More of the Mystery

What happens when we stop learning about God

“You’re going to get a PhD in breasts.”

In the midst of our awful conversation, I burst out laughing.

“No, I’m serious,” my midwife insisted on the other end of the line. “You’re about to learn more than you ever wanted to know. You’ll be a cancer expert by the end of this.”

Months later, her words still echo in my ears. Terminology and treatments, hormone receptors and immunotherapy, genetic mutations and reconstruction options, staging and surgery and statistics and survival rates. Far from an expert, but also far from a bewildered beginner. I know much more than I wish I knew.

But one clear thought keeps rising up, starting with the whirlwind of those early weeks of daily appointments and information overload.

This is a chance to grow in wisdom, too. Not just knowledge.

To learn more of the mystery of God.

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Every hard thing we go through—every suffering, every loss, every devastating diagnosis, every unwanted admission to a terrible club, every jagged corner of the world that we didn’t know existed until we got there—offers us a chance to learn more of God we never glimpsed before.

Believe me when I tell you this is far from bright-siding. You will learn much about God that will break your heart. The baffling truth that God allows so much suffering and death. The maddening contradictions of an Omni-Everything—omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent—not intervening when we would find it obvious. The determination of the Divine to uphold freedom when automation would prove safer, if less satisfying. The stunning silence of the Word when what we crave is explanation, consolation, justification, anything.

But suffering holds the flesh of the heart of God.

I have not found the same in softness or silence, though I have sought God there, too. But in the loneliest places where I least wanted to dwell, I found more of God.

You have caught your own shards of paradox. The divine presence in other humans. The healing power of beauty within pain. The fresh comfort of ancient wisdom. The sacred shedding of certainty. The daily miracle of resurrection.

When I cast back to the God I knew before suffering—grief, loss, death, illness—I find it a wonder I believed in anything, so thin and two-dimensional was my flimsy hold on faith. I thought it transactional, achievable, untarnished, and unquestionable. Now I am grateful for spiritual chiaroscuro, the subtle truths held in mottled shades of grey.

Once I saw a striking diagram in a theology textbook. A graph that showed how religious education stagnates in elementary school or junior high for most Christians, while their education in every other area continues to climb steadily through high school, trade school, college, or beyond.

Many adults don’t keep learning more about God in an intentional way once they leave Sunday school, religion class, or faith formation. So when we go through crisis, we fall back on what we know best. Which might be science or business or engineering or construction or education—but not faith.

The textbook chart was not a harsh critique, but an honest reality. When life begins to splinter, we default to our strongest store of knowledge. If we haven’t cultivated any curiosity for the divine, our muscles atrophy over time.

So I wonder for myself—for you, for any of us: how do we keep a channel open through the muck and muddying of life’s twisting turns, pushing aside the debris of our fallen formulas, scooping out the silt of accumulated assumptions, clearing a course for the water of discovery to keep flowing?

How do we keep asking where or how or who is God as once-easy answers scatter like brittle leaves at our feet?

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As I lose my strength, my hair, my appetite, my plans, and every expectation about what comes next, I have little agency left. But the choice to remain curious about God is a thrumming pulse in my veins.

I can (and do) rage and weep and rejoice and plead with the divine on the daily. This is prayer’s practice, the human part of the holy whole. Because if my understanding of God doesn’t yearn to increase alongside any immersive education that life brings—bidden or unbidden—I miss the chance to learn more of the mystery.

For now I only glimpse the glimmers: a flash of light, a moment of understanding, a quick swell of presence. These days stretch long and hard, draining on body and soul. Too often I burrow, wallowing in the foreshortened horizons of illness or the evaporation of simple peace. But such longing can make an idol of healing, too, denying what can be known of God within suffering. We make meaning all along, not only after. We are becoming now, not in some far-off fixed future. God is already revealing something new within this particular painful time and place, not withholding love’s promise for some distant shore.

To try and understand more of God along the way is not another obligation, the burden to make-sense or make-right, but an invitation into deeper mystery, the unfolding of quiet communion. An opportunity that exists and opens alongside any other: even the burden we would never have picked for our shoulders, personal or collective, but the one that has been placed nonetheless.

There is nowhere we cannot find God. A horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. And every suffering, even the worst, offers one clear choice: to shut our eyes and turn inward from pain, or to look everywhere else—up, down, around, beyond, through—and realize once again that we have never been alone.