If you’re going by the standard lists, no, of course not—it’s not on any of them—but I think there’s a case to be made.
As always, it’s important to begin by defining your terms. First, spiritual disciplines are not law but grace, not requirement but gift. They are not things we do because we have to or to get some sort of response from God, they are things we have been set free to do because of what God has done for us and is doing in us.
Second, a mystery is not a secret God is unwilling to tell or something too obscure or difficult for us to understand, nor is it something we have to figure out. When the Bible talks about mystery, it means something we can’t figure out on our own. It’s something too big to be seen by the unaided eye, fully comprehended by the human mind, or defined and circumscribed by the human capacity for reason.
The word “mystery” is almost always used in Scripture to describe the counsel or plan of God for the world which he only shares with his people. The only exception I can think of is Paul talking about the mystery of sin in 2 Thessalonians 2, which makes at least one thing clear: we can’t fully understand or explain God’s solution for this world because we can’t fully understand or explain the problem, either. The wrongness of this world is too great and too fundamental to our experience for us to be able to stand apart from it and make sense of it. The problem is a mystery to us, and so therefore must the answer be.
Now, when I put this word mystery together with the term spiritual discipline, it’s obvious why they aren’t routinely combined: when we think of spiritual disciplines, we think of things we do, and mystery isn’t something we do. But here’s the thing: neither are solitude and silence, which are fundamental spiritual disciplines. They are things we seek out, to which we yield ourselves and open ourselves. The discipline is learning to receive them, and then to pursue them. They aren’t matters of doing, they are matters of accepting and letting God do. Other people are our chief defense against God—distracting us, occupying our attention, filling us with all sorts of stuff, good or bad; accepting solitude is surrendering that defense. Words are our greatest weapon against God; keeping silence is laying that weapon down.
Solitude and silence are external states of being—realities in the world around us which are necessary for certain things to happen in our own heart. Solitude makes it much easier to be alone with and before God; silence around us is necessary for us to silence ourselves. In a similar way, divine mystery is an external reality which we need to allow ourselves to experience without trying to explain it (or explain it away). Mystery moves us into the deeps, where we cannot stand, where we are not in control. The first part of this spiritual discipline is acknowledging and accepting that we are in way over our heads; the second part is trust. It’s choosing to act in trust that though we can’t keep our heads above water, God is the water and he will not let us drown. In David’s lovely image in Psalm 131, it is to sit with God like a weaned child in Mama’s lap—a child which no longer sees that lap as a place to turn and get something, but simply as a place to rest and be at peace.
So what does this mean for us? We live in a scientific age, which means an age of understanding, in a very particular way. One of the beliefs that drives and forms our culture is that we are able to understand how and why everything happens, that given enough time we will get there, and that we have the right to expect that degree of understanding—and the concomitant degree of control over ourselves, our circumstances, and our world. Increasingly, our culture sees everything, including human beings and human lives, as just so much raw material to be shaped however people choose to shape it.
The mystery of God runs directly counter to this world’s expectations, not because we cannot understand it—though some aspects of it are certainly beyond our full comprehension—but because it is not subject to our understanding. We aren’t in control, we don’t set the terms, and whether we like it or not is immaterial. Listen to the arguments that rage through our society—listen for how often they boil down to “I don’t want to believe that”; you’ll realize pretty quickly the frequency is distressingly high. To practice mystery as a follower of Jesus is to set that aside. It is to surrender the demand, even the expectation, that God will work in ways that fully make sense to us on our terms in this life.
That’s hard. Even if we accept that God allows things to happen that we can’t understand right now, even if we recognize and confess the biblical truth that he uses pain and suffering and difficult circumstances to do his work in us, how do we justify that? I’ve heard a lot of those testimonies over the years, and they all seem to end the same way: “And now, because of all that terrible stuff, I’m in this place which makes it all worth it.” We say—I’ve done this myself, many times—that the rough and rocky road is worth it because it leads to a beautiful place. Many times it does. But what do we do when it doesn’t?
We are not promised resolution in this life. We are promised a happy ending, yes, but not in this world. Opening ourselves to the reality of divine mystery teaches us to live between, in the open and the unresolved—not backwards into the past where everything is stable and unmoving, nor forwards into the future where we can imagine everything being the way we want it to be, but right now in the chaos of the unfinished, the undetermined, the uninspiring, and the unknown. That’s the only way we can learn to see Jesus in the chaotic now—which, really, is the only way we can learn to see him at all, because that’s where he’s present and working, down with us in the muck and mess of our lives.
Sadly, life doesn’t magically resolve itself. There are situations that never get better, and sins that never stop kicking our butts; far too many of the wicked still prosper, those we love get sick and die, and the next person I see rise from the dead will be the first. We ask God for things we know he can do and believe it would please him to do—heal his children, save those we love who have rejected him, bring judgment down on the wicked—and sometimes he does, but often he doesn’t. To the extent that our faith depends on God making sense to us, it will be shaken by the world, because that isn’t his promise. He’s on about something far too big for that.
Photo ©2011 Risto Kuulasmaa. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic.