MYSTERION

Hi There !

There's a folk tale that tells a truth to frequently revisit.

It's about Augustine, super sinner become super saint.

Augustine was walking along the ocean beach.

His peregrination was one big pondering on just what is God.

Augustine was a card carrying, heavy duty thinker.

He sees a little boy busy carrying bucket after bucket

of water from the ocean and poring it into a big hole

 he had dug out in the sand.

In response to Augustine's query about what he was doing,

the boy tells Augustine he is going to pour the whole ocean

into his big hole in the sand.

The ever rational Augustine tells the boy that's impossible,

the hole is way too small to contain the ocean.

The boy says

          "And your mind is way too small

           to ever come close to containing God,"

and then the boy disappears into the heavens.


 Myth speaks truth so artfully and fully.


Well, there's more than a little of Augustine in most of us.

We come from a long line of heavy duty thinkers

and their movements: the philosophers of ancient Greece,

the Romans and their organizational genius,

a bevy of notable Christian thinkers

the likes of Augustine, Origin, Aquinas, Bonaventure,

rethinking ancient ways in the Renaissance,

the intensely rational Enlightenment,

the Reformation with a lot of "thinkie things "

like doctrines and dogmas,

the calibrations of the Industrial Revolution,

now our own highly scientific and technological era.

Much, much good for sure, yet as a culture

we are decidedly left brain, often to an extreme.

We assume we can think through,

figure out, analyze anything and everything,

if not now, sometime, somehow.

That can throw a monkey wrench into all sorts of things,

our spiritual lives certainly included .

It definitely throws  us way off in terms of God.

Sure, philosophize, theologize for all your worth.

But God isn't something to figure out.

God is to be experienced, lived.

What we can intellectually know of God is good.

It is also limited.

It is an inch to the Alps!!

Look at lovers.

They "know" all sorts of things about the each other,

none of which comes within a galaxy

of experiencing oneness with the beloved.



The ancient Greeks had a wonderful awareness of all this.

They called it 

                                    MYSTERION
:
           A  reality so vast the human mind alone cannot grasp it.

In this wonderful sense God is a mystery.

Metaphor helps.

God is like the ocean.

It is real, but we cannot grasp it with our arms or with our eyes.

It's just too vast.

What we can do is jump in, delight in it, and that without end.

That's what lovers do with each other.

We are invited to be lovers.

             "Love the Lord your God

              with all you mind, heart and soul."

                                             Mark 12:30-31

Lovers can be incredibly intellectual.

When they get in bed they have more important things to do!!!


Much of the disconnect with God in our time is because the church

has turned God into a concept to be studied and believed,

a "Thinkie Thing."

In reality, God is Reality.

God is the Essence of all.

God is the mystery in which all is.

The ocean of all.

Love Itself.

To put metaphor to it, our spiritual lives

are all about getting lost in God.

For the more cautious, "Go for a swim!"

For the rest of us, "Let's go to bed!!



You can't get more "thinkie" than Albert Einstein.

What a gift he is. He has opened up the heavens for us

like no one ever before.

Let's give a lot of time, an open mind, a spaciousness of spirit

to what this mighty "thinker" thinks about mystery:

       "The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have

         is a sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle

         of religion as well as all serious endeavor

         in art and science.   He who has never had this experience

         seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind.

         To sense that behind anything that can be experienced

         there is something that our mind cannot grasp

         and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us

         only indirectly and as a feeble reflection,

         this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.

         To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets

         and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind

         a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is."




Expressed from the Christian Tradition,                                                                    

the mystery that

                 " God is love."
                                        ( 1 John 4:8 )
                 "In him we live, and move and have our being."
                                                                                            ( Acts 17:28 ).

What a  

                 MYSTERION.

Jump in!!!!

( ocean or bed ).



.

It's a delight to welcome to our weekly gathering here

new members from Finland, Turkey and Switzerland.

Happy we can all share this gathering together.

Every blessing and goodness.

Holding all in

God's Dear Love,

  John Frank