Faith minus vulnerability and mystery equals extremism. If you’ve got all the answers, then don’t call what you do ‚faith.‘
Brene Brown
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
Max Planck
We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.
Paulo Coelho
While reading an inspirational text this week, the word `mystery´ jumped off the page, catching my attention in a rather strange way.
I was suddenly transported back to my earliest years of school where the term so often cropped up. The mystery of the Creation Myth, the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and the mystery of the miracles worked by Jesus among the poor and downtrodden. These all caught the imagination of the sensitive young boy who has now had over five decades of vibrant life experience since those days of innocence at Scoil Ida, our primary school, run by nuns, in the quiet riverside suburb of Corbally, on the edge of Limerick City in my native Ireland.
It was lovely to have so much mystery threaded through the life of thought in those days. I equated it with opportunity, saw it as something benign and exciting which could and would enrich anything with which it came into contact.
Then there was the experience of mystery, especially in the realm of nature. The hatching of a butterfly from its pupae at this time of year, the slow transformation of tadpoles, losing their tails and gaining the legs of young frogs, the musical flow of a river as interpreted and conveyed to me by my father, a man very attuned to the effervescence of nature. These, and more, caught my attention and even enchanted me. I felt part of the mystery itself.
Then came the fall from innocence. It is difficult to know when exactly that happened, but by the age of nine or ten there was a shift towards disassembling ideas and phenomena in order to `get to the bottom of them´, to understand them and to demonstrate to parents and teachers, now Jesuit priests, that we had indeed understood.
My talents in this realm, coupled with my thirst for recognition from and connection with the adults around me, especially my father, drew me more and more away from the mysterious and increasingly into the analytical. The analytical realm felt, on the one hand, more clear and safe and, on the other, less soft and warm. It was a trade off that seemingly had to be made as the teenage years unfolded and the dark underbelly of cruel human existence manifested more and more.
Ireland was afflicted by a bloody civil war, a reverberation of centuries of oppression, cruelty, and the resulting hatred, which had so long characterised life on our beautiful, yet economically poor island. First episodes of romantic love entered the stage at around fourteen, bring with them insecurity, confusion and the pain of hearts breaking. Then, my dad fell suddenly ill and had passed away within one year, cut down in his late youth at the age of fifty-one.
I turned to intoxication to soften the hard edges of my experiences. It worked very well at first. When I was out drinking or passing around a joint with my buddies, the burdens of awkwardness, grief, and resentment slipped briefly away, and I felt a sense of belonging. This is the slippery slope that many young people experience in mid teens. The trickery of addiction is that this false sense of belonging is achieved at the price of ever-increasing isolation. I became a loner in the crowd, pretending to be a part of proceedings and, in reality, drifting further and further away, to being apart from.
In this energy field, life is a battlefield, a never-ending struggle to justify my existence, to prove my worth. The further down this path I went, the less worthy I felt, and the more was the need to make the impression that I was on top of things, which included knowing everything. As without, so within. The capacity for mystery dried up, for there was no longer a place for it behind the thick walls I had erected around myself. As Brene Brown points out, there can be no happiness without vulnerability or mystery. I became exceedingly unhappy, while still functioning well in our addictive society, until the inevitable crash.
This happened at the age of forty-two. Within a single year my house of cards had collapsed; my marriage had failed, my children were not living under my roof, my job was gone, my friends scattered, and a deep depression overcame me, which I later recognised to be the result of having burned out.
In the midst of this, mystery unexpectedly showed up. I had fallen in love and was getting to know the woman who was later to be my life partner for several years. We sat chatting in her car on one of those seemingly endless evenings of that very warm balmy summer of 2003. After giving her the rosy version of my life habits, `a drink each evening and a smoke now and then´, – no mention of the hundreds of blackouts over a period of more than twenty years – she turned to me and said simply: `You don’t need that anymore Patrick.´ This message penetrated mydefences and resonated with my soul as nothing ever had.
That was the beginning of a transformation in my life. I have been on a daily road of recovery, with many ups and downs since then. It has been a life without drugs of any kind, a crash course in growing up for an emotional sixteen-year-old in a forty-two-year-old mind and body. Mystery re-entered the stage when I conceded to my innermost self that I was lost, in dire danger of losing my life, and knew very little about the reality of existence.
Embracing the unknown, the unseen, as part of the process of recovery has been as important as surrendering my stance of knowing it all, which got me into so much trouble in the first place. Now, the newly formed abilities to follow instructions, to remove the trash from my thinking, and to have faith that the Universe will guide and protect me, open me up once again to the Great Mystery of life. The flow of the early years has returned.
The one great mystery of why I am here is one which is, in principle, solved; it is to carry the message of recovery, however the need is manifested, to those who are still lost and confused, as I once was. The practice unfolds mysteriously each day, one day at a time, as long as the connection to the Source remains vibrant.
