A couple of Sundays ago, I watched a friend, a priest and preacher, deliver her sermon to the congregation gathered at her parish.  She spoke of the Gospel of the day in which Jesus poses the question, Who do you say that I am?  This was developed and included a reference to the element of Mystery that is always a part of relationship, no matter how long a friendship, marriage, or partnership.  That evening, I continued to muse on this idea of Mystery’s steadfastness as I stretched out on the upper deck and looked at the stars beginning to appear.  As a thank you to her for the inspiration for my musing, I sent her what came to me while gazing up, and out, and also in.

Mystery Remains

When days wind down
and I search the skies
for the celestial ellipsis
that is Orion’s belt
that is the unfinished story
that is the more to come…
I wonder what to speak 
into the great and wild everlasting 
that invites my gaze and my desire.
In the sigh before rising I utter 
the only prayer that feels
worthy or apt or true in that holy instant.

Mystery remains.  

Thanks be to God. 

Kimberly M. King

Several days later, I began reading Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane…an exquisite book on landscape and the language used to describe it.  I made it only to page five before I had to stop for a think because my brain was pitched into the deeps of awe by the description he offered about the nature of language and the act of translation:

…Most fascinating to me are those terms for which no counterpart of comparable concision exists in another language.  Such scalpel-sharp words are untranslatable without remainder….

—p. 5 Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane

Untranslatable without remainder…there will always be more to the original than can be translated through another language…there will be a remainder, an and yet…, that shadows the translation.  YES!! Yes yes yes!  

As someone who does written translation from one language to another fairly regularly, I know of what he writes.  And I know it too when trying to translate experience into any language or format—essay, poetry, homily, sometimes simple conversation…I can try…but there is so often more than can be contained in the serifs and bends, in the syllables of word choice.

Instead of being frustrated by that—regarding any facet of the Trinity or any nuance of language, I find myself utterly grateful.  There is something akin to relief within me to walk around knowing that all I behold, think, observe, speak, write, believe I know…is hint and suggestion.  However solid it seems, there is more and there is mystery.

I was attempting to explain this to someone and they asked “Why relief and not any kind of fear?”

Because I believe there is more to know of Love.  What it asks and what it offers and how it can be expressed.  There is more to humanity and the whole of creation, more to language, more to the fullness that is wholeness that is home again and at last.

Thanks be to God.