There are some people I just wouldn’t have expected to be Christian. One of them is Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey bridged the Beat Generation and the hippies, two cultural movements that took many in my generation far from the faith of our parents.
Kesey appears to have been the kind of Christian I like — the kind who knew he didn’t have all the answers.
In a recent issue of The Missouri Review, I read a thoughtful article on Ken Kesey by M.C. Armstrong. The article quoted from a 1994 Paris Review interview in which Kesey talked about his Christian faith. Kesey said: “I’m for mystery, not interpretive answers. The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answers, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
That reminded me of a newspaper column written several years ago by Jody Seymour, pastor of Davidson (NC) United Methodist Church, in which he said the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. His words said to me that having doubt and having faith weren’t mutually exclusive. Armed with that, I came to understand that all I can really know with certainty is that I don’t have a clue.
A teacher of meditation from the 1970s whose name escapes me called it “don’t know mind.” He said it is the place where we are empty of preconceived notions and have therefore become teachable.
If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking.
Of course, even being too attached to the idea of mystery dances me closer to the edge of thinking I have the answers. All I can do if I want to always be seeking is to keep planting a garden where those mysteries can bloom.
