Trading control for an encounter with mystery

We are obsessed with control. Well, that may not be true for all. Let me speak more personally: I am obsessed with control. What time will my roommate be home? How exactly is the exam being graded? The settings of the washer must be just so, so that the clothes inside will end up looking the way I want them to look. So many facets of my day and life are held tightly in my pasty fists so that my world may continue to go round in the manner I think it ought to.

This is not always a bad thing; often my tight grip of control is what enables me to have dinner with my roommate, to receive high marks on my papers, and to maintain sweaters in the size and shape their manufacturers intended. Yet, there are times when the need for control controls me.

Perhaps this tendency toward control finds its origins in Francis Bacon. He famously said that we could know nothing unless we discovered it by scientific examination and that we must scientifically discover all. He further taught that, by knowing nature, we take control over it, and in controlling nature, we ought to harness it and use it for our own ends. (Please note that, yes, I am blaming my control issues on a scientist from the 1600s.) His paradoxical quote, “We cannot command nature without obeying her,” still implies that we can, in some way, command nature. And what’s wrong with that? We channel the power of water to generate electricity with which we cast light into the darkness. We can clone sheep to expand our crops. We can create a heavily endowed chicken to produce more meat for our tables. We can grow a human in a dish and implant it in the womb of a woman who is not its mother. What starts as good innovation quickly twists into problematic distortions.

The Age of Enlightenment was an era of progress, but, like many other periods in human history, the following generation contradicted the preceding one. Enter the Romantics.

There are times when the need for control controls me.

Letting go of control

Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, and artistic movement of the 1800s, argues against the enlightened control freaks who came before. Romantics focus instead on the intuition, the common man, isolation, and the power of nature. Of these figures, one in particular comes to mind.

He was out of control.

One of the most preeminent American Romantics, poet Walt Whitman, sang of nature and its mysteries, which mirrored the mysteries of the self. He rejected the scientific straight lines of the Enlightenment and instead focused on the things he could not control. In “Song of Myself” (6), he writes:

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

Whitman takes a pondering stance toward nature, not seeking to control it, but rather wondering at this thing and what it may be. The following lines ponder what the grass might be — not what we could make it, nor how we are to use it, but what it is and our relationship to it. Is it “the flag of my disposition?” Is it “the handkerchief of the Lord?” Or maybe the grass itself is a child? From Whitman’s perspective, we do not have to make one choice; all these things can be true at once. He rejects the strict control of the Enlightenment thinkers, seeking to know, not just to understand.

When the speaker gives up his control, he is freed to have a personal encounter with something higher.

A notable Whitman poem that reveals this truth is “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” The poem shifts from Enlightenment-style thinking to a Romantic approach:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

The speaker is stuck in a lecture hall where things are terribly clear and straightforward. The punctuation seems to dissect the lines into manageable, controlled chunks. But, as the speaker concludes: This is no way to really learn about the world. This is no way to really live. Instead, the speaker makes a different choice. He surrenders this mathematical understanding of the world around him and instead seeks out an actual encounter with the unknown; he seeks an encounter with the mystical. It is only when confronted with the mystery, with the grandeur of something he cannot control, that the speaker comes to have a deeper relationship with the world around him. In other words, when the speaker gives up his control, he is freed to have a personal encounter with something higher.

Leave room for mystery

There are many things in life we cannot control. And that is a good thing. To be always in control is to believe you have ownership (and therefore responsibility) over all. Not only is that a lot of pressure, but it also makes the world smaller. We must remember, like Whitman, to leave room for the mystical — to leave room for God.

Often in my life, I try to white knuckle it. I must be in control of when things happen, how they happen. But leaving room for mystery means leaving room for wonder at the plan God has in store for me. My plan is usually far more boring than the truly remarkable path God leads me down. Mine is usually a lot safer as well. But to live like a Romantic is to live dangerously, to recognize the beauty in the sublime and the terror of witnessing and bowing to a power you cannot and should not seek to control.

Leaving room for mystery means leaving room for wonder at the plan God has in store for me.

I’m not going to stop asking when my roommate will be home, asking how exams are graded, or fine-tuning the settings on the washing machine. It may be time, however, to surrender a control I never had in the first place and encounter our loving God, who has gifted us this great adventure. 

Rosie Hall is a published writer, podcast producer, and lover of well-steeped tea. Her articles have appeared in CatholicVote’s LOOP, Caeli Catholic, Blessed is She, and the online lifestyle magazine Refine. She has also appeared as a guest on the LOOPcast. After spending several years discerning a religious vocation, Rosie went to school for literature at Ave Maria University, where she graduated summa cum laude and received the departmental award for literature. In the fall, she plans to study for her Master’s in English at Oxford University.