Holy Mystery: Moving Beyond the God of Our Understanding
For years, I thought I knew exactly who God was – a divine judge who demanded perfection and kept track of transgressions. My religious community reinforced this image, giving me a God I could define, explain, and predict. A God who fit neatly into a theological box.
Until that God stopped making sense.
When Certainty Crumbles
"In the beginning God created man [sic] in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since," Voltaire observed. How true this became in my life. The more I studied theology and examined my experiences, the more I realized my concept of God was largely a projection – a divine figure created in the image of authority figures I knew, particularly my father.
When I left fundamentalism, I didn't just leave a religious community. I left a God I had known with absolute certainty. What remained was a terrifying void where that certainty had been.
What happens when the God you were certain of dissolves before your eyes? Where do you turn when the theological structures that once gave your life meaning begin to crumble?
Entering the Cloud of Unknowing
In medieval mystical tradition, there is a beautiful text called "The Cloud of Unknowing," which suggests that God cannot be grasped by rational thought but only experienced through love. The anonymous author advises entering a "cloud of forgetting" where we let go of our preconceptions, and a "cloud of unknowing" where we encounter the divine mystery directly.
This became my unexpected path forward – not more certainty, but a willingness to enter mystery.
Sanctus Mysterium.
I have spent years trying to figure out
a way to You.
Engaging my mind;
searching for answers.
But it turns out I won’t find You
with my intellect.
Only love opens the door to You
I began to explore different ways of understanding the divine. In Jewish mysticism, known as Kabbalah, God is referred to as Ein Sof – the infinite, that which has no boundaries or limits. In quantum physics, consciousness itself may precede material reality. In feminist theology, God is not a distant ruler but the very ground of being that underlies creation.
I discovered that embracing mystery didn't mean abandoning faith – it meant deepening it.
From God to Holy Mystery
Today, I use the term "Holy Mystery" rather than God. This isn't mere semantics, but a profound shift in how I relate to the divine. This term acknowledges that whatever the ultimate reality is, it transcends our full comprehension while remaining intimately present.
Holy Mystery is not a being removed from creation but the very source of being itself. Not a cosmic ruler issuing commands from afar, but the ground of all existence in which "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).
This shift has transformed my spiritual practice from striving to please an external deity to opening myself to the mystery that already permeates all things – including myself.
Learning to Live with Questions
Embracing mystery doesn't mean giving up on understanding altogether. Rather, it means holding our understanding lightly, with open hands instead of clenched fists. It means recognizing that our concepts of the divine are always partial, always limited, always evolving.
As poet Rainer Maria Rilke beautifully advised: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now."
I've discovered that living the questions opens space for a different kind of knowing – not the knowing of facts and definitions, but the knowing of relationship and experience. Not the certainty that closes possibilities, but the faith that opens them.
Practices for Embracing Mystery
If you find yourself in a place where the God you once knew with certainty has become questionable, consider these practices that have helped me embrace mystery:
Create space for silence – Mystery rarely speaks in the language of certainty but often whispers in the silence between thoughts.
Welcome doubt as a teacher – Your questions are not enemies of faith but doorways to deeper understanding.
Pay attention to your body – Divine wisdom often speaks through physical knowing before intellectual understanding.
Explore diverse traditions – Other faith perspectives can offer fresh language and practices for experiencing the ineffable.
Embrace metaphor – All language about the divine is inherently metaphorical; play with different images and see what resonates.
The beauty of embracing mystery is that it doesn't require you to abandon your spiritual longing – only to hold it in a more spacious container. One that has room for questions, doubts, and new understanding.
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware”
-Martin Buber
Yet somehow, in the embrace of that very unknowing, we find ourselves held.
How has your understanding of God or the divine evolved over time? What metaphors or images most resonate with your experience of Holy Mystery? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
For more exploration of embracing mystery in your spiritual journey, my card deck "Musings on Grace" offers daily reflections and practices that invite us into this sacred not-knowing.