MYSTERY, SHERLOCK HOLMES, 007, CSI, ALGEBRA, OR GOD?

Mystery is a great word. It is word that carries a lot of baggage and it gets heavier as you grow in age with it.  I grew up at a time when the rites of the Catholic Church, especially the Mass were called "The Sacred Mysteries."  When I was young, I thought that that was so cool.  After a while though, that expression went away and we referred to the rites, the rubrics, the sacrifice, the sacraments, etc.  That was OK but mystery was a word that I wished would have stuck around a little longer in our Catholic vocabulary.
For a while there, it did make an occasional appearance when you would hear someone say, "We believe that, but it is a mystery that we don't understand."  That usually was the end of the discussion. But then, like so many of us do, I grew older (notice not "up" but "older") and I did learn some things.  I learned that there are some people who thrive on "mysteries" because they feel that the more they know about something that others do not know, they are better than the rest.  It gets to be a religion with some, and even with some Christians and Catholics too.  Some religious people will only tell what they think is a high form of human knowledge about the divine, to certain "initiates" who have passed certain hurdles in society.  Some people think that the more you know about mysterious things, the more divine you become.  The intriguing dimension of this is that Catholics fall into this trap all the time.  Yes, even priests and bishops.
Now, I am not a holy guy.  Trust me, that is not a mystery.  The real mystery about me is, "the good die young, so why am I still here?"  It's a good thing that no one here on earth can figure that out.  What I want to say is that this "the more I know the more divine I become" is a very insidious attitude.  We like to think that what we know about the mysteries of our faith makes us more divine.  That is wrong thinking.  The secret of our lives and the direction that God and His Son, Jesus all together with each other and the Holy Spirit give us is that we must strive to become as close to perfect human beings as we can.  God knows that He has to help us do that.  His great love is what we need to tap into to strive on that path.  The more we do that, the more we will come to understand about Him.  The more we understand about Him the more we will be convinced that it is not we who strive to become divine, it is He who by making Himself human makes it possible for us to aspire to human perfection so as to spend the rest of eternity with Him.  For me the great mystery is, "what we have the most in common with God is our humanity."  Keep that in mind the next time you take Communion.