Searching Among Stones

Quest Monthly Magazine

The other day I found myself in the home of the president of my congregation. The board of trustees was having its annual retreat, welcoming new board members, setting priorities, etc. As a way to get to know one another better, each of us was asked to bring an object to share. Not just any old thing, but an object that was important to us, that revealed something about our spiritual lives, about our religious journey.

One member of the board, Steve, brought a stone and began by telling us that he is a scientist—specifically, a geologist, someone who studies stones. And as a scientist, he had always maintained a healthy skepticism when it came to matters religious. But one day, many years ago, Steve was out in Montana, studying the rocks out there, looking for clues to the geologic history of the area.

He was down in a valley, surrounded by mountains, digging through a bunch of rocks, when he rolled away some stones and found something remarkable. “Immediately,” he said, “I knew I’d found something special.” He knew it was special because the stone was smooth and polished; there aren’t a lot of ways that stones get polished in nature. It was a stone that wasn’t native to the geology of the particular area. It had come from someplace else.

Now, Steve has a quiet way about him, but you could tell he was getting excited remembering the moment. So we asked him, “Steve, what’s so special about the stone?”

He drew himself up in his chair, his eyes got bright and he said, “It’s a gastrolith.” What ensued was an awkward moment in which Steve had that expectant look of a high school science teacher who has just revealed something of great excitement, but his students have all received that news with a blank stare.

After a pause, someone carefully asked, “What’s a gastrolith?”

Undeterred, Steve pushed forward. “A gastrolith,” he explained, “is a stone found in the stomach of reptiles and some birds that aids in the digestion of their food. It’s a little bit like the sand in a chicken’s gizzard. It helps them break down the food.”

Well, I remember looking at the stone and thinking to myself, “That would’ve had to come from a pretty big chicken!”

Anticipating our next question, Steve continued. He held up the stone and said, “This stone came from the stomach of a dinosaur.”

Well, now he had our attention. Now everyone wanted to learn more about this gastrolith and what kind of dinosaur it had been in.

“It’s hard to know,” Steve said. “A Brontosaurus, maybe. Probably a big dinosaur.”

“How old is it?” we wondered.

“Well, dinosaurs roamed the earth about 150 million years ago. So that’s when it was in a stomach. But the stone itself,” he said, “is probably 300 million years old.” The room was silent for a moment.

One board member said quietly, “Gee, that feels pretty close to eternity.” Eventually someone asked, “What’s the spiritual significance of the stone for you, Steve?”

“Well, when I discovered the stone,” he said, “it really set me to thinking. It made me ask over and over again, ‘What came before? What came before the dinosaur? What came before the stone?’ It was as though the stone put me in touch with an immense mystery that kept receding further and further into the past. It was an awe-filled experience. It was a turning point in my spiritual journey.”

Now, I’ll bet a lot of us have had an experience similar to Steve’s—a time when we unexpectedly bumped up against the mystery and grandeur of creation, the mystery and grandeur of life. When we were filled with the sense of being part of something so awesome, so large, so powerful, and so beautiful that we felt two things simultaneously. We felt small and insignificant up against this great mystery. Yet at the same time we felt strangely exalted and ennobled, because we experienced ourselves as a tiny part of that great mystery. And therefore we were heirs to its grandeur.

I remember when I moved to Portland, Oregon, just after I graduated from college. I had never been out West before. I’d never seen, in person, the mountains of the West. And I moved to Portland, in part, to experience those mountains because I had an intuitive sense that they had something to teach me. But I swear that it was cloudy the entire first month I lived in Portland. I never saw the mountains. I began to forget that they were the reason I’d moved there in the first place.

And then one day I woke up and finally the skies were clear. As I walked to work looking down at the sidewalk ahead of me, minding my own business, I happened to lift my eyes and I saw Mt. St. Helens for the first time, looming like a celestial palace over the city. I gazed at her trademark flat top, a reminder of the volcanic power within her that had torn 3000 feet of stone right off of her during her 1980 eruption. And right there on the sidewalk I felt a sense of wonder and awe, that sublime sense of being both insignificant and ennobled—part of something infinitely larger than myself, something so beautiful and so powerful that the only name I could give it that would even begin to do it justice…was God.

But I had a little problem to overcome. I grew up with a pretty clear sense of God as a sort of law-giving father-figure, an anthropomorphic being. And what I was now experiencing as God was something much less well defined, much more mysterious. Yet at the same time something much bigger than any God I’d grown up learning about.

And so I began to read. And I discovered that there were others who spoke of God less as a person and more as an immense mystery. I learned that medieval monks used to address God with the chant “O Magnum Mysterium.” O great mystery. Beyond our ability to comprehend. Powerful. Awe-inspiring.

I read modern theologians like Jewish mystic Martin Buber and German theologian Rudolph Otto, who called God “Mysterium Tremendum.” (I’m not sure why they always use Latin. Maybe it adds to the aura of mystery.) Mysterium Tremendum—tremendous mystery.

These folks formed a tradition that said God is most fundamentally a mystery—an immeasurable mystery that inspires awe, praise, fear, even, and always more questions. It’s a way of understanding God that always leads to more questions. After that, I grew to appreciate how God would remain a mystery. That all my questions wouldn’t be answered, and how my life might be richer for being able to live in that mystery.

After he told us the story behind the gastrolith, Steve passed it around and I watched as each person in our small group received the stone with a certain reverence. No one could keep from rubbing its smooth surface in their hands, as if it were a magic lamp on whose polished surface the answers to our questions might be revealed. Everyone wanted personal contact with that mystery.

A problem with too much of religion today is that some people want to take the mystery out of God, to make God literal and concrete. They want to pretend that we can know, at every moment, God’s will, God’s intent, God’s laws and ways. And we’ve forgotten that God is, first and foremost, a great mystery. O Magnum Mysterium.

Many of us have walked away from God because we believed that the tidied-up and certain version of God was the only god available for us to embrace. We were led to believe that our doubts and our uncertainties about the nature of the Holy were heretical, that a questioning faith was somehow a lesser faith. We were taught that doubt was the opposite of faith. But that’s not true.

The opposite of faith is not doubt; it’s certainty. Faith is a trust you feel even though you entertain doubts and questions. It’s an abiding sense of the possibility of God amid the mystery of God. Faith wouldn’t be faith without doubt and uncertainty.

Let me commend to you this God who is both known and unknown. Let us be assured that it is a valid religious calling to spend our lives amidst the mystery. Let us trust that such a religious life will indeed bear fruit and imbue our lives with richness and meaning and excitement. Let us rub the smooth stones of our earth and seek answers.

Let us live with the sense of hope and possibility that comes from never knowing what will be revealed when we go searching among the stones.