Roughly 8 years ago I came into the office and found a bullet sitting on my desk. It wasn’t in the case; it was just the lead. I shrugged my shoulders, and went to work. When I told a co-worker about it, she said she would be freaked out. I thought about it, and decided that it was indeed a mystery but since no one was threatening me, and I had no enemies I knew of, I wasn’t going to worry about it.
I kept it, though, as an interesting symbol of the mysteries we encounter in life. It’s in my car. Not all questions are answered. Not all confusion is healed. Rather than sitting at the apex of knowledge, I think we ought properly to view ourselves as scarcely better than the insects. We quite literally have no way of knowing what we don’t know. This plain fact is easily missed in our current age.
It would in fact come as a disappointment for me to learn just how that bullet came to be sitting on my desk. I would say “oh, yes”, and it would all make perfect sense. But how dull that would be. I like a life where I don’t understand everything, and know I don’t.
Mystery builds room for creation, for speculation, for movement. It is that place where we build what comes to be “really real” in our persons, and in our social orders.