Quotes About Mystery

As the psychologist Victor Frankl once pointed out, true knowledge is always knowledge plus – that is, knowledge that understands that it is always penetrated by unknowing. The result is that God is not defined as the greatest conceivable being or as that which is greater than conception, but rather, as Anselm argued, God is the one who is conceived as inconceivable.

approaching the truth affirmed by Christianity as some abstract, objective assertion to be tested, simply demonstrates that the questioner is approaching this query as a problem to be pondered, dissected, and solved, rather than a mystery to inhabit and be transformed by.

What we think and say about God is still both important and unavoidable, for our words help us come to terms with the hallowed mystery and respond to it. However, this approach diligently maintains a conceptual distance between ourselves and God, one which approaches the divine mystery as something to be transformed by rather than solved.

Christianity is not brain surgery or rocket science, it is not quantum mechanics or nuclear physics; it is both infinitely easier and more difficult than all of these. The fragile flame of faith is fanned into life so simply: all we need do is sit still for a few moments, embrace the silence that engulfs us, and invite that flame to burn bright within us.

But for now it is simply worth noting that the multitude of descriptions detailing the nature of God, combined with the various claims that God cannot be contained by any description, presents the reader with the reality that the text affirms God as beyond all our understandings of God. In other words, the God who grasps us is never grasped (in text, thinking, or experience).

We are like an infant in the arms of God, unable to grasp but being transformed by the grasp.

The silence that is part of all God-talk is not the silence of banality, indifference or ignorance but one that stands in awe of God. This does not necessitate an absolute 'silencing', whereby we give up speaking of God, but rather involves a recognition that our language concerning the divine remains silent in its speech.

As Marion writes, 'The silence suitable to God requires knowing how to remain silent, not out of agnosticism (the polite surname of impossible atheism) or out of humiliation, but simply out of respect.'50 Or as Gregory Palamas writes, '[The] super-essential nature of God is not a subject for speech or thought or even contemplation, for it is far removed from all that exists … [it is] incomprehensible and ineffable to all for ever.

In the same way that the sun blinds the one who looks directly at its light, so God's incoming blinds our intellect. In this way the God who is testified to in the Judeo-Christian tradition saturates our understanding with a blinding presence.

God remains transcendent amidst immanence precisely because God remains concealed amidst revelation. In this reading, Christ, as the image of the invisible God, both reveals and conceals God: rendering God known while simultaneously maintaining divine mystery. Here the God testified to in Christianity is affirmed as an un/ known God.

As we have seen, we ought to affirm our view of God while at the same time realizing that that view is inadequate.

God is not a theoretical problem to somehow resolve but rather a mystery to be participated in. This perspective is evidenced in the Bible itself when we note that the term 'knowing' in the Hebrew tradition (in contrast to the Greek tradition) is about engaging in an intimate encounter rather than describing some objective fact: religious truth is thus that which transforms reality rather than that which describes it.

If all the heavens with all their stars exploded in this valley, they would be but a leaf fluttering in the wind. Here a tiny fish is mightier than a whale and nobody can say why.

God has revealed himself to us in his Son, Scripture, creation, and other ways, but so much of who he is remains incomprehensible.

In this distinctive world, elusive quantities flash at the edge of conventional logic.

Ventilation is the profound secret of existence.

Sie war unruhig, und doch schienen wir - ohne mehr voneinander zu wissen als unsere Namen - über Nacht vertrauter miteinander geworden zu sein.

I have been sometimes way too attracted by my own villains because in a way they seem to hold the secret to the heart of the narrative.

To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe. A piece of the universe? A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside of him is also inside of him.

The face was no longer bone, but animal - the face of a white wolf. "I forbid you nothing. Nothing, " uttered the awful face. "You may go anywhere - you may open any door. But, little bird, remember that you must be prepared to accept whatever you find." The long jaws spread in a smile filled with teeth.

Man near entrance is shot in the head at close range from behind. The other two, multiple stab wounds, genitals severed, other injuries. Also head and pubic hair ignited, shot, muzzle in mouth. Three bullets recovered, 45 calibre." Villani: "So you can't rule out an accident?

lus mór na coille.

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. —MARK TWAIN

Black holes are the ultimate garbage can.