The Beauty of Holiness

There is something about the way the human mind works that is fascinating. It is a big old world and to survive, creatures have to find ways to navigate within it. The human-animal uses the elaborately functioning rational ability we have been gifted with. Our physical senses are pretty good but we do not have the acuity of the five senses that some animals have. My dog, Jimmy, has me beat in the nose department. We don’t have the physical form that protects certain animals in this world. The tortoise is shielded. The Grizzly is, well, grizzly. Every creature has its strengths and limitations. We meet our vulnerabilities with what we have. Our strength is our reason. Our rational capacities go so far, and then we depend on other things.

I feel like our use of the mind has various aspects that make it even more powerful. We use memory, language, logic, and deductive reasoning. They can be applied to most aspects of awareness and discovery.  Beyond that, there is some kind of combination of our gifts that allows us, for example, intuition or a deep acknowledgment of mystery. Our capacity for abstraction lets us make room for the spiritual—the possibility of God. We might come to awareness there is One who knows all we cannot fathom. The prophet, Isaiah gives voice to poetry from the Omniscient One:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts.  —Isaiah 55:8-9

As we go through our lives, we may have experienced this inner sense of the Holy, in which we hold an awareness of that which is beyond us. Perhaps it is the sense we feel inside the dialectical tension of true paradox. When we sense mystery and find our inner being both drawn to it and holding back from it at the same time, this is an encounter with holiness. Something is very great and we are too small to contain it. We are sensing what theologians have named with Latin the Numinous (Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion). Leaning on its literal meaning, it is when the divine will itself give a creature a nod. The creature senses awareness as if the Universe has taken notice. Theologians use Latin to speak of mysterium tremendom. It is holy fear with attraction: that religious sense of wanting to be pulled in and be allowed to flee all at once.

I quite deliberately describe these spiritual sensibilities, humanity’s extra-rational and intuitive perceptiveness. This is because it is possible when we read Holy Scripture we come across feelings and concepts that form as a result of holy sensing. We do find bridges to the numinous, things that trigger our encounter with the Holy. This Sunday in the Liturgy we hear more from the very mystical Gospel of John. A small group is in the presence of Jesus. Two are the fishermen, Philip and Andrew, followers of Jesus. Two are Greek men that “want to see Jesus.” Well, they get their meeting. These two pairs of men come from very different backgrounds, but meeting Jesus they meet someone delivering something way beyond any of them. He is revealing a mystery, and his heavenly Father booms an announcement in the midst of it all. The mystery is the paradox that in death, the death of the Son of Man comes to the greatest glorification of the Life-giver possible. The Father seems to say that a first glorification is in the gift of the eternal Son of Man in his birth, the second will be in his death and what follows. Give it a good look:

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die..   —John 12:20-33

I do not get how the power of life is given to the world through the Son’s death. I do not rationally comprehend how this “defeat” spells glory to God and victory for all people in God. Do you? At the risk of sounding like Yogi Berra, I will declare, mysteries are not easily grasped. As we approach Holy Week in ten days which begins with Palm Sunday, let us all be prepared to be hit with the unexplainable, to be pulled into the mystery, to be enveloped by the Holy. The Son will indeed draw you, “draw all people” to himself. In awe and joy, we will be taken into his embrace of love.