No Longer a Mystery

"Some colleges let men, women room together in dormitories. Gender doesn’t play a role in roommate selection,” Ben Arnoldy of the Christian Science Monitor reports as we come the end of 2006.

His article discusses this societal change in somewhat objective terms. The main concern about this change is a moral question about what this might lead to sexually for men and women. However, the article rather handily dismisses this concern since, we are told, the practice is becoming common with little evidence of resulting sexual problems. Seems a shortsighted, premature evaluation.

However, almost as a postscript, the article alluded to an accompanying change which is of equal concern to me. This change was expressed in the words of a college sophomore who is a leader in this new approach to college living. He says, “I think the opposite sex is no longer really such a mystery as it was before.” He sees this as positive development. I see it as a loss.

No wonder many American young people are “old” before they are 20 and are often bored. They have opened all their presents before Christmas. They have been given advantages they have not worked to achieve, and many have also lived with the privileges of marriage without the beauty and mystery of committed lifetime love.

Paralleling this trend, many participate in the forms of their religion without experiencing the mystery of a loving God who communicates with his creation first through his Son and then by the Holy Spirit.

I believe our societal desire to eliminate all the mysteries of our humanity is destined to destroy a part of us that makes us human. We think that surveys and tests and charts will give us all the keys to life here on earth and even the universe. We think we can determine what happens in the brain when people fall in love and thus remove the mystery. We even do tests to see what is happening physiologically to someone in prayer.

I am reminded of a poem written in 1798. “Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books…” the young romantic Wordsworth wrote. For years I enjoyed reading this poem to high school seniors in the spring of the year. At first they were shocked that their book-loving English teacher would speak such words. But soon we began to unpack the layered meaning in the poem, “The Tables Turned.” The students pondered the words:

“Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things—
We murder to dissect.”

Wordsworth, of course, was speaking primarily of his society’s penchant for analyzing natural beauty rather than enjoying it. However, my students were able to quickly make other applications. They began to see that some things are experienced intuitively though not understood by the mind. As we read Wordsworth, they understood that analyzing the stamen and pistil of a flower are not the same as experiencing the beauty of a “host of golden daffodils” stretching “in a never ending line” “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” causing the poet’s heart to “dance with the daffodils.” They realized that falling in love could not be entirely explained. Many also understood that there was a mystery in their relationship to God that was beyond intellectual understanding.

Mystery is more than a TV or paperback who-done-it. I experience mystery when I look across the breakfast table at my husband and ponder our love which has endured 42 years of life’s beauteous and difficult experiences. I am drawn into the Christmas narrative as I ponder again the mystery of God who so loved as to give his Son. I experienced mystery at the birth of my children as my husband and I saw each other reflected in each new life.

To go back to the original article about college kids, I would say, there is an appropriate mystery between a man and a woman before they become physically, emotionally and spiritually one. To eliminate this is like plucking green fruit from a tree. It can be eaten, but the fullness of the flavor is lost.

A life lived devoid of appropriate mystery is not fully human.