One of the more challenging aspects of writing about either religion or spirituality is how to adequately reflect the many ways in which life’s highest and deepest concerns may show up in our lives. For example, even when avoiding overtly theological language, it’s very easy to be drawn into what we might call the “God Problem.” That said, particular beliefs about the nature of divinity — let alone about the existence or non-existence of God – are really secondary to the exploration of life’s most profound and meaning-laden questions. Why are we here? Do our lives have meaning and purpose? What is love? What lies behind the veil of death? While the contemplation of such questions has always been essential to the evolution and wellbeing of our inner lives, many of us today lack language with which to meaningfully engage in such exploration.
Like many contemporary spiritual seekers, scholars of comparative religion have also struggled to understand what lies at the core of the world’s many and diverse religious traditions. Despite all the ways beliefs and practices differentiate one religion from another, what might they be said to share in common? Among the scholars seeking to answer this question is William Paden. In his book, Religious Worlds, he writes “what characterizes religious behavior is that it takes place with reference to things that are deemed sacred.” While the sacred can have any content, Paden observes, to the adherent “it is always something of extraordinary power and reality.”
While, in the end, the nature and content of experiences of the sacred will always be subjective to the experiencer – sort of an “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of encounter – there are nevertheless some useful general observations we can make about the sacred when it manifests. While, like love, the concept of sacredness is an elusive one to define, I think we can begin to define “the sacred” by some of its attributes. Two of these hallmarks of the sacred – wonder and awe — were first described in 1917 by a German Protestant theologian named Rudolf Otto in a book called Das Heilige (published in English as The Idea of the Holy).
Before writing this book, Otto traveled extensively in North Africa, the Middle East, India, and the Far East and explored a wide range of religious traditions. Otto’s encounters with such a varied array of religious practices and symbols and his ability to observe their impact at first hand left him with a profound recognition of the enormous power such practices and symbols held for their adherents. In particular, Otto noticed that, unlike many of his Protestant European contemporaries, