Let the Mystery Be Oct. 5, 2025
Dr. Roger Ray click here to see the video
More than 30 years the pop singer, Iris DeMent released a catchy tune and somewhat labored rhyme scheme that introduced the very profound dimension of theological mystery. She sings:
Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from
Everybody is worrying 'bout
Where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be
Many church members and listeners through the years have been shocked to learn that I don’t believe in life after death, not in heaven, hell, souls, reincarnation, or final judgement. It was a huge disappointment to my mother and, I suspect, to many of you. There is just no evidence and therefore, I see no reason to invest myself in believing in something that sounds so important but which, in the end, has too little substance to even cast a shadow. I’m all about evidence based faith.
But DeMent takes a more agnostic stance. Nobody knows and because nobody can know if there is or there isn’t an afterlife, she chooses to just let the mystery be. I like that but I will confess that is hard for me. I like having answers. I like having a method of discovery. But she sings, “I think I’ll just let the mystery be.”
I am a newly wed. It is official now. My bride has been granted a visa and permanent status, and we have begun the long journey towards applying for her citizenship in the USA. During the past year I have spent three months visiting her in Thailand. We did all of the tourist stuff but as we got more eager and more anxious about getting her visa granted, we spent more and more time going to various temples to do what Thai people call “making merit.” They don’t simply go to temple the way that we think of going to church, in the rather curious form of Buddhism common in Thailand, they go to Temple to make merit and they make merit by making offerings to the monks who live there and to images of the Buddha as well as certain famous late monks, and other gods, whose favor, they believe, will result in good luck for them.
My wife would assure you that it works because, after all she did get her visa. That’s proof enough for her even though the offerings, kneeling, and various merit earning gestures we went through seem to be rather far removed from the American immigration service procedures to me but, I’m learning to take Iris DeMent’s posture of just letting the mystery be.
There was one moment in a temple that stands out in my memory, when we visited the small and rather impoverished temple where Hui’s parents’ ashes are interred. We presented the monks with gifts of clothing, food, and personal care items and then we knelt while an older monk led us in prayer. These memorized prayers are recited in Sanskrit, which is even more difficult than Thai to my ears but during this long recitation, I noticed that my fiancé was praying right along with the monk. She knew the exact Sanskrit words to the prayer that the monk was reciting.
When the ceremony was over and we were alone again, I remarked to Hui, “I had no idea that you could speak Sanskrit!” She replied, “Oh, I don’t know what a word of it means, this is just a prayer we recited every day at school, and I have never forgotten it.” I pressed her, asking, “What does it mean? What is the translation of the prayer?” She replied, without a hint of curiosity, “I have no idea.”
Being who I am, I was tempted to start googling for answers, for a translation, but I saw that this is just one of the things about an oriental and occidental relationship. I want to mine for answers but for Hui, and evidently, for most of her peers, the prayer was a part of the mysterious universe of their unique Buddhist faith. I realized that she was content to simply let the mystery be. Thai Buddhism looked initially to me to be a religion based on good luck charms but, it appears, there is something much more, something deeper, a quiet faith that isn’t based on knowing the answers, on understanding, or dissecting.
I still like my way better, but I have no need to persuade her to approach faith the way that I do. Which is a good thing because, it is apparent, she hasn’t the slightest interest in embracing my way of being religious.
We have a hard time with mystics in the modern era. Well, if we are honest about it, we have always had a majority who were more inclined to ignore or ridicule mystics. I will never forget a lecture that I heard M. Scott Peck deliver many years ago in which he said that it is evident that St. Joan of Arc was a schizophrenic who heard the voices of long dead French saints, but Peck added, “it would be a mistake to assume that she was simply a schizophrenic.” She was schizophrenic and a great spiritual mystic.
Christians tend to read their New Testaments as if every line of every little book in it carried equal weight and credibility. Clearly, that is not true. We could wish that Jesus had written something himself, something that we could compare with what was written about him, but, alas, he did not. But when it comes to the famous self-appointed Apostle Paul, that is an entirely different matter. The New Testament contains several letters which Paul authored, in his own hand. And it contains several letters written by well-meaning followers that they tried to insist had been written by Paul, and then there is the voluminous Acts of the Apostles, written long after the Apostles it chronicles were dead.
The difference between how Paul tells his own story, and how others tell Paul’s story is as different as daylight and dark. Bear with me, please, to give you an amazing example: In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul is trying to impress his readers with his importance and he describes his conversion experience in this way: I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. 3 And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— 4 was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.
Let me try to rescue that from some of the verbiage. Paul is describing a mystical experience in which he doesn’t know if it was something that happened to him physically or if it was a vision. He felt that he was in the presence of God, but he cannot tell us what he saw or heard, only what he felt. Since he doesn’t describe anything at all, there are no paintings of this life changing event, it isn’t portrayed in sculpture or even in modern movies. It is a foggy event for which we do not have a mental image.
