The Best Kind of Mystery

“Do you have a mystery for me to solve?”

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a hundred times. My daughter is obsessed with mysteries. It’s not enough for her to read about them in the pages of every Nancy Drew book she can get her hands on. She wants more than that. She wants a real-life mystery. A puzzle that resists being solved. A question that eludes an answer. Something that isn’t easy to wrap her head around.

And not surprisingly, she’s not satisfied with the “mysteries” I can offer her. The Mystery of Mom’s Missing Hair Tie (spoiler alert: it was in my purse). The Mystery of the Missing Lunch Ham (oops, Mom finished it).

Simple answers are so boring. “Will I ever have a real mystery?” she moans.

I get it. We’re all this way, really. We are drawn to the mysterious, to the inscrutable. It’s because we know that the answers to the really big questions are ones that can’t be explained in a neat and tidy way. We know that the reality of life and love and the human condition is something we can’t quite fit our heads around. We know that there is so much in this world, in this universe, that we can’t…understand. So, in a way, mysteries are the only things that really make sense to us.

Why do we love mysteries so much? Because God is a mystery. And that’s never as clear as it is today, on the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, the mystery that boondoggles us all. Four relations. Three persons. One God.

Don’t ask me to explain it. I could, but I don’t have the word space, and frankly, it might not even make sense then. It’s a mystery, you see. A real one. The best kind.

©LPi