it in gold and hang it around our necks. It becomes so familiar that we no longer see what it is. Then we hurry towards the Resurrection because we cannot bear to remain at Calvary.

The mystery is not that suffering exists. We know that already. The mystery is that God entered it, and that love was not defeated there.

Christ does not rise by avoiding the hardships of life, or the final catastrophe of the human body. We all die. He passes through it. And when he returns, he still carries the wounds.

I have a felt sense of what this means. A deep but imperfect knowing, that the more I think about, and the closer I come to understanding, the more beautiful it becomes.

I just struggle to articulate it.