Mystery itself is what we know we don’t know. Sometimes, mystery is what we can’t know, given the limitations of this human plane. “Can you fathom the mysteries of God?” Job asks in the Bible, “Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens. What can you do? They are deeper than the depths of the grave. What can you know?” (Job 11:7–9). For the quietist, this not knowing expresses a quality of the sacred. Its hiddenness, its mystery, lives ever present, like a seed within the earth, resting in the loam of sheltered darkness waiting for optimal conditions to germinate, to be revealed.

Mystery, in its sacred sense, also suggests another kind of not knowing – an attentive, conscious unknowing. Mystery is a letting go of everything we think we know about God. Whatever we perceive God to be, whatever meaning we invest in the word “God,” conscious unknowing means releasing our hold on our perceptions and images of God in order to let God be who God is. This is equivalent to a voluntary step into the transforming dark in order to make our faith more real.

A Kenyan friend, studying African creation myths, told me of a myth describing this transition from imaging the divine to a more authentic experience. At the beginning of time, God created the earth, its creatures, and humankind. However, humans would not let God be. They made constant requests, petitions, and complaints. Finally one night when they were sleeping, a wearied God decided to leave. When the people awoke and discovered God’s absence they ran about in panic, calling for God to return. But after a while, they realized something had changed. Everything around them, the earth, the night sky, the creatures of the earth, even themselves, had acquired a sublime beauty. God had gone, yet only to be present in a different way than they had envisaged.

–Elaine Pryce in Pendle Hill Pamphlet 434: A Quietness Within