LIVING BEFORE THE MYSTERY
Modern humanity is beginning to experience a dissatisfaction that produces in our heart an inner emptiness, the triviality of daily living, the superficiality of our society, the lack of communication with the Mystery.
There are many who, sometimes in a vague or confused manner, other times in clear and tangible ways, feel a deception and an unspeakable discouragement in the face of a society that depersonalizes the person, empties us within, and makes us incapable of opening ourselves to the Transcendent.
The trajectory followed by humanity is easy to describe: we’ve gone about learning to utilize the instrument of our reason with more and more efficiency; we’ve accumulated an always greater number of statistics; we’ve systematized our understandings of science with more and more complexity; we’ve transformed science into a technology that has more and more power to dominate the world and life.
This passionate path throughout centuries carries a risk. Unconsciously we’ve ended up believing that reason will carry us to complete liberation. We don’t accept the Mystery. And yet the Mystery is present in the very depths of our existence.
The human being wants to know and dominate everything. But we can’t know and dominate our origin or our final destiny. And it would be more rational to recognize that we are enclosed in something that transcends us: we need to humbly move ourselves in the horizon of Mystery.
In Jesus’ message there’s an invitation that’s scandalous to modern ears: not everything is reduced to reason. The human being must learn to live before the Mystery. And the Mystery has a name: God, our «Father», who welcomes us and calls us to live as brothers and sisters.
Maybe our greatest problem is to have made ourselves incapable of praying and dialoguing with a Father. We are orphans and we don’t succeed in understanding ourselves as brothers and sisters. Today also, in the middle of clouds and darkness, you can hear a voice that keeps calling out to us: «This is my son… Listen to him».
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
