Seeker Into the Mystery

There is a line in the book, The Seeker and the Monk, by Sophfronia Scott which jumped out at me.  Her book is a wonderfully fabricated dialogue with the 20th century monk, Thomas Merton.  Scott never met Merton; she is much too young.  He died in 1968.  In fact, she never heard of him until 2011, which one of her mentors quoted a line from Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.  It turns out, that is one of my favorite lines from Merton.  To put it briefly, Scott began to pursue Merton by reading voraciously all seven journals and much more.  But it is also true, that Merton began to pursue her.  And so, the result is her book.

Very early in her book, Scott offers the stark comparison of her life with Merton’s life.  Rightly she tells us Merton is a “white Catholic monk who lived most of his life in a monastery in Kentucky and died over fifty years ago.” (2). Her life contrasts significantly with hers.  She shares, “I’m a Black woman, not Catholic but Episcopalian, with Baptist notes from my childhood.  We have nothing in common other than Ivy League educations (mine from Harvard, his from Columbia) and a searching nature when it comes to faith.”  I knew a great deal about Merton, although I never met him either.  But I knew nothing about Sophfronia Scott until 2021.  I am glad to know both of them.

I appreciated the end of the last sentence quoted: they both had a searching nature about things of faith.  Some folks do, too, but too many never think about their faith.  Or they simply ditch their childhood faith and never look back.  This ending from this last sentence sets us up to focus on the sentence I so much appreciated.  Scott observes, “I am a seeker into the mystery of what tethers my life to the divine, and I long to see the notes of grace scattered in the crevices of experience, to learn how to read those messages, continually saying, “I love you anyway.’”

I am compelled to join Scott in seeking.  In one sense she knows exactly where to seek: into the mystery.  In another sense, she knows nothing.  My take on mystery holds that mystery can be known, but not solved.  It is not like a difficult problem which has some kind of sophisticated solution.  But it can be known.  Secondly, it is not just mystery.  For Scott mystery has a focus---a direction.  She seeks in the mystery of what tethers her life to the divine.

The verb, tether, is an interesting choice for Scott.  A tether is a rope or something similar which keeps something attached.  For example, I can see images of an astronaut in the middle of a spacewalk.  Yet, there is some kind of tether which keeps the astronaut connected to the spaceship.  Using this image, we can understand a tether allows a degree of freedom, while assuring the stability of connection.  This helps me understand Scott’s basic faith assumption.  Human beings are tethered to the divine.  

We are astronauts on a space walk through our lives.  We have incredible freedom to do as we want and go where we want.  In fact, we become so hung up on our freedom, we fail to recognize we are also tethered.  We don’t realize---or appreciate---that our freedom is limited.  We cannot go flying off to our demise.  We can get hurt, but we can’t get lost!

Next Scott offers this inviting plea.  She confesses that she longs to see the notes of grace that are scattered in the crevices of experience.  Again, she assumes there are notes of grace.  I hope she is right.  I am confident she assumes all humans can find these notes of grace.  They are to be found in our experiences.  This grace may seem so ordinary that we miss them.  Who has not had some scrape and felt “lucky” to escape?  Was it luck, or just a note of grace?  I certainly don’t see grace everywhere and, I suspect, neither does Scott.  Winning a lottery is not a matter of grace, as I understand it.  Mathematically, someone is going to be lucky enough to win.

She does counsel me to pay more attention to my experiences.  And perhaps, she implies if we pay more attention to living intentionally in the mystery of the divine, we will see even more grace in our experiences going forward.  I would like to think so.  I am confident there is more grace than we ever know.  Scott wants to learn how to read those messages of grace and so do I.

Interestingly, she seems to know what those graceful messages are telling us.  They are continually telling us about love.  Intriguingly, she uses the adverb, continually.  Grace and the message of love is not sporadic---hit or miss.  It is continuous.  That is because of the divinity to which we are tethered.  Thank God for my rope!  A tether is continually hooking me to the mystery of the divine.

And it is always telling us there is love---that I am loved.  That is indeed good news.  We can even call it gospel.  Regardless of how I see myself or how others see me, that divine love is a gift---a grace.  It is there.  I am tethered to it.  I am convinced that it is true, even if you don’t know it---or maybe even try to deny it.

And it can be known, as any seeker into the mystery will realize.