The Mystery (of the Sacraments, the Eucharist in particular, and the Incarnation, as well as alot of other stuff)

This is a phenomenal quote, and is a partial insight into why I love Sacramental worship, and why I think it's one of the best things Christianity has to offer the typical young person of our time. It's why young hipster Seattle-ites crowd into St. Mark's Cathedral every Sunday night for Compline, though they hardly know what they're being exposed to, it's why witchcraft and New Age spirituality in various forms is exploding, and it's why Evangelical Christianity is fading into irrelevance and mere self-preservation, (well, there are other reasons for all those things as well, but this one plays no small part!) As we try to know everything exhaustively through our ever-increasing technological apparatus by way of 'the scientific method,' we eliminate mystery. Not because we've actually succeeded in 'debunking' anything, (the whole idea of dis-enchanting the world and being a habitual 'debunker' is a dubious pursuit to begin with I'd say...unless you like places like Auschwitz and the Gulag) but because our claims to know all (or that we will someday know everything, or just about everything) do not permit a notion of mystery. More importantly, our arrogance does not want to permit such a thing. Something incomprehensible would be an insult to our claim to the possibility of complete knowledge of everything, but more honestly, to our sense of power over all those things we might know. Should God Himself make a claim that is beyond our ability to contain rationally, we don't actually argue against it, or for it, or whatever, we simply eliminate it as a possible answer, thereby usually eliminating the question also. As you consider the notion of Sacrament (a material/physical way of giving and receiving divine grace), and why it so powerful, keep the quote below in mind. I believe that in receiving the Eucharist, I am not just memorializing the life, death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, I am actually encountering Him in the elements as well. In the final analysis friends, it may indeed be just bread and wine after all, but what a truly awful impoverishment...so let us keep the feast.

"Partly because the history of the intellect in the West has Christian roots, and partly because Christians wish to remain in dialogue with the secular mind, we in the West fail to satisfy the hunger of those who come and stare at the feast. Living among those utilitarian rationalists who control the world and with whom we seek to communicate, we Christians can forget the nature of Christian perception. We confess to doctrines profoundly mysterious by their nature- that a man should be God, that one God should be at the same time three persons, that we of corruptible flesh should also be temples of the living God. So we believe, but so we cannot comfortably think. For as 'thoughts,' these are in essence mystery. Mystery is what many contemporary minds are hungry for; it is what they seek for afield, in the non-Christian realms and such Eastern, Asiatic sources as the Bhagavad Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We Christians in the west have not shared what we possess. We have mystery in plenty, yet our own discourse averts it, avoids it as if in embarassment. For mystery is what we have been taught through our education to relentlessly extinguish...Our continual impulse is not to 'apprehend' mystery, but to render it extinct."
Anthony Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon pgs. 93-94