The Glory of Mysteries, Part 1

“Where is the poetry section?” I asked the bookstore owner, who stood behind the counter. I wouldn’t say I’ve been a big follower of poets. But I’ve grown interested in the odd and stunningly articulate Emily Dickinson. I had visited her historic house just days before, while visiting in New England. And here I was in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a Massachusetts town given notoriety by a (somewhat depressing) movie of the same name, staying with my son and his family. And of course, I was drawn to the bookstore there--the cleverly named Manchester-by-the-Book.

Pointed in the right direction, I found a biography of Dickinson, as I hoped I might. When I came back to make my purchase, an elderly, distinguished lady--obviously a regular used to chatting with the proprietor and customers--asked me what I was buying. When I held up my purchase, she lit up and said, “Oh, I just love her poetry!”

I was intrigued, given my new-found interest in Dickinson. “So,” I said, “what do you like about her poems?” She hesitated a bit; I could see her mental gears rolling. Filling the awkward quiet, I said something about the striking images of Dickinson’s poetry.

Yes to that, she agreed. The owner chimed in about how he found her poems, short though they were, full of surprise. The woman, the whole time pensive, finally added, “I don’t understand all of it, though!”

I assured her that I don’t, either. But how even so, a poem can still have an impact, even when all of the meaning isn’t evident. And, I said, the reading I was doing was helping me understand Dickinson’s poems.

Then she said something I’ll never forget. “Every person’s heart and mind is such a mystery.”

The word mystery seems eminently true of Dickinson. Scholars puzzle over her life, in part because she was legendary for her reticence. Her studied secrecy and even evasiveness in the presence of curious inquirers leave lots of questions. Letters she sent far and wide to friends give clues about her inner life, as does her poetry itself: reams of observations, convictions, doubts. She certainly had a drive to capture her reflections, sitting at a desk the size of chess board in her upstairs corner bedroom.

“My little Force explodes,” she wrote her future editor and clumsy mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson. This was 1862, when she was firing off some 300 poems a year, some of them jotted on scraps of used envelops, unfolded and spread out for her penciled astonishments.

But why did she withdraw from much social contact in the last years of her life? Was she burned by unrequited love? And I wonder about her impatience with the Christianity around her—was she a pagan (which she herself sometimes seems to imply) or simply someone who turned a cool eye to excesses in piety?

Just that morning before my bookstore foray I had been writing about mystery in relation to our longing--sometimes aching--to understand God. And what I had been writing seems especially apt as I think about a deeper meaning to the word mystery. The word in this deeper sense points not so much things we don’t know but could know with more effort—like how an iPhone receives data or how the craggy depths of the Grand Canyon were formed. Those are less mysteries; rather things that could be understood with study. And the word mystery in the sense I’m working on means more than yet another way in which we use the word, as in the Cadfael Chronicles I love reading or the episodes of TV detectives Monk or Columbo. In that sense of the word mystery, we simply lack access to bits of knowledge hidden to us, something needing to be pieced together or figured out, such that by story’s end, a damning clue finally yields the resolution. Probing makes clear what happened, and why, and who.

I like better, however, how Steven Guthrie speaks of mystery, how it belongs not in the category of philosophy or physics (or a bookstore genre), but rather in the realm of relationship. “It is persons who remain always beyond what we can say about them,” he writes. We speak of knowing persons, and by that we mean we understand aspects of who they are or how they might act or ways they disappointed us. For, Guthrie writes, “it is persons who are most truly always beyond our knowing, who always remain, to some degree, mysterious.” Persons are those to whom we speak day by day, in casual, off-handed, sometimes distracted conversation. And yet, when we pause to notice, it is persons who are mysteries more sublime than anything in our world.

I think of the mystery of my wife’s face. A face that has changed over the years, as has mine, with the signs of maturing, but a face that I know better than any other, and yet whose warmth I can never fully fathom. I guess any person’s face, studied enough, reveals (or hides) all kinds of hidden depths.

So if mystery belongs most fully in the realm of the personal, what about my experience of God, what I had been writing about just that morning? Whatever I come to know of God doesn’t satisfy, not completely, for what I glimpse only makes me curious to find more. I am coming to see that God is such a mystery we never can fully perceive. But that doesn’t lead me away; rather, it often draws me deeper.

As it turns out, when it comes to Dickinson’s struggles with faith, I think I detect in her poems and letters a core of belief and longing. How else would she ask, in a poem,

Infinitude—Had’st Thou no Face

That I might look on Thee?

Her not claiming to have all the answers makes me think that she had a feel for this deeper meaning of mystery. Some mysteries fire your curiosity and lead you to greater, and yet always elusive, encounters.