Mystery
I’ll begin by telling you a story that I heard and couldn’t forget. Using the liberty of the storyteller, I’ll
make it sound as if it happened to me, as that’s the way I heard it.
It was Sunday. Having attended the service at our local parish church I was on my way to have lunch at my parents’ house. To get there, I took a train that would take me almost to their doorstep. It was a beautiful day with all the promise of springtime turning to summer. The
compartment I seated myself in was deserted except for a man and his three kindergarten aged boys that I took to be his sons. My harmonious mood soon turned to dismay and irritation. Although I seated myself as far as I could from this noisy group, I had no choice but to notice that the father only sat in his seat passively, seemingly half asleep, while his sons ran, climbed and screamed around the compartment making a real nuisance of themselves. The problem with parents today, I thought, is that they no longer teach their children any manners. To begin with I didn’t wish to intrude, but then, as I prepared to get off at my station I decided that sometimes one needs to make a stand and to give the father a piece of my mind. I approached and addressed him: Excuse me, sir, are these your children. It seemed as if I had woken him up as he looked at me as if he didn’t understand my question and then replied, Yes. Well, I said, I couldn’t help noticing during my journey that your children have been making a right spectacle of themselves all over the compartment and that you have done nothing to keep them at bay. I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s a very proper way for a father to act. He still seemed drowsy as he said: I’m terribly sorry, sir.
You’re quite right, of course. It’s just that my wife was last week diagnosed to have a brain tumour and we’re returning home from the hospital, where she died last night. I’m trying to think how we’re going to carry on as a family and didn’t wish to be very harsh on the kids as they didn’t sleep much last night by their mother’s bedside.
I then had to get off the train.
Life is a
mystery. So often what we take to be something, turns out to be something quite different. Evaluation seems to be, not only a toastmasters term, but indeed a way of living for all of us. Everything in our lives seems to have an unconscious value tag stuck onto it. As unpleasant as it may be to admit it, the values more often focus on what will benefit ourselves than the question of high values or virtues, such as prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice, faith, hope, and love. This mouthful really doesn’t sound too sexy nowadays, does it? And what do they mean anyhow?
So I looked these up, in the net, of course!
Prudence seems to mean the ability to handle one’s willpower correctly.
Temperance then, guides to moderation, enough but not too much, in all our ways.
Fortitude gives us strenght to accept and do our best with what life puts our way.
Justice helps us to look at others as we would wish to be looked at ourselves.
Faith allows us to see everything in life as a mysterious miracle.
Hope seems to come in handy when we realise that we lack in so many virtues, but can and will do better.
Love, now there’s another mystery, we’ve all heard of it, but how precious little we really know of it?
By now it’ll be no mystery to you that the theme of my speach tonight is mystery.
When I inspected the associations the word brings to mind these days, I came up with three winners: The mystery of who killed whom and why, the mystery of which celebrity will bed which and how,
and on top of all, the mystery of who makes the biggest bucks and is it legal, that is: can we get in on it?
In the middle of all this hectic mystification we don’t often stop to think of life itself as a mystery.
If we happen to cut ourselves somehow, we usually just tape an adhesive on the injury, knowing that the injury will then heal itself usually in a matter of days.Almost as if it were all down to the adhesive. Even if modern science can tell us how the healing happens on microscopic level and can even accelerate it, it still doesn’t know how to make new life without using existing tissue of some kind.
So to return to my theme of the day, I expect most of the three mysteries I mentioned earlier usually to get an answer of somekind. But I must admit that however much I look for the answers to the mystery of life; how, why and what it is, the best and most beautitul ones are far from scientific, and usually in the form of stories that still leave me with a feeling that out of all the wonderful things in the world, really
Only
LIFE
Is a Mystery.