The Mysterians

Last night, I spoke with a friend about prayer. A mutual acquaintance had received bad news. What do we pray for? Peace? Healing? Comfort? Strength to endure? “Thy will be done” (those four words we pray when we run out of ideas, the last best expression of hope and resignation whereby we collapse into the words of Christ himself)? What does prayer even do? Are we trying to get God to get busy with what he would otherwise be disinclined to do without our entreaties? Does God require arm-twisting? Is there a critical mass of prayer required to move the divine needle? When it comes to the nature of prayer, it doesn’t take too long before we’re in head-scratching territory. It sort of defies airtight explanation. “I pray because Jesus prayed and because he told his followers to pray” can sound like a cop-out. Or it can sound like the deepest, truest thing one could say. Depending on the day.

This week, Norwegian author Jon Fosse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’ll confess that the Nobel Prize in Literature isn’t something that I spend a great deal of time thinking about. Much as I would love to imagine myself to be a man of high culture, I’m not really. Poetry, frustratingly, mostly eludes me, as does the theatre (for which Fosse is mostly known, at least in Europe). I usually have a novel or two on the go, but they’re rarely the ones recommended by those who pronounce upon such things. My reasons for digging a little into Jon Fosse had to do with a tagline or something that I read in an article somewhere. Fosse was described as “a former atheist who found religion later in life.” As it happens, I do I have an interest — professional and personal — in those kinds of stories.

Fosse’s story would hardly register on the conversion Richter scale. Nothing seismic or shattering about it, really. He describes himself as “a kind of stupid Marxist and atheist” like most others in the circles of his young adulthood in Norway. But after abandoning his dream of being a rock star (I liked this guy even more after reading this!), and beginning to seriously focus on writing, he began to encounter something mysterious. A haunting question. “Where does it come from?” The impulse to write, to create, to explore words, to tap into meaning, to place the elations and sorrows of life in some kind of wider context of meaning. He gradually came to believe that this impulse wasn’t something generated within. It was a response to something beyond, something “out there.” He became a Roman Catholic.

Fosse’s journey has not been an easy one. Like many artists, he has fought his demons (not least a debilitating alcoholism that landed him in the hospital, and which he only relatively recently overcame). But those what know about such things say that his writing has stubbornly pointed to this beyond, this “out there.” Something that defies full explanation, something that resists categorization, something that one feels more than one can always articulate. Something that one perhaps cannot make sense of being human without. Something literature can only gesture in the direction of. “I often say that there are two languages,” Fosse said. “The words that I wrote, the words you can understand, and behind that, there’s a silent language.”

One reviewer, Christopher Beha, reflected on Fosse’s work alongside his own personal journey:

I sometimes think that the modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it’s a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility. I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.

I, too, would place myself on the side of the mysterians. Or at least I would like to. I am probably predisposed to say more about God than would Fosse and his admirers.  I would want to drill down further, get a bit more concrete and specific, try to get a bit more practical and untether myself from the clouds, as it were (occupational hazard). I think that God is more than just a placeholder for our wonder and inability to explain, more than some kind of eccentric intellectual aesthetic. I’m not suggesting this is the case for Fosse, but it is for many others. I need more than that.

But people like me could likely do with a little more recognition of the mystery of things. The mystery of prayer, for example. When confronted with the pain of the world, I instinctively rush to explain, to solve, to respond, to understand the mechanics, to figure out what inputs to plug into the system to achieve the desired outputs. Worse, I want to defend God for his apparent negligence in this world where so many struggle in such a wide and devastating variety of ways. My instinct is to bring this whole cocktail of insecurity and need into prayer. I often wonder how different some of my desperate flailings are from the prophets of Baal that Elijah mocked in 1 Kings 18: Why don’t you yell louder? Maybe he’s asleep and needs to be awakened!

One cannot just marinate indefinitely in mystery, obviously. But one could certainly visit the territory a bit more often. When it comes to God and God’s work in the world, how it intersects with human pain and need and ecstasy and longing there is so much that we don’t know, so much we will never know. Perhaps it is occasionally enough to approach prayer as a kind of bearing witness to what is beyond, what is “out there,” that seems determined to keep calling our names, to keep summoning us to something deeper, truer, holier, and more ultimately hopeful than we have words for.

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