The mystery writer Jim Thompson once said that there is only one story, and he summarized that storyline in this quote: “Things are not what they seem.”
I love mysteries of all kinds, and I remember the moment I first fell in love with them.
It was an Alabama summer, the swollen air was full of lightning bugs and whispers from porches, and my next-door-neighbor gave me a book called The Clue in the Embers. It was blue and with a picture of an exotically-painted shrunken head.
From the book’s jacket the plot unfolds: In solving the mystery of two medallions missing from an inherited curio collection, the Hardys wind up in a desolate area of Guatemala at the mercy of dangerous thugs.
I remember I read the book cover to cover before I could sleep, fascinated by the intellectual puzzle that a mystery offered its reader. The clues were all there, but you just had to pay attention at the right times and look at them in the right way to get it right. In the end, the Hardy Boys always got it right, and you could go to sleep knowing that the mystery had been solved.
I have a theory that people love mysteries not just because of their exciting puzzles or their sensational plots, but because they remind us to look more closely at the world around us, than any single detail of existence, no matter how marginal or inconsequential can become a crucial fact to solving it all. In mysteries, the most mundane artifacts in our lives shimmer with narratives of good and evil – a torn movie ticket, a strand of hair, or even the fact of a dog’s not barking at a significant time can establish a storyline that has tremendous implications for everyone involved.
Since that first book, I have read many mysteries, including the rest of the Hardy Boys series and the Nancy Drew mysteries (those I wouldn’t confess to having read until much later), and I worked my way up to Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and eventually to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, Patricia Cornwell, Michael Connelly, and Ruth Rendell. I think that mysteries offer us more than just a thrilling and lurid read in the summer; I think that they offer us clues to some of the most important things about ourselves. Clearly they can give us a course in ethics, but they also can retrain our spiritual vision.
Universalist Minister Stephen Kendrick has written a book called Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes. In this book Kendrick argues for a way of reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s as religious parables, ones that call us to a heightened understading of the significance of spiritual mysteries hovering like clues just at the margins of our daily lives. At the end of his introduction, Kendrick writes about his book, “Holy Clues is a book that finds parables where others have not noticed them before – though I suspect all lovers of mystery stories have been quietly affected and shaped by the spiritual fingerprints found within these entertainments. We will encounter many clues that the spiritual searcher must follow to find the sacred secrets within, and this is particularly true for those of us with a modern, scientific, skeptical attitude. If you’ve already been given all the answers and know all mysteries, this book will not charm you. But if you have not, let us then follow the intriguing clues of guilt, goodness, evil, and the very texture of this world, to trace the spiritual fingerprints left behind …”
Mysteries suspend logic, make us feel like our rules of order no longer apply, and they more often delight than terrify. Magic can work in the same way. I have often noticed the delight on people’s faces when they watch someone performing a magic trick, even if it’s a simple card trick. It would be simple enough to say that they become like kids in front of magic, but there’s an even subtler point to be made about that. Magic performances take us back to that time before we know how cause and effect work, before we had logic and analysis. Those simple tricks help us see the world again as a mystery, where we look at things again for the first time.
Matthew 18:3
“And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven”
Yet Matthew’s meaning remains incomplete, but is illuminated by Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chodron who writes in her book Comfortable With Uncertainty:
“As we become more open, we might think that it’s going to take bigger catastrophes to make us want to exit our habitual ways. The interesting thing is that, as we open up more and more, it’s the big ones that immediately wake us up and the little things that catch us off guard. However, no matter the size, color, or shape of the catastrophe, the point is to continue to lean into the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than try to protect ourselves from it.
In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal – quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is. If our experience is that sometimes we have some kind of perspective, and sometimes we have none, then that’s our experience. If sometimes we can approach what scares us, and sometimes we absolutely can’t, then that’s our experience. ‘This very moment is the perfect teacher’ is really a most profound instruction. Just seeing what’s going on – that’s the teaching right there. We can be with what’s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom. It’s available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.”
Just as the last chapter in a mystery, it appears that the clues we have needed for so long have really been right in front of us all along.
