Coming to Terms

This essay appears in Issue 24 of The Mockingbird, now available to order in our store.

By now most anyone can lay out the basics: the stage is set by a scene that defies explanation. Unnerved witnesses appeal to primitive superstition or tried-and-true tradition to make sense of what they’re seeing. An investigator arrives, assures the bystanders that there’s a rational explanation for this, and begins gathering bits of data, much of which is only discernable to the trained eye. More evidence emerges as the plot thickens, and the audience is cajoled into following this or that false lead. Suspense builds as we begin placing bets on which character will be revealed to be the culprit. Eventually the climax arrives when the investigator provides a careful, rational account of all that has taken place. The clues are woven together into a coherent narrative, the malicious instigator working in the shadows is dragged out into the light, and our brains receive an endorphin rush as the puzzle pieces fall into place. What appeared to be incomprehensible turns out to be quite logical, and perhaps even mundane — not something uncanny or supernatural, but something basic, something elementary, as Sherlock Holmes might have replied to his dear Watson.

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These narrative conventions emerged in the 19th century out of the confluence of two Western cultural revolutions, the first scientific, the second industrial. The Scientific Revolution brought about a sea change in how Westerners viewed mystery: unexplained phenomena were not to be regarded as portents of the supernatural, but simply riddles waiting to be solved by trained experts. As Alexander Pope celebrated in his epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” The optimism of the period resounds in this compact eulogy: The past could only be viewed as a dark age uled by fear-filled fables and the primitive superstition of Medieval Church tradition. Enlightened scientists like Newton would liberate humanity from such nonsense, tearing down these dimly lit, ramshackle temples of ignorance and replacing them with solid, light-filled structures of knowledge and learning.

Scientific advancements led to a transformation of the means of production, and with it, the rise of the machine and the possibility of large-scale manufacturing. The economic center shifted as a result from the rural farm to the urban factory, which caused a population boom in cities. This increased the need for more organized police forces, and with them, specialized investigators called “detectives.” The word detective combines the Latin verb tegere, “to cover,” with the prefix de-, which connotes reversal: A detective is someone who uncovers, someone skilled in lifting the heavy veil of obscuring mystery to reveal the plain truth hidden beneath.

Despite the now partial collapse of modernity’s confidence in rationality, by and large most Westerners remain completely hooked on detectives. Everywhere you look, professional uncoverers stand ready to offer consumable explanations for the mysteries of life. Highly trained physicians continue to function as our culture’s primary prophets of hope or doom. Parenting experts promote practices they insist will keep us from permanently screwing up our kids. Financial advisors predict personal wealth and prosperity if we follow their step-by-step advice. Pastors simplify, consultants clarify, and sociologists generalize, all of them promulgating their promises in a never-ending flood of podcasts and TED Talks and TikToks and self-help books.

We are awash in authoritative explainers. I’m usually one myself, truth be told. As a Bible professor at a small Christian liberal arts university and seminary, people turn to me all the time seeking answers to questions about God and the Bible and Christian life. Most of the time I’m able to respond with a few genuine insights to help them along the way, but in recent years I’ve experienced something that has crippled my capacity to take up my appointed explainer role with anything like an uncomplicated manner. These days my speech is frequently fogged with words like “maybe,” or “I wonder” — and increasingly, I find myself closing my eyes and admitting, “Honestly, friend, I have no idea at all.”

I remember when I thought an uncoverer who admitted ignorance had failed, especially if that expert explainer was also a person of faith. We aren’t agnostics, after all — Christian faith proclaims the good news of a God who is truly knowable. Still, after what I’ve been through, I’m far more inclined to recognize some confessions of ignorance as declarations of truth, and even broken words of praise. Those of you who have been fundamentally shattered by life know exactly what I’m talking about.

***

Eighteen years ago, just after my family moved back to the US from my Ph.D. studies in Scotland, and my infant son was still in a bassinet, and I was starting my new post as a professor, I began experiencing panic attacks. As far as I knew at the time, they were coming out of nowhere. I’d be following my daily routine, minding my own business as it were, when suddenly my breath would be knocked out of me like I’d been sucker-punched by an invisible assailant. My eyesight would dim into narrow tunnels. My feet and hands would go buzzy-numb. I’d find it hard to feel the floor, like I’d been thrown into unfathomably deep, icy water. My head would fill with blaring noise like someone was screaming in my ear.

