Still-beating hearts and walled-off living victims were the subjects of Edgar Allen Poe’s macabre tales.[1] Poe was my favorite writer in junior high. I mentioned this once while speaking at a conference. A well-meaning soul sought to explain The Gospel to me on a comment card, not believing that someone could be a Christian and love Poe at the same time. There is a reason why humans are drawn to the classic suspense genre. But it was not until I was an adult that I understood the reason for Poe’s strong attraction. What draws us toward the unknown? What is it that stirs our hearts to mystery? And why ponder Poe at Christmas?
“Can you keep a secret?” is the question of mystery. The English word has given us the process of initiation. A secretive ceremony honors the first-time participant. In our culture the word “mystery” has come to ask the question, “How will this crime be solved?” TV dramas inevitably answer the query in an hour’s timeslot. But once the case is cracked there is no more mystery. While detective stories may baffle us, eluding our understanding for a time, the narrative has a conclusion. The older word “mysterium” better explains the original intent of the term. Mysterium marks the location, physical or otherwise, where something obscure takes place.[2] The opening line of the old radio show says it best: “You are now entering the inner sanctum.”
Friday the 13th seems to present a mysterium problem for emergency room doctors. Atul Gawande recounts his thoughts about the event in his award winning book Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science.[3] Gawande states that there is no immediate explanation for the excess number of ER visits on a day marked by superstition. While a committed natural science researcher, neither he nor other doctors could explain the abnormal increase in hospital needs on that fateful calendar day. The evidence, however, did not seem to suggest a supernatural answer: it was nothing more than a fluke. But, unable to catch a break or keep the patients straight on one such Friday, Gawande began to wonder why that day presented more problems than others. A nurse explains, “It’s a full moon Friday the 13th.” Gawande narrates, “I was about to say that, actually, the studies show no connection. But my pager went off before I could get the words out of my mouth. I had a new trauma case coming in.”[4]
P. D. James, the famed British detective novelist, was asked why her specific craft so engages our minds and imagination. Because her books are often tied first to a homicide, James responds
Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can make no reparation, and has always been greeted with a mixture of repugnance, horror, fear, and fascination. We are particularly intrigued by the motives which cause a man or woman to step across the invisible line which separates a murderer from the rest of humanity.”[5]
“I had murdered them all myself.”[6] Father Brown perhaps comes closest to true, biblical mystery. While a crime may have been solved, the good padre still wondered after the human penchant toward sin. Sherlock Holmes fans are used to deductive reasoning: a scientific analysis, assessing problems from the outside, in. Father Brown became the murderer because he was a murderer. Chesterton’s sleuth, a Catholic priest, saw people as they were, from the inside, out. The mystery of our own nature continues: “The heart is hopelessly dark and deceitful, a puzzle that no one can figure out.”[7]
Flannery O’Connor believed that Southern authors were both “grotesque” and “Christ-haunted.”
We find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day . . . If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. . . . Such a writer will be interested in what we don’t understand rather than in what we do.[8]
O’Connor exactly represents the New Testament word for “mystery.” The secret thoughts and plans of God, formerly hidden, are now revealed. In no way is the mystery diminished. We still wonder at God-perpetrated events. So called “mystery religions” kept mysterious, teachings they did not wish to fall into unworthy hands. The group controlled the available knowledge requiring all to become initiates. Christian “mystery,” on the contrary, is freely proclaimed to the world.[9] The “Christ hymn” of 1 Timothy 3:16 clearly announced belief in Jesus’ life as being both historical and revelational. Jesus came in flesh, was vindicated by the resurrection, and ascended into heaven. His work was broadcast, believed, and became doxology. “This Christian life is a great mystery, far exceeding our understanding, but some things are clear enough.”[10]
Christ’s person and work is why I have a fascination with Poe. What is so attractive about mystery? How am I at once repelled by and attracted to what I find baffling? My answer? The unknown makes knowing the known possible. I crave “mystery.” I am fascinated by what I do not understand which makes what I do know, that much more wonderful. Herein is the wonder of Christmas—the mystery of God becoming man.
“I Murdered Them All Myself”—Christmas Mystery
Mark Eckel, ThM PhD, Professor of Old Testament
[1] “The Tell-tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” are two of Poe’s short stories mentioned here.
[2] John Ayto. 1990. Dictionary of Word Origins. (Arcade): 359.
[3] Atul Gawande. 2002. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (Picador).
[4] Ibid., 114.
[5] https://www.amazon.com/Talking-About-Detective-Fiction-James
[6] G. K. Chesterton, “The Secret of Father Brown,” The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton (Ignatius, 1986): 217.
[7] Jeremiah 17:9, The Message.
[8] Flannery O’Connor. 1997. Mystery and Manners. (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux): 40-42, emphasis mine.
[9] See Glenn W. Barker, “Mystery,” International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Vol. 3 (Revised, Eerdmans, 1986): 451-55; W. L. Liefeld, “Mystery,” Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 4 (Zondervan, 1976): 332.
[10] 1 Timothy 3:16, The Message, emphasis mine.