Lest we imagine that the search for mystery, the sacred, is an adult activity, I would like to suggest that it begins in childhood: A tiny baby who recognizes its mother’s face and smiles is responding mystery. When a child grabs for a colored toy in the crib, it is responding to mystery.

As children grow up, of course they begin to become aware of more abstract forms of mystery and naturally ask questions about their meaning.

A story from my own childhood history will serve as an example: Our church of St. Henry was a stately faux-Gothic structure with a high ceiling and a long nave. In the apse at the end of the nave the architect had designed a splendid stained glass window with a huge eye in the very center.

I can remember on one occasion, before the beginning of Mass, asking my mother: “Hey ma, what’s that big eye doing up there?” She said something to the effect: “That’s the eye of God and God is looking at you, so you’d better keep quiet or something will happen to you.” End of conversation (sort of). But I continued to wonder about that eye or perhaps better about the beautiful range of colors that poured out from the middle of the eye. Of course, as a six-year-old, I still had no deeper theological sense of God, but the fascination with the colors gave me a hint that beauty had something to do with God.

Perhaps, given all that, there is something deep in our psyche that tells us that we have not yet explained everything around us. Perhaps we come to realize that we are merely created beings and that a power greater than ourselves keeps us in being.

That in itself seems to speak to our dependence on the Sacred, on God. Having no simple answers to the Sacred, we wonder, we contemplate, we think, we reflect.

But throughout our life we also continue to search for clearer, more convincing answers, for a clarity that will calm our human quest and bring not final answers but a sense that we are a bit closer to what we imagine God to be.

Since the earliest days of human existence, we creatures have been fascinated by the possibility of the Other. All religions have their gods to whom they lift their eyes and offer their prayers.

From the earliest days of our own Christian faith, theologians and other learned individuals have tried to give some substance to our human faith quest. Our sources are always the sacred Scriptures which speak of God creator, of the Divine Son, Redeemer and of the Holy Spirit, wisdom and consoler. These are human words, of course, which attempt to give us a deeper understanding of all that is sacred and divine, the Holy Trinity.

But they are still words, after all, human designations. We know that God the Father is always greater, more all-encompassing than the word father. We know that the Son is always more than our human word for son. The Holy Spirit is always beyond our feeble words that can speak only of wind and fire.

In the end we admit that we are “at a loss for words.” Anything we say, any word we choose, will never compare with the reality of the Infinite One.

But if words are often inadequate to speak of God, we never tire of seeking out other sources to fulfill our eternal quest for what is sacred to us: We gaze quietly at some great piece of art and are reduced to silence. We listen to the works of Mozart or Beethoven and are overwhelmed by the sound and complexity. We listen (on a CD) to the Gregorian chant done so well by the monks at the Grand Chartreuse in France or the monks at San Domingo de Silos in Spain or, closer to home, to the monks at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky. Or perhaps purely on our own initiative, we stop at a church on our way home from work and there we simply sit and let the sense of the Sacred soak into our being.

All these works of art and other human devices, of course, are not God, but each in their own way tries to speak of the God who is beyond word or art. The rest is left up to our own imagination; we call it contemplation.

In the end, perhaps we should say that each of us is left to our own devices, our personal gifts and talents. I would imagine that even astronomers and astrophysicists with their great insights must occasionally say to themselves, “we have only scratched the surface of the source of all this.”

One might even come to the point where we could say that the God who exists from all eternity is also the God we have “created” for ourselves, out of our own rich gifts of insight and imagination. In that sense each of us must speak for him or herself when we speak of and to our God.

My hunch is that each of our efforts to speak to our God, if honestly made, reaches the heavens, the very throne of the Sacred One, and we are left with the deep consolation that, as St. Augustine once wrote, ”Our hearts are created for you, O God, and restless are they until they rest in you.”
The scriptures: Exodus 34: 4b-6, 8-9; 2 Corinthians 13: 11-13; John 3: 16-18