At first, these attacks would dissipate almost as quickly as they came: for a few moments my whole body would become a fiery exposed nerve, and then my conscious mind would catch up and the world around me would slowly return to normal. But over time these sucker-punches grew into something far more pervasive and menacing. I’d cross a street and experience a flash image of a car running me over, and the airless panicked screaming would flood me. I’d see my son walking near a happy bonfire and whoop — suddenly he would be on fire, running in circles, screaming.

It’s like being slapped hard across the face: your eyes pinch shut in response to the horror; head jerks aside, arms flex inward to protect your core. You’re left momentarily incapacitated — breathless, blind, groping.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, 1999. Digital chromogenic print, image: 50 × 60 in. © Gregory Crewdson

My therapist tells me these mental and physical reactions are post-traumatic responses to an attack with no immediate attacker; just panics from the past that pop without warning into the present, making my body react as though I have to fight for my life. But here’s what really captivates me: though these attacks apparently emerge entirely from within, I experience them as something alien, as an incursion from the outside — a revelation from a different world bursting forth from within my own mind and body. The experience is somehow both intimate and foreign, knowable but uncontainable, understandable and yet entirely bewildering.

***

Soon after the panic attacks arrived, my body began a slow march toward collapse. I was under constant assault from infections and suffered what seemed like a never-ending case of strep throat, with 104-degree fevers that would leave me hallucinating. As summer approached and my skin began to tan, my forehead and the backs of my hands revealed an assortment of misshapen milky-white skin patches that would burn bright pink, even on cloudy days. I began to have trouble with food, as though my body was intent on rejecting what I’d put into it, like the food itself was attacking me. Things I’d eaten my whole life started triggering an anaphylactic response: my chest would tighten, my heart would start pounding, I’d struggle to breathe for a time, and eventually I’d fall into a dead sleep.

Soon bites began to get stuck, painfully, at a point near the end of my esophagus but before it could enter my stomach. I’d have to stand over a toilet for twenty minutes or more, pouring sweat, until it would finally give way and the remaining food would pass through. Over time I grew exhausted, sleeping more than twelve hours a day. My joints ached so badly it became difficult to climb in and out of bed. At my worst, my wife would wake me mid-morning, help me to get dressed, drive me to work so I could mumble through my lectures, and then bring me straight home again so I could crawl back beneath the covers.

I was sent to a variety of specialists and received a range of diagnoses: vitiligo, eosinophilic esophagitis, Epstein-Barr virus, inflammation, irritable bowel syndrome. I was prescribed ointments and steroids and anti-depressants and told to get as much sleep as possible and avoid foods that triggered a response. And in each case, the physician confessed that science did not yet fully understand why these conditions developed in people or how to stop them from happening. They were chronic medical mysteries, physical ailments to be carried around like heavy luggage that could never be put down. They would flare up and calm down, but they would never go away.

One day my GP wasn’t available for some reason, so I was seen by a new doctor. She looked at my chart, asked about my diagnoses, the doctors I’d seen, the medications I was taking. Eventually she looked at me and said, “You’re being treated for each of these as independent problems, but most of these have the same root. You’re struggling with autoimmune disease.” She went on to explain that autoimmune diseases are conditions where the body’s immune system malfunctions and begins responding as though the body is under attack, fighting foods as though they were allergens and battling against healthy tissues as though they were infected or diseased, even though they aren’t.

I must have blanched because she asked me if I was alright. For a moment I was left speechless, stunned dumb by the realization that what was going on in my mind was happening simultaneously throughout my flesh. Brain and body alike were fighting phantoms, the whole of me exhausting itself defending against an inscrutable enemy that wasn’t actually attacking me. Something was trying to break into my life, through my skin, my lungs, my throat, and my mind. It was a mystery attempting to make itself known in me, and I was exhausting myself in desperate combat against it.

