At Home with Mystery

From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters, cp

Sunday, 11th June 2017

You don’t need me to tell you we are complex, complicated people, full of contradictions. We can see this so clearly in other people but we are not so good at seeing it in ourselves. We can be blind to our own contradictions. I’m sure you’ve sometimes said of someone, “He’s like two different people – I wonder who we’re going to meet today?” I heard too of a very fine lecturer who was always lecturing about the importance of relationships and community yet those who lived with him said he kept himself to himself and rarely spoke a word to anyone! He was good at the theory! And I used be surprised to find that those who caused the most trouble in family or community were the first to lecture others from on high! But I’m not surprised any more because we’re all inclined to tackle in talk what we can’t tackle in life. It’s a kind of compensation! But the little lad in “Angela’s Ashes” probably explains it best: “I think my father is like the Holy Trinity, the one that comes in with the paper in the morning, the one at night with the stories and the prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes in with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland!”

All this shows we are a mystery even to ourselves. We often don’t understand our own behaviour and we bewilder those who love us and want to understand us. Remember how honest St. Paul was about this: “I don’t understand my own behaviour. The good things I want to do I don’t do and the evil things I don’t want to do, I do. What a wretched man I am.” (Rom.7:15, 24)

Really then, we can’t complain when confronted today with the mystery of God as Trinity; in fact we should feel at home there. We’re never going to understand this mystery of our Faith but it does throw a warm light on the mystery of our own lives. If, in some way, God is a family of loving relationships and some way relationship is at the heart of God, then no wonder relationship is at the heart of our lives too. Only in relationship have we any hope of coming to know who we are. Relationship is at the heart of family, at the heart of church and at the heart of parish. It is the quality and strength of the relationships in a group that make all the difference, not the planning or the management or the administration. All these help, of course, but if the relationships are not right, nothing will be right.

I have a strange feeling I’m now doing what I said above – tackling in talk what I find hard to do in life. No wonder, too, I’m so consoled by almost the very last words in the medieval treatise called “The Cloud of Unknowing”:

“What God sees with his compassionate eyes is not how we are or how we have been but how we long to be”