Mystery

Our lives are suffused with it, and one of life's mysteries is why, if the Free Library of Philadelphia is going to host such compelling speakers as Karen Armstrong and James Ellroy, and if it insists on ending the programs at the library's normal closing hour of 9 p.m., it does not begin the evenings earlier than 7:30.

Quite a number of audience members' questions went unasked, and mine, at least, would have been good. I'd have asked this scholar of comparative religion, this preacher of compassion, this advocate of religious practice and of the ineffable that lies behind the words we use to delineate the divine, why the scriptures of the three religions she discusses most (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) so seldom if ever acknowledge the mysteries that lie at their own heart. Why has it been left for rabbis, exegetes, sages, interpreters and scholars of later times to do so? (And why, one might add, do the oldest Indian scriptures explicitly embody mysteries in ways that Western ones do not?)

Armstrong's current initiative is the Charter of Compassion, and this reminded me of one of the unforgettable crime novels of recent years.

We now return you to our regular programming.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009