The Mystery of God

© Photograph by Gabe Hiemstra. License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Back in 2001, in my final year of a physics degree, I had to do a research project. The subject of these tended to be proposed by the lecturers, and I was given a project that I am sure many students before me had also been given - the elephant bell. I don’t have a picture of the elephant bell I was studying, but I found this one online, a picture of an elephant bell from the 17th century, now in a museum in India. There was a mystery to the sound produced by the elephant bell. Whether this was just the bell we had in the physics department, or whether it is true of all elephant bells, I can’t be sure. My memory of it has faded and a brief internet search hasn’t made me any wiser. From my hazy memory, when the bell was rung the sound could be stopped by touching any of the prongs. My challenge was to work out why. I know I didn’t solve the mystery, but I did lots of experiments, wrote a report and got my degree. Why am I sharing this with you? I found this quote in my prayer journal written in 2018.

“God is like the elephant bell. How it works is a mystery. And the more energy spent on experiments and trying to understand how it works, the less the beauty of the elephant bell is appreciated, but studied. And studying leads to frustration that it cannot be understood!”

We like to know how the world works, and how God works. We exercise a lot of energy into trying to understand, through experiments, through study, but that study doesn’t always yield results. God is a mystery, and always will be. We cannot fully understand who God is or the way God works. It is much better to appreciate the beauty and the mystery of God than to get frustrated trying to understand God. I was clearly getting frustrated when I wrote this prayer journal entry, and for some reason I remembered the elephant bell!