Surely mystery is an essential ingredient, if not the essential of our common life and this earth in which we are all rooted. By mystery I do not mean the vast oceans of knowledge in which we have not swum or not yet mapped. By mystery I mean the infinite depths of being that we can never plumb, never know, never exhaust, given the limits of our mortality, our finitude, our creatureliness.

Our inherent sense of mystery is in our irrepressible longing for something we cannot name but intensely miss. We are afflicted, or blessed, with a kind of insistent, cosmic homesickness. It comes in moments of awe and wonder at starlight or twilight, or a child's birth and unfolding, or the quiet peacefulness in an old woman's face, the surprising lift of music, a pause of self-recognition in Shakespeare, or the opening of the world in a line of poetry.

Ted Loder, The Haunt of Grace