Mystery, the Holy, and Joy

Mystery, the Holy, and Joy
Copyright Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The Christian mystic Rudolf Otto once coined the word “numinous” to describe that part of reality which both overarches and transcends the more mundane daily reality of our lives on this earth. The numinous is the sense that most, if not all, human beings possess that something mysterious and of ultimate value and meaning is present in the universe, but beyond the full reach of our highest sensory or intellectual powers. One might call this “something” both the wellspring and the object of the basic spirituality that every man and woman possesses.

Of course, being Christian, Otto identified the something as a Someone. In fact it was in his study of the holy attributes of God that he first used the term “numinous”. For the contemplative believer the mysterious yearning to enter into the ultimate meaning of our existence, that we may have known since childhood, can only be satisfied in the God of the Bible. It is in the Holy One of Israel that our inherent spiritual longing will someday find its fulfillment, if it is to be fulfilled at all.

Many Christians shrink away from that word “holy”. To some it means the part of God that is incomprehensibly different from us. For fearful believers it often comes with a terrible foreboding that springs from the contrast of His holiness with our own imperfections which we know are all too many. I will not endeavor to completely banish the sense of dread that our Lord’s holiness may cause our hearts to manifest. It some ways God is indeed the “Totaliter Aliter”, the “Totally Other” that the 20th century Swiss theologian Karl Barth professed Him to be. His holiness does embody a purity of perfection that causes God, the Father to dwell “in unapproachable light”, a light that is blinding and deadly to the fallen and finally unredeemed human being.

But, as another Christian mystic, A.W. Tozer tells us another attribute of the holy is that which is whole and healthy. As he put it “The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal, meaning, ‘well, whole.’” Holiness, it seems can touch us and leave us healed. We therefore can find ourselves craving holiness as well as fearing it.

Beyond this it is possibly in God’s holiness that we discover the resolution of a generic numinous spirituality with the reality of Jesus Christ. In some sense we are looking to Him when we look to the distant sky and feel the touch of the ultimate and the aching desire to wholly possess it, or perhaps more appropriately be wholly possessed by it. The farther I travel in my own Christian walk the more I sense that the wonder I possessed as a child finds its answer (and its recapturing) in seeing Jesus both in and beyond the natural world. Maybe this is what happens when the merely numinous becomes specifically identified with divine holiness. If that is the case then I really do ache for this aspect of God’s being to possess me completely, if not in this life then in the next.

So far I have felt no fear in my own recent contemplation of the trees of the forest framing the sky outside my window, even though I have more fully identified the experience it gives me with the God who created these things. If part of knowing God’s holiness is having some simultaneous feeling of fear I cannot say I have yet reached that point, at least not in my appreciation of the super-nature that I sense just beyond the nature I now take such pleasure in losing myself. If such a “healthy dread” is truly necessary to properly apprehend the awesome import of His holiness then so be it. I hope I will come to know such dread.

But right now it feels so good just to be able to see God in the earth and sky that I can only feel like a child again, looking off in the distance and knowing only wonder….and joy.