[Reflection on Mysteries of Faith by Mark McIntosh, Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Chicago and associate professor of systematic theology and spirituality at Loyola University. The book is part of The New CHURCH'S TEACHING SERIES (Chicago: Cowley Publications, 2000.]"We do theology not to be clever or well - informed," writes professor and priest Mark McIntosh, "but in order to be drawn into God's own life," a process that McIntosh compares to reading a novel. Drawn into a good novel, we get a "lift," a broadening of horizons, even when we return to our "daily round" (5-6). Theology should do that, he says, keeping us aware of resonances between the daily round and the story of God. In the first two chapters that I've read, McIntosh focuses on those moments of resonance that he calls "mystery."
To explain "mystery," McIntosh tells of his visit to Grand Canyon. It "vanished: when I stepped back just a few feet from the edge... I was completely unaware that this huge reality was right before me." That image helps him to make his point that theology "is walking up to the edge and noticing the mystery before you" (1). Many moments in our lives have this kind of "mystery" or depth to them when we're caught up short. Feeling hurt, or ecstatic, or compassionate, is a starting place; the next step is to find meaning in such moments from context, the intersection of our life experience with others' stories. Knowing God's story from Creation to Revelation, we can find our place in that. Once we understand that others are equally part of that story, we have to recognize, as C. S. Lewis writes, "There are no ordinary people" (9).
In McIntosh's terms, God initiates a conversation through those moments; we've "heard" God when we connect them to Scriptural stories; we converse with God through prayer. These steps or "moments" can be sequential, or a recursive process. Paying attention to these moments, connecting them to stories, and relating to God in prayer: to make these the habit of our lives, he says, is the purpose of theology. Without it, life becomes like TV talk shows, just a stream of "banal hysteria" in nine - minute segments (14).
McIntosh uses a Christmas memory to explain other aspects of "mystery." McIntosh remembers coming home from midnight mass with his parents and three siblings. Being the youngest, he was made to wait in new - fallen snow outside his family's picture window while he watched a procession of gifts being stacked by his parents and older siblings.
What entranced me so on that snowy night long ago was not the glimpse of presents, although that was part of it. A deeper kind of marvel tantalized me as I watched my family moving through the house. It seemed that the happiness I could see on their faces and the bounty they carried in their arms were signs of all the love and joy I longed for in our life together. For a moment, though I stood outside peer in, I had been granted a vision of the secret heart and soul of our family. (25)Like the Grand Canyon anecdote, this is a deep moment, a "mystery," one that he says we recreate in the Episcopal church:
An empty room slowly fills as people trickle in, and soon it becomes a place of prayer filled with all the longing, hope, and pregnant quiet that prayer brings with it. Then a designated band moves up the aisle and into that mysterious space the altar gathers round itself. Later, another group with lights and sacred book comes back down into the people's midst, speaking a Word too intimate to be uttered from far away. Later still the whole place breaks into movement as the flow of communion draws all into its pattern of life poured out, given freely away.Looking in that window, he also suggests, is the way we "see" the Trinity, longing to be part of it (29). He writes later that the Spirit is the conversation between Father and Son (no hierarchy involved, here), and that we are what they're talking about. The trinity isn't a patch up effort after mankind failed to live up to expectations, but the essential communal nature of God(31).
McIntosh's theology connects at many points to what we do in Education for Ministry (EfM), the program that assigned his book. Each year, we tell our life stories to each other, forced to rethink our stories from a particular angle; McIntosh's emphasis is on seeing God's work in our lives, in the long run. Each week, we practice theological reflection, often starting from a "moment of mystery" that one of us has experienced, and we connect those (1) to our own experiences and (2) to novels and movies and (3) to Scripture. Then, there's this description of a "Jacob" moment that we may have experienced, feeling that we are in the presence of God when we see, perhaps, "the sun set over a northern lake with the sky so richly purple and red you could hardly breathe..." (40). Isn't that the watercolor, made recently by co - mentor of our EfM group, Susan Rouse?
Finally, he stresses that we relate to stories, and that faith is a relationship, not a bunch of teachings. Prayer, he says, isn't our effort, but, as Paul writes, the spirit in us (46). "The work of prayer is the activity of God the Holy Spirit freeing us from the grasping, frightened, self - important bundles of instincts we have been taught to think of as our true selves in order to discover the deep, strong, and passionate person we are created to become in Christ (47)."
Theology can't remain in the abstract, but must be related in our living (11).
I've responded to other chapters in other blogposts:
- (01/09/2019)"Not the Moral, but the Story" about chapters 1 and 2.
- (01/26/2019)"How Episcopalians Believe" considers chapter 4, along with other sources
- (01/30/2019)"Jesus Saves - but how?" about chapter 6
- (02/12/2019) "Theologian Mark McIntosh Sees Drama in Cosmos" about chapter 7.
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