Radical Grace
January – March 2007

Mystery and Multiplicity

by Richard Rohr, OFM

I believe in Mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don’t think so. My very belief and experience of a loving and endlessly creative God has led me to trust in both.

I have had the good fortune of teaching and preaching in much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world. This life journey has led me to love mystery—and to not need to change or make it un-mysterious. Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity—“Hints and guesses” as T.S. Eliot would say. This has put me at odds with many other believers that I know, who seem to have a penchant for certitude, order, and explanations for everything.

I often spend the time of Lent in a hermitage, where I live alone and apart for the whole 40 days. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I find myself surrendering to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and in almost everything else, including God. Paradoxes do not scare me anymore.

When I was young, I could not tolerate such ambiguity. My very education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations. I wanted to know; I often did know, or at least I thought I did. Now at age 63, it is all quite different. I have counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, watched too many nature programs, faced my own dilemmas too many times, and been loved gratuitously after too many failures, to believe that this is a quid pro quo universe.

Whenever I think there is a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveals an exception. Whenever I want to say “only” or “always,” there is invariably someone or some-thing that proves me wrong. I only have to wait, and listen.

Strangely, it is my scientist friends who come up with things like “principles of uncertainty,” dark holes, and a willingness to live inside of hypotheses and theories—until reality reveals itself more fully. It is we religious folk who insist on answers that are always true. We religious folk love closure, resolution, and clarity, while daring to think that we are people of “faith”! How strange that the very word “faith” has come to mean its exact opposite.

People who have really met the Holy are always humble. I can state that categorically. People who don’t know, usually pretend that they do. People who have had any genuine spiritual experience, always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery, in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love which is incomprehensible to the mind. It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is—quite sadly—absent in much of our religious conversation today. My belief and comfort is in the depths of Mystery, which should be the very task of religion. He who knows about depths knows about God, and she who knows about God knows about depths.

Adapted from a recording by Fr. Richard Rohr for This I Believe, National Public Radio (NPR), December 2006. ©2006 Richard Rohr. Reprinted by arrangement with This I Believe, Inc. To read and hear other essays, and to submit your own, visit www.thisibelieve.org.

Fr. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan of the New Mexico province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, NM.

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