But if you haunt art museums as I do, you will have seen many depictions of the conversion of St. Paul but they are not based on what Paul said about himself. They are based on what someone who never met Paul, wrote about Paul 50 years after he was dead. In Acts Paul’s conversion is described this way:
3 Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” 5 He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. 6 But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”
This version has a street address; there are voices and visions and based on this account you can find many works of art. The author of Acts gives us a movie script from which artists have allowed their own imaginations to run wild…. I will point out that there is no horse in the text but most of the paintings involve a horse . . . it makes for a better story.
This is how religion often operates. The birth of the faith is usually rooted in either practical moral teaching or a profound mystical experience, but the instinct of later generations is to turn a mystery into a movie script.
I have taught world religions in college for many semesters and our text books always try to describe each religion by a set of beliefs. When I have taught Buddhism, I start with the four noble truths and the eight-fold path. I can’t be that far wrong, that’s how Buddhism was taught to me at Harvard by very famous professors. But in one of my early conversations with Hui, I discovered that even though she and her friends are life-long Buddhists, they have never heard of the 4 noble truths and the eight-fold path, and, what’s more, they showed no interest in finding out about them. That have an experience of Buddhism that is not based on memorization or what we call “the darhma” the “teachings of Buddha.”
Christianity, by the time of the Council of Nicaea, was determined that Christianity, to be a religion, had to be defined and their definition was the Nicaean Creed which was later shortened into the Apostles’ Creed which most of you know if you grew up Catholic, or Methodist, or Episcopal, or Presbyterian. It distilled the profound and life changing experience of faith into a paragraph long statement of beliefs.
Again, if I may beg your indulgence for another few minutes: the text of the Apostle’s Creed is this:
I believe in God,
the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.
Amen.
This paragraph is recited in churches all over the world as a succinct statement of what the Christian religion is. Please notice that it contains not one word of what Jesus taught. Nothing about loving your enemies, forgiving those who have offended you, praying for those who have persecuted you. There is nothing in the Apostles’ Creed about love, about compassion, just stuff about what you are supposed to believe, most of which is clearly not even true. This, I submit, is the work of theologians. Jesus taught a message of radical compassion. If he taught a religion, it was a religion of love but a few hundred years later, the church, in conjunction with the government, turned the Christian religion into a set of beliefs that were supposed to ward off the flames of hell and get you into heaven. Total rubbish.
Jesus taught his followers to be good people, not self-serving religious hypocrites. Theologians took away all of the mystery by trying to explain everything and distill it down to a kind of divine transaction suggesting that if you can make yourself believe a series of totally absurd things that you can go to an imaginary heaven when you die. No thanks! I think we would all be better off if we just let the mystery be.
When I have taught courses in world religions, it was easy for me to teach each religion based on a list of beliefs until I came to the chapter on Christianity and then I realized that the author’s attempt at describing Christianity by listing beliefs didn’t even come close to describing the faith I had observed for years. Even when I was a Christian pastor, that list of beliefs in the Bible as the word of God, a final judgement, the divinity of Jesus…. I didn’t believe those things!
The textbook wanted to distill religion into beliefs when it would have been more helpful to ask, what do Buddhists and Hindus, Muslims and Jews, and Christians do. How does the mystery of your faith get lived out?
I will close with a personal observation. This is my wedding ring, at least this is how it looks in the Jewler’s shop in France where a spike in tariffs have kept it from being shipped but I’ll not say more about that today. It is inscribed with the most treasured and ancient of Sanskrit Buddhist mantras. It ways, “om, mani, padme, hum.” A mantra recited by Buddhists the world over. Literally translated, it says, “Hail to the jewel in the lotus.”
Now, you may reasonably wonder why anyone would recite a mantra that praises the bud of a water lily. Again, on the surface, it makes no sense at all. As with most mysteries, you have to allow yourself to go deeper than the surface meaning.
The lotus is a symbol of renewal, as the flower closes and submerges only to re-emerge the next day, over and over. It appears to grow without being rooted in the soil, having life in itself. This will be a stretch for westerners but the lotus is also associated with the wisdom and enlightenment of the Buddha.
The ancients believed that reciting this mantra helped to foster a spirit of compassion and to dispel evil thoughts. I don’t know if wearing a ring with this mantra will help me to recite it more often or if reciting it will really help to make me a better man, a better husband, a useful soul in my golden years but I hope so, at least I am willing to embrace the mystery and to just let it be.
I would be the last person to suggest that being spiritual means that you will just accept and believe any silly thing. I am deeply rooted in evidence-based faith but, every coin has two sides. Think, for sure, reason, use critical thinking skills, but do not abandon an appreciation for and a certain amazement in the face of mystery.
