Let the Mystery Be ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
May 31, 2026
Just a little over two years ago, I received one of the great gifts of my life. It was a beautiful, clear night, with a crescent moon hanging low in the sky. My son was visiting, and we had heard that there might be a possibility of witnessing the aurora borealis much farther south than usual, because of an unusually strong solar storm. And so we set off, driving north through Rockport, heading toward Halibut Point State Park, where the light would be least.
The roads were virtually deserted. Even in this small town, it seemed as though the sidewalks were rolled up tighter than usual. We arrived at Halibut Point, and discovered why: the parking lot was full, and there were people everywhere.
There were too many cars coming and going, too many headlights, so we set off down the trail through the woods to where the huge Babson quarry overlooks the Atlantic. The night was full of shadowy figures, bobbing cell phone flashlights, and happy, excited voices everywhere. We emerged from the woods to the quarry’s edge, to the open sky above and the water below us. We lingered among the others, letting our eyes adjust until we could spot the pink areas with our naked eyes, and taking in the odd sense of standing in a dome, with the streaks of light hanging down vertically above us and around us. It looked like curtains gently swaying. I was transported, and as any other time when I have experienced awe in my life, the tears came to the surface. I always know when I am having a peak experience, because I always begin to cry.
What a great gift. To be there, in that moment, with nature offering one of its most awesome phenomena to us, and a wonderful reminder.
With this gift, we were offered a chance to remember to pay attention, to open ourselves to all there is to see and hear, all that can be obscured – hidden by noise, by light, by our general busyness and lack of attention. We were offered shared experiences that are so often missing from our daily lives: connection with other people; and a sense of wonder, of awe; and an opportunity to feel grateful for this cosmos full of mystery, this home that offers us everything it has, and asks only that we notice and give thanks in return.
I was reminded of this experience of joy and amazement when I was reading Orbital, a fictionalized account of a space station mission as it orbits the Earth 16 times per day. The six astronauts aboard never tire of the views of Earth. And then, during one orbit, they fly through the aurora borealis. The author, Samantha Harvey, wrote, “It ripples, spills, it’s smoke that pours across the face of the planet;…The light gains edges and limbs; folds and opens. Strains against the inside of the atmosphere, writhes and flexes. Sends up plumes. Fluoresces and brightens. Detonates then in towers of light. Erupts clean through the atmosphere and puts up towers two hundred miles high. At the top of the towers is a swath of magenta that obscures the stars, and across the globe a shimmering hum of rolling light, of flickering, quavering, flooding light, and the depth of space is mapped in light. Here the flowing, flooding green, there the snaking blades of neon, there the vertical columns of red, there the comets blazing by, there the close stars that seem to turn, there the far stars fixed in the heavens, beyond them the specks that can barely be seen. (The six astronauts are drawn to the windows, moth-like.) Remember this, each one of them thinks. Remember this.”
I do not begin to understand the science of the aurora borealis. I have the vaguest sense about solar storms disrupting our atmosphere. Why? No idea. What is a solar storm? Not sure. And in that moment, there standing on the edge of the Babson Quarry, seeing the green and magenta curtains of light reflected both in the quarry water and in the ocean beyond, I did not care about why. I felt surrounded by mystery, present in that moment of witnessing a gift from the cosmos. Understanding the science could not possibly have enhanced my experience. In fact, it likely would have diminished it – made it understandable and explainable instead of utterly awe-inspiring. Aboard the space station, the astronauts had the same response. In the face of an event that can only be described as cosmic, as other-worldly, isn’t the best response to just say, either “Wow”, or “Thank you?”
This month, we’ve been asked to explore Curiosity. I noted a few weeks ago that the characteristic of curiosity is one of the things that makes us most human. Without curiosity, we would never progress, or learn new things, or ask ourselves “What if” or “How”, and then figure out how to get answers to those most fundamental questions. Truly curiosity is one of the attributes that drives us forward, keeps us striving, and enables us to flourish.
But there are times when we need awe more than curiosity. If I had grabbed another onlooker at Halibut Point that night and asked for an explanation, somehow the experience would have shrunk to human size, instead of remaining truly cosmic.
Interestingly, often scientists understand this better than religious people. We see this in our own religious history.
When American Unitarianism was brand new, in the early 19th century, our Harvard-educated religious leaders were completely caught up in trying to define Christianity, and to prove its complete validity. They emphasized extensive Biblical analysis, in order to prove that the concept of the Trinity had no place in Scripture. And in order to prove the legitimacy of Christianity beyond any possible doubt, these conservative, scholarly Unitarians focused their attention on trying to prove the factual nature of Jesus’s miracles. Their reasoning was that the miracles demonstrated the divinity of Jesus. So the miracles had to be true, in order that Jesus would be set apart as holy. But by refusing to allow mystery to have its place, these scholarly Unitarians inadvertently reduced Jesus’ miracles to facts that could be proved by humans. Religious belief began to feel more like dissection. Once again, humans, in chasing down all the facts, could diminish the miraculous, the source of wonder that makes people feel religious and want to worship.
This emphasis on intellectual proof and not on emotion and religious feeling led to a great debate between the scholars and the Transcendentalists, who sought a religious experience based on their own experience of the holy in their midst. All life was miraculous, the Transcendentalists believed, not just events enshrined in Scripture. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously put it this way: “Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” (RWE, in Nature)
In other words, don’t try to dissect holiness. But rather, open yourself to it, allow yourself to experience its presence through all your senses.
Great scientists are very capable of experiencing awe and wonder. Traditional religious people can sometimes believe that science is the enemy of religion, as it seeks to experiment, to answer questions, to learn all that it can. This can threaten religious people, make them believe that they ultimately might be forced to choose between science and religion.
But when you read Carl Sagan, for example, or Neil deGrasse Tyson, you see that they are fully capable of experiencing awe and wonder. They understand that they never have to relinquish their curiosity or the gift of knowledge. They can stand under a night sky and be moved. Like the astronauts in Orbital, they seek, not to sort out details, but to feel awe, and to remember.
Recently I came upon an essay by Albert Einstein written in 1931 titled, “The World as I See it.” In the essay he touched on his beliefs about a variety of topics, and had this to say about Mystery:
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.” (Albert Einstein, The World as I See it, https://fs.blog/einstein-the-world-as-i-see-it/)
Mystery, said Albert Einstein, something that we cannot penetrate, is what stands at the cradle of art and science. And a sense of wonder is what gives rise to religious impulses, to worship, not beliefs imposed by scholars, not facts.
My friends, what is truly beautiful about human life is that we do not have to choose. Mystery and knowledge exist side by side, informing the other, endlessly fueling more growth, more wisdom, and more awe-inspiring discovery. We can be endlessly curious, and the world is a better place because of it. And we never have to reject awe and wonder, we never have to suppress the strong emotions that arise whenever something we don’t understand reveals itself to us.
As we read earlier, “Worship is the mystery within us reaching out to the mystery beyond. It is an inarticulate silence yearning to speak. It is the window of the moment open to the sky of the eternal.” (Jacob Trapp, in To Worship, Singing the Living Tradition, #441)
Our work, in such moments, is simply to allow ourselves to feel, to worship, and to be grateful.
