Abandonment to the Mystery

In our journey toward God, we eventually come to the moment when we realize that He can only be defined by mystery.  It was mystery which Moses experienced when the bush was burning; yet, not consumed.  It was mystery which overwhelmed Isaiah in the Temple.  It was mystery which knocked Saul from the throne of personal arrogance into a blindness that could not be healed apart from the help of one he sought to kill.  How do we explain God?  How do we explain our encounters with the Holy One, the Mighty Lord of the Universe?  

Certainly, we try.  There are those who have come before us who have spent the wealth of their years seeking to speak of Him in such a way as to open ours eyes and mind to what cannot really be seen or understood.  Like them we have constructed our own system of understanding, defining, and knowing God.  It may be a system more simplistic than the brand name theologians whose books sit on seminary library shelves, but still it exists in our mind and by it we live out our relationship with the Creator who made us.  In the end it may be true that we all will come to the place of claiming mystery instead of knowledge.  

We may all come to the place of knowing that there will always be more we do not know than we could ever know about God.  We give up many things as we walk the journey which leads to home.  In some ways life can be defined as a process of letting go.  As we venture walking that road with Him, we began to realize that we must not only let go of the things we hold in our hands, but also all the things we have held dear in our heart.  To finally come to Him and to be enveloped in His holy presence will likely require us to let go of what we thought we knew about Him so that nothing holds us to here and we can be swept away to there as surely as Elijah was carried away in a fiery chariot.