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Beyond All Telling: Proclaiming the Mystery of Faith

“Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”
—G.K. Chesterton

Love requires deep knowledge of the beloved, but how can we deeply know the ineffable I AM?

Love requires encounter and mutual gift between persons, but how can we encounter a Triune God we seemingly cannot see or hear or touch? How do we recognize the gifts we have been given, and what have we to give in return?

The purpose of this blog is to encourage a holy love affair. Its method is to embrace the madness: to explore but never seek to domesticate the mystery of communion with Love and Truth and Being Itself.

It is easy to find “tellings” of religion: systematic theology, scriptural exegesis, tips and tricks and exhortations on how to pray, how to identify and conquer sin, how to explain your faith to others.

But in the rich prayers of Mass, we several times find the phrase “beyond all telling.” God and Love are far too big to be adequately told, and that is why we call them mysteries.

The authors of this blog are fraternal twins in the Mystical Body of Christ, brought together by the special providential care of our Heavenly Father and Mother. Both were received into the Catholic Church as young adult converts during Easter Vigil, 1998, less than 10 miles apart in the Washington, D.C., area. Yet they did not meet until almost 19 years later, when they made acquaintance through some mutual friends on Facebook and exchanged some occasional comments.

On the Feast of Mary, Mother of God, (January 1st) 2017, H.L. made a Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary, following an inspiration on the previous All Saints Day, H.L.’s 40th birthday. That evening, David sent H.L. a private message tentatively saying he felt strangely compelled to get to know each other better, having previously only encountered each other as friends of friends on Facebook. Though they now live 500 miles apart and have taken radically different paths since their conversion to Catholicism, they quickly discovered their common birthday in the Church, common Consecration, and many other common points of spirituality and interest. After some months of theological discussions in public and private Facebook forums, they decided to launch the Beyond All Telling blog together, and a year later they joined the Patheos Catholic channel.

H.L. is a true amateur in theology—in the happiest sense of a person who pursues the subject out of pure love, without any compensation but the joy of the pursuit. Blogging has led H.L. to begin discerning a call to ministry, going outside the Vatican’s strictly-enforced gender walls. Read about H.L.’s journey of faith that has led to embracing the label of “Episco-Catholic” here.

David has a Ph.D. in theology, and a degree in philosophy as well, and a crowd of former and current students who have caught the love of wisdom and God from his classes. He blogs under the moniker “Poetic Pedagogue” and shares a glimpse of his present bearings in his odyssey of faith here.

“Together let us proclaim the mystery of faith!”

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