Religious Practice That Leads Into the Mystery of God

In a recent “Poetry Unbound” podcast, Padraig O’Tuama featured Molly McCully Brown’s poem, “Transubstantiation.”  I had never heard of this remarkable young woman.  But our amazing Williamsburg Regional Library has her single volume of poetry and her single collection of essays, and I have been reading what she has written, expressions arising from her experience of living in a body disabled by cerebral palsy.

In some of her essays, she reveals that she has been on a religious pilgrimage.  I was struck by this sentence in her essay, “Bent Body, Lamb”: “I grew up twenty-five miles from Jerry Falwell’s Baptist mega-church, in the heartland of what often feels like the worst religion has to offer: bigotry and prejudice, rabid anti-intellectualism, the inability to yield even a single hard-edged certainty up to kindness, questioning, or complication.”

I am struck by the fact that I read this sentence the day before the Sunday of The Holy Trinity (this past Sunday).  I think it is my favorite Sunday of the liturgical year is, because this teaching of the church nearly entirely resists intellectual understanding.  Many people find the doctrine of the Trinity to be boring.  That is because they have been taught badly by people who spend too much time considering religion to be a set of intellectual propositions.  But when the Trinity is explored with cognizance about the limits of our intellects, and with openness to God who is beyond our understanding, then it encourages religious practice that leads in the opposite direction of “the worst religion has to offer.”  Instead, we find ourselves drawn more and more deeply into divine mystery.  Instead of "hard-edged certainty," religion is practiced with "sure and certain hope" (to quote from the ELCA Lutheran grave side liturgy, language that expresses deep mystery).  How exciting this is to me! 

As I reflect, I am so thankful that I never had to spend years recovering from religious malformation.  I am so thankful for the pastors and parents who formed me, theologically and liturgically, before I was even aware of this, to enter into the mystery of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Andy Ballentine