Mystery

www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/ark-covenant-200712.html

Recently, my dad sent me the following article about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and their claim that they are the keepers of the Ark of the Covenant.

For me, it stirred up thoughts and feelings about the role of faith and mystery in today's church.

Growing up in the US, Christianity (and Catholicism especially) seems so contemporary, normal, and, well, safe ... almost like the mystery has been shaken and squeezed out of it. You go to church, remain solemn and mostly silent, say your prayers (with heads bowed and hands clasped in front of you) to the benevolent God to "put your time in" on Sunday morning and spend very little time the rest of the week thinking about your faith. This attitude, as far as I can tell, stems from belief in the "Scale Theory" of religion, but more on that later.

At least, this is how it was for me -- I understand that some people, my incomparable Grandma Pesek among them, find a close connection with the heavenly through Catholic rituals --beautiful hymns that echo the angels, rituals handed down for generations, but for me, they were obstacles in my path to creating a relationship with a personal God.

I started reading through the whole Bible earlier this year and was really struck by a couple things -- first, that they sacrificed animals in the Old Testament, a fact that I'm sure I was aware of, but didn't really hit home. It was a little like reading in the news about terrorist attacks in Asia or civil wars in small Carribean nations -- doesn't quite hit you until you see it first hand.

I visited the Golconda Fort here in Hyderabad about a year ago. The fort was built as a Fortress for the Nizam (Muslim leader of India from the 14th and 15th centuries) but has since been overtaken by the Hindus as a place for prayer and sacrifice. Dozens, maybe even hundreds of chickens in various states of sacrifice were on display all over the fort compound, with solemn prayers to the Hindu gods spoken in reverence and piety. For someone who has grown up in the sheltered cove of suburban and rural American, it was at once one of the most revolting and amazing things I've seen in India, and certainly something that had no parallel in my life before that.

It was shortly after that that I read about sacrifice in the Old Testament -- God goes into almost morbid detail about the nature and substance of the sacrifices. The rift in my mind between the strange and exotic rituals of the Hindus at Golconda Fort and the somber Sunday Catholic services of my youth closed in an instant and I began to first understand, in awe, the power of Christ's work on the cross. The crucifixion and resurrection, which had previously been mixed with thoughts of Easter time chocolate bunnies and marshmallow chicks, suddenly became the most humbling and ultimately life changing event that has ever happened on the face of the planet.

It is this mystery that is the lifeblood of faith. Ultimately, in the articled I've linked above, the author considers entering the holy of holies to see for himself whether the ark in question is really the Ark of the Old Testament but is stopped by a healthy fear of the powers of God. It is this same mystery that creates a healthy fear in those of us who believe in the power of a living God.

Of course, for me, everything goes back to Ecclesiastes 3 :)

The eternal question:
"What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men."

And the answer, in three parts. One:
"He has made everything beautiful in its time." -- God loves us too much to give us lives that are happy and pain-free but ultimately create self-centered people who always get what they want -- he weaves in mourning, weeping, death, war, and even hatred into the fabric of our lives to give us depth and strength to make us his beautiful creations.

Two:
"He has also set eternity in the hearts of men;" -- We are made not for this world, but for the next.

Three:
"yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." -- Ah, the mystery that creates the faith that pleases God.