Mystery Grows

“It doesn't do to look too hard into this mystery, which is as far from being simple as it is from being safe. We don't know enough about ourselves. I think it's better to know that you don't know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people are so lost.”

― James Baldwin, "If Beale Street Could Talk"

*******

Dear Kate,

I've just spent 20 minutes searching for today's quote.  I knew it is somewhere in the beginning of the book, but turned out it's page 45, for which I was thankful, all 45 of them, fresh as ever, thunderous truth.

Words we read and heard, conversations, they either shut us up to the selfsame illusions we want to preserve with our same selves understanding or open us up to a deeper reality of grace.  Grace is where mystery is, where everything we know we are meant to be becomes possible.

But everybody knows what they want, don't they? No mystery about that.  We want a vaccine, "light at the end of the tunnel," "back to normal."  What were you doing last November 25 anyway?  Looking forward to sky-opening conversations in all the upcoming Christmas parties?

The "sermon" I posted two days ago, I have an R-rated version of it, actually a few, all discarded.  In one I talked about our being demonized in a technocratic state.  In our "enlightened," disenchanted world, we don't see herd of two thousand pigs rushing down steep bank to drown themselves in a sea.  We are too busying rushing around to notice any of our own drownings.

I did preserve a paragraph I cut from my final draft:

"If you find your heart rises and sinks with the COVID numbers, Amazon price changes, your work performance score, or whatever totalizing framework that dictates who you are (which, incidentally, always speak to our greed and fear), be careful.  Greed and fear always sound reasonable, or they wouldn’t be so hard to resist.  And they always have a feature.  They will give us all the reasons to say No to life, and leave us with not much energy and creativity to say Yes to God."

Please say Yes.

Yours, Alex