One of my favorite books is a book called Discerning the Mystery by a man named Andrew Louth. It's at times intensely technical, always beautiful, and overall very concise (Only about 150 pages! Ask me about my working theory of the correlation between great non-fiction and the 150-page mark).
It's an important book to me because of one of its central premises, which shattered my approach to thinking about God and Church and the Faith in the best and most enlivening of ways. I've still not recovered.
The premise is this: for Christians, God is not a problem to be solved. Our task is not to figure out which inputs fit best in some divine formula, either for our thinking, our praying, or our living. Instead, God is a mystery (ie, something once hidden, now revealed) to enter in to, to be enveloped by, and explored.
The difference between these two ways of thinking can't be overstated or quickly dismissed. It is a radical difference, radical in the sense that it has to do with the very root of how we approach God. He isn't some object upon which we may turn our evaluative gaze to master or (worse) manipulate. He is the Thing behind and beyond all things, from which all things come, in whom all things live and move and have their being, and toward which all things reach (appropriately or inappropriately).
Now, there are all kinds of caveats to make about the solidity of doctrine and reliability of the Scriptures, etc. etc. And I believe all that--we can know things about God and there are real things like right and wrong. But to get hung up on that here is to miss the point.
The point is that God is utterly beyond us.
God is beyond gazing, grasping, manipulating, or comprehending. God is wild, and Other. And the great mystery of the Christian faith, that mystery for which the Church spent nearly all her energy in the early years of her life, is that once in ancient Israel that beyond-ness arrived in human flesh.
Infinity showed up within finitude. The creator became one of his own creatures. "Being" itself entered into "becoming."
It is hardly able to be understood; the Church invented words to describe it. But they recognized that this inventing was absolutely necessary because of what they could discern about the meaning of the Incarnation, and that is this: in the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ human nature is forever linked with divine nature. This the early Church saw is the meaning of salvation--to be taken up into the life of God--and it is accomplished via the fact of the Incarnation.
It is mind stretching and blowing and when we begin to understand--not comprehend but understand--we should never get over it. There is no moving on.
And it is because of this "thing" that we sing and feast and give and receive together in the coming days and weeks. There is no problem for us to solve, only an achingly beautiful mystery to explore.