***

It took me years to crawl out of the hole I’d fallen into, but with patience and learning and a lot of help from others, I did slowly reemerge. But the collapse has left an indelible mark on my mind and body that has forced me to reconsider my existence — and my faith in God — as a broken person in a traumatizing world. Among the many things I’ve learned is this: Though we are hooked on explanations, human existence is immersed in the sort of mystery no detective could ever fully uncover or explain away.

I’m sure this comes as no surprise to you. All of us know what it is like to be flooded by experiences that overwhelm us, whether they leave us drowning in grief, recoiling in pain, or fleeing in panic. You’re probably also familiar with the pop-slogan Christian workarounds designed to shoehorn these occurrences into safer territory: Remember, God never gives us more than we can handle! Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart! All things work for good for those who love the Lord! On the surface, such phrases are uttered to comfort the sufferer, but they’re often just a backdoor means to comfort the speaker. Indeed, far from helping to uncover the mystery of suffering, these simplistic explanations are often just a further act of covering: The sufferer risks vulnerability, sharing the naked, painful truth of what is happening in their mind and body, but the hearer receives it like a kind of indecency and quickly covers it over with the thin fig leaves of cheap theology. The response is meant to sound like Christian hope, but it’s really just carnal, white-knuckle optimism.

Such explanations are often quite damaging and ultimately unnecessary, for our heritage has so much more of substance to say about the overwhelming mysteries of life. In point of fact, our faith centers on a range of mysteries that are knowable without being anywhere close to fully understandable.

Indeed, it is arguable that Christian theology’s most operative term is “somehow.” The entity we call God is confessed to be three different Persons in one Being, a communion of difference that is somehow completely at-one in an eternal relationship that is Love itself. This three at-one God so loves humans that God became one, somehow, at a particular point in history, so that all that exists might be drawn more fully into the embrace of God’s eternal “at-one-ness.” Our forebears recoiled from this God-man and executed him as a criminal, and somehow, this violent life-taking turned out to be the very means by which the three-at-one God achieved life-giving at-one-ness with us. It is the greatest story ever told and yet it involves a series of claims that defy rational explanation.

In this, Christians are simply being called to speak truthfully, for to be human is to be overwhelmed by a world that is knowable and yet beyond our capacity to fully understand. The word “confession” captures this nicely, as the term is used to describe both what we affirm (like a creed, for instance) as well as what we admit or acknowledge (like our sins). We affirm a real, personal knowledge of God, and at the same moment, we admit that in our finitude we cannot know this God fully. A famous passage from one of St. Augustine’s sermons captures the conundrum well:

So what are we to say, brothers, about God? For if you have fully grasped what you want to say, it isn’t God. If you have been able to comprehend it, you have comprehended something else instead of God. If you think you have been able to comprehend, your thoughts have deceived you. (Sermon 52.16, Edmund Hill trans.)

God takes hold of us, entirely, but we do not take hold of God in the same way. Si comprehendis, non est Deus: If you think you have grasped him, it is not God you have grasped.

Does this mean reconciling oneself to never understanding God and never comprehending ourselves? Nothing of the sort. The Christian life calls us to inhabit a rather uncomfortable space, one that affirms authentic understanding without anything close to mastery. Here’s how the late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware put it in his wonderful book, The Orthodox Way:

So, in the Christian context, we do not mean by a “mystery” merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God. The eyes are closed — but they are also opened.

The mysteries of God and God’s world are revealed for our understanding, though we will never exhaust their meaning. They aren’t irrational, they’re superrational — truths we can really see and touch, though they float just above our heads and their fullness extends far beyond our reach.

But here’s what I’ve learned through my own collapse: These high and lofty truths simultaneously lie deep within each of us, buried so deeply, in fact, that they dwell beyond our cognitive grasp, leaving us with the sense that we know them intimately even though we don’t often sense them or fully understand them when we do. Again, Augustine captures it well, confessing to God, “You were more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me” (Confessions, Henry Chadwick trans). We experience the mystery of God as something beyond us, something external and alien, but the gap is not simply an external space between us and a distant, holy God. Rather, the gap lies at the center of our dis-integrated selves, in the space that opens up when life fractures our emotions, bodies, and minds.

Note how Augustine describes his search for God: “You were within me, and I was outside myself: and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created: you were with me, but I was not with you” (Confessions, Carolyn J.-B. Hammond trans). God was not detached from Augustine; Augustine was detached from God, because he’d been broken apart, and thus dissociated from the person God made him to be.

On this way of thinking, the eternal God reaches out to us by reaching up from deep within us. How can this be? When the infinite God calls us, perhaps the voice reverberates out from the image of God hidden in the gap at the center of our broken being. God emerges from within, takes hold of the jagged fragments of our disintegrated selves, and begins the process of knitting us back together into something new, something reconciled, something whole. Maybe.

One thinks of Paul on the Damascus Road. When Jesus called out, it resulted in Paul’s complete physical and mental collapse — he was knocked to the ground, left blind, unable to eat or drink, the man of power reduced to a weakling who had to be led around by the hand for a time. Sounds like my experience, actually. Paul’s description of his undoing is telling: “God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me” (Gal 1:15-16). Jesus was not revealed to Paul (as the NRSV has it). The Greek is en emoi, “in me” (as reflected in the NIV, NET, NASB, and others); the crucified Lord was made known not as an external relation, but as a person breaking forth from within Paul’s own fractured personhood.

This is why Paul describes the Christian life as a participation in the reconciling life, death, and resurrection of Jesus: “I have been crucified with Christ,” he says, “and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (2:19-20). To “know” Christ is “to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings, and to be formed together into his death” (Phil 3:10, author’s translation). For Paul, God’s at-one-ness in Christ does not simply involve Jesus giving his life for us to pay the price for our sins. No, in giving himself for us, Christ was giving his own self to us, that by the power of the Spirit he might live within us, and in doing so, restore the image of God by healing us from the inside-out.

***

“Listen,” says Paul, “I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed” (1 Cor 15:51). In the Christian perspective, the mystery of God is something to be proclaimed as knowable, though not in the form of sophisticated explanations or simple sayings on a bumper sticker, and not in a manner that could so perfectly sum it up that we would no longer have to go on searching to understand it. No, one “understands” a mystery by living with it, contemplating it, responding to it, and over time, with God’s help, coming to terms with it. Like the word somehow, I think that phrase come to terms is useful in this regard, in part because it suggests one has found a way to speak about it, but also because it suggests coming to the limit of something, like a pregnancy coming to term. It is likewise suggestive of coming to a set of agreements for how conflicting parties may go forward together in peace. And, of course, it suggests reconciling oneself to something, usually something sad or painful.

I have learned that coming to terms with mystery means letting go of my addiction to explanations. I no longer ask why bad things happen, why I was traumatized, why my mind and body operate as they do, or whether God will ever heal me of it all. I know that such truths lie beyond my grasp. But I do feel I am coming to terms with what is happening in me. I have learned to re-narrate my experience in light of God, who somehow entered our world as a frail, breakable human, and enters anew into my life today, somehow, to heal my brokenness from within, even while my outward self appears to be wasting away.

When I’m sucker-punched by the invisible assailant, when I become sick for no apparent reason, I try to take a deep breath and welcome this stranger as a friend, trusting that its presence indicates God is somehow at work in the deep places within me. It comforts me to imagine my turmoil is the outward manifestation of Jesus laboring inside of me to continue his healing work.

This is the mystery of faith: Jesus is being revealed in me, just as he is being revealed in his own particular way in you. I hear him inside of me, right now, whispering I am making all things new. He is reaching out his arms of love once again, as he did so long ago on the hard wood of the cross, grasping my traumatized body in one hand and my troubled mind in the other, dragging them back together, shifting the tectonic plates that grind painfully against one another in my inmost being, causing my whole self to convulse, but through it all, carrying me to a new place, a site of strange healing, a place of at-one-ness with the God who was once traumatized but emerged on the other side eternally scarred but laughing and singing follow me.

I do not understand this, but I know it, intimately.