Can we know too much?  Looking at our cat the other day, sleeping peacefully, tucked into a blanket on the sofa, seemingly without a care in the world, I thought how simple her life is.  She knows little, yes, but she doesn't need to.  She is a cat.  And she doesn't even know that!
     In this present age, often dubbed the information age, an age in which so many of us have become so dependent upon and often worshipful of knowledge--of all kinds--we rarely stop to think whether we really need all the information we are receiving.  Maybe we do, maybe we don't.  But how do we know?  As the biblical writer opined many centuries ago, "In increasing knowledge is increasing pain."  How many of us have heard the phrase, "Ignorance is bliss?"  
     In many cases, this is true.  In many instances, we're better off not knowing.  In others, we of course are well served to know.  Yet however much we know, we must be prepared to deal with it in a responsible way.  Knowledge is often life changing, and life ending as well.  We want to know, yes, but we should know that the more we know, the more we do not and, significantly, the less mystery we have in our lives.
     Before Adam and Eve ate the "fruit," they did not know sin.  They had not tasted of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Now they, and all of us with them, do.  Are we better off?
     As finite beings in a finite world, yet a world created and pervaded by an infinite God, we should expect, even welcome mystery.  It's a inevitable part of our experience and being.  Sometimes we should welcome not knowing.  Sometimes we should welcome the not seeing all.
     In truth, if there were no mystery in the cosmos, we would likely not be.  Not only is the impersonal incomprehensible, but it is impossibly suited to birth mystery.  It is thoroughly opaque.
     Only divinity opens a door.