Mysteries

A friend was talking to me today about some of his current reading.  He mentioned that he'd been reading murder mysteries.  He wondered if I liked reading mystery novels.  "Sure," I said, even as I struggled to think of one I'd picked up lately.


I was reminded that Eugene Peterson had written an appreciative passage on mysteries for his book Take and Read.  In the book, he recommends books across a vast swath of genre - all of which pertain to living the spiritual life well.  One of the chapters - perhaps the most unlikely of all the chapters - is "mysteries."


I found one particular passage quite intriguing:


"Gabriel Marcel always insisted that we have to choose whether we will treat life as a problem to be solved or as a mystery to be entered.  Why then do so many of the men and women who choose to enter the mystery slip aside from time to time to read mysteries that aren't mysteries at all, but problems that always get solved by the last page?  I think one reason may be that right and wrong, so often obscured in the ambiguities of everyday living, are cleanly delineated in the murder mystery.  The story gives us moral and intellectual breathing room when we are about to be suffocated in the hot air and heavy panting of relativism and subjectivism." (Peterson, Take and Read, 73)


First, I think the Marcel quote seems to imply that the audience will be nodding after the part about mystery.  The audience is shaking their head after the part about life being a problem to be solved, but are nodding in agreement about it being a mystery to be entered.  That appeals to us.  Life is messy.  Questions pile up before many satisfying answers do.  Taking into account that reality is not based on us, but upon God, we can say something similar: Living by the power of the Holy Spirit, through the life of Jesus Christ given for us, and for our Father with whom we are re-united - we live at the dictates of a holy, loving being who is not us.  Thus, we live mysteriously. 


But Peterson is also saying that this isn't enough for us.  We turn aside from the mystery to "mysteries" or "thrillers" which are actually more like "problems" because they get solved by the last page.  He thinks the reason we do this is because in a world that deliberately keeps the truth fuzzy, where to say something with great feeling must mean that it is real, that the delight a person experiences in the truth coming out at the end of a mystery thriller is comparable to the experience of breathing easy after suffocating in great humidity.  It is a slight reminder of all the ways that we hunger for truth.


So, since Peterson recommended some old mystery writers, here's the oldest one:


G.K. Chesterton, The Father Brown Stories (1929).  The mild and soft-spoken Father Brown, unassuming and unobtrusive, always took people by surprise when he solved a crime.  They didn't realize that a lifetime of hearing confessions was as good a training as one could ask for in crime detection.  W.H. Auden, confessed Christian and self-confessed detective story addict, wrote, "Father Brown solved his cases, not by approaching them objectively like a scientist or a policeman, but by subjectively imagining himself to be the murderer, a process which is good not only for the murderer but for Father Brown himself because, as he said, 'it gives a man his remorse beforehand'" (from Auden's The Dyer's Hand). (Peterson, 74)