Mystery is not for understanding. It is for adoration and living. Some things are too beautiful to understand. Lovers of truth know the ineffable is glorious, is beautiful. They feel its majesty. Truth is their lover. Mystery leads to praise, to silence. The mind prostrates before what it cannot know. No one can understand truth, but we can love it - that is enough... love.
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January 2021 -
What is essential is that we do not seek to solve the mysteries we face, often contradictory to the mind, in an answer that is our attempt to explain and, so, tame the wildness of truth. ... For truth is not meant to invite us to resolve the ineffable ...; truth urges us to invite, experience, and live it.
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In January 2016, I had one of those koan moments. During Sunday morning worship, words started repeating in silence: "Sacrifice Thy Love, to Thy Love." I thought, "That doesn't make sense." I yielded to the paradoxical mantra, while it continued repeating.
After the Service, I got in my vehicle to leave, the words still repeating. Through the week, they returned. I reflected on them but mostly was subtly curious and appreciative of the beauty and felt-sense of the koan prayer, "Sacrifice Thy Love, to Thy Love."
It is over seven years since that Sunday. What do I now think the paradoxical mantra meant... means?
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Some truths we live with - that is all we can do. Occasionally, a subtle revelation does not need our understanding. It stands alone, for good or temporarily, among the many other I-don't-knows.
Moving closer to Grace, we grow in understanding but understand less. We are more content to hold in reverence what has been shown to us without comprehending it conceptually. Some things are too precious for the mind to fathom.
I have no interest in exploring some meaning in the koanic disclosure. I sense joyful reverence in not trying to attach a meaning to it - fitting it in the remains of the past. Revelation is always fresh; it lives, not fading with time, for it is not of time.
*Use of photography is allowed accompanied by credit given to Brian K. Wilcox and title and place of photograph.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
