Finding God in both the miraculous and the mechanics
I’ve been thinking about mystery lately, not as a conversation-stopper, but as something more generous. I’ve used “God works in mysterious ways” before, sometimes like I was closing a door. A sort of shrug, really. “Well, I don’t understand it, so I’ll just accept it.” That blind faith element. I’ve now come to see it as a profound acknowledgement of the sacred and the ordinary intermingling.
Take those stories I’ve witnessed. Someone prays for help, and that same day, a friend feels moved to reach out with exactly what’s needed. I’ve seen this repeatedly at my church in Canterbury. Financial needs met by gifts that were prayerfully given, often without explicit knowledge of the need. Just a sense that someone should give, and it turns out to be exactly what was required. The sceptic in me knows about unconscious pattern recognition (marketing psychology taught me this), about the thousands of subtle cues we process without awareness. The believer in me has felt that unmistakable sense of being part of something larger.
Then there are the harder-to-explain stories. A friend facing surgery for a heart issue (a valve problem, if I remember correctly). Scans before, prayer throughout, then new scans just before the procedure showing… nothing wrong. Everything functioning as it should. The medical team comparing images, checking again. Between those scans, we prayed, and healing came.
Here’s what I’m learning: I don’t have to choose.
The brain does extraordinary things. Music in worship genuinely alters our neurochemistry (the research on this is fascinating). Communities create feedback loops of emotion and meaning that can be mapped and studied. We can explain the mechanism behind many experiences that feel transcendent. But does understanding how something works diminish its capacity to move us? Does knowing how love affects our neurones make it less real?
When Jesus talked about the kingdom of God being within us, among us (Luke 17, Matthew 12), he seemed less interested in supernatural fireworks than in the radical reorganisation of actual human relationships. The miracle wasn’t just the healing, it was the restoration to community, the overturning of who gets to belong. Pretty mundane stuff, really. Pretty revolutionary.
Paul gave us cosmic drama and spiritual warfare. But even he kept coming back to the practical: how to share meals (1 Corinthians 11), how to use your gifts (1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12), how to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6).
Maybe mystery isn’t what’s left when we run out of explanations. Maybe it’s what emerges when we realise the natural and supernatural might be different ways of seeing the same thing. The person who felt prompted to help might have been responding to unconscious social cues AND participating in divine action. The worship experience might be neurologically explicable AND a genuine encounter with the sacred.
There’s something liberating about not having to defend mystery as ignorance or attack it as delusion. Sometimes it’s the acknowledgement that reality is wilder than our categories. That the mundane machinery of consciousness and community might be precisely how the divine moves in the world.
I’m not suggesting we stop investigating, stop questioning. But perhaps we can investigate with wonder intact. Perhaps we can explain without explaining away.
The mystery isn’t in the gaps, it’s in the whole magnificent, messy system. That feels more worthy of awe than any supernatural interruption of natural law ever could. It’s not about choosing between faith and reason. It’s about recognising that maybe they were never opponents to begin with.
P.S. I’ve given chapters rather than specific verses. Individual verses can construct convenient stories; chapters at least offer broader context. The whole book would be better, but chapters are a decent compromise.
Jonathan Pay - email marketing consultant 