T.S.Eliot put it right: "Nobody likes to live with mystery." We humans beings have been pondering our origins for centuries, discontented with the elusive mystery of where we came from and why.
Our Old Testament faces up to the question at the very outset: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" This is a statement of faith, not knowledge. It says to the reader that an unknown and unknowable force is responsible for the creation. It does not attempt to suggest what went on before that act of creation; it does not conjecture any motive; it does not describe the substance of that creation. It is a grand lyrical poem that attempts to account for existence.
The poem consists of eight acts of creation, based on the Babylonian calendar. These eight acts were telescoped to six in the Hebrew poem to fit the creation-in-six-days liturgical week during the Babylonian captivity of Israel. When that "captivity" came to an end, the Hebrews returned to their homeland with a new worship plan (home-based Seders), confirmation of the Shabat (seventh day worship) and a poetic answer to the age-old mystery of the Creation.
In our scientific age, we earnestly search out an answer to that fundamental question about our origins. The Hadron Collider is our current enterprise, attempting to discover the elements of our existence and how they came into being. But the purpose of our existence remains unknowable except in the imaginative weaving of poetry and theology.
These are speculative efforts at best, the "stuff that dreams are made of."
And this is not a bad situation. We must be thankful that the mystery of our existence is a never-ending challenge to our imagination. It is not a matter of knowledge. It is not open to scientific investigation. This mystery cannot be solved. It can only stimulate our spirit to commit our selves to channeling our lives in ways that are meaningful to us. And "meaningful ways" are what lift our lives above the level of mere survival.
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