I was raised in the Catholic faith. And honestly, even with a Catholic education, I didn’t spend much time considering what I believed. That changed when I went to college.

My first roommate was also Catholic but didn’t seem to follow some of its doctrines, particularly the prohibition of sex before marriage. His behavior confused me. My next roommate had also been raised Catholic but had become a born-again Christian and attempted to convert me. When he challenged my beliefs, I couldn’t answer why I believed them.

Thus began a time of faith exploration.

During that time, one thing that always annoyed me in books and homilies was the use of the word ‘mystery’ as part of their explanation, thus ending the conversation. Since I was studying engineering, my mind was being trained to think logically. Calling something a mystery felt like a ‘lame’ copout used by someone who didn’t have the complete answer.

Later, I studied theology in the seminary and had the opportunity to dig more deeply into Catholic beliefs and their origins. In the process, I discovered that the interpretations of every theologian or scriptural scholar didn’t always match. It freaked my engineering brain out until I realized each based their understanding on their experience and knowledge. That realization freed me to explore my beliefs from the perspective of whether they made sense to me and my experience.

For the next forty years, I continued my exploration through workshops, books, and podcasts. One thing remained important to me: everything had to fit together. In fact, it was frustrating when they didn’t. But a few months ago, I had a major aha moment.

As remarkable as the human brain is, it’s still part of a physical world and thus limited by what it can conceive as possible. Now some of you know that I love SciFi and fantasy. You would think it would enable my mind to go further. It might, in some ways, but beneath that it is still constrained by what is believable.

And suddenly, I found myself back where I started.

Mystery. Perhaps there really are things my mind cannot imagine or comprehend.

Now, that doesn’t stop my questioning. In fact, it opens that process up to allow things not to make sense and allowing my understandings to change and expand as the unexpected unfolds.

So maybe those scriptural scholars and homilists weren’t so lame after all. Well, some of them still were.

What about you? How do you hold the idea of mystery? Do you think minds are limited because they are contained within a physical existence? Can something you don’t understand still be true?

After all, we never know what’s waiting around the corner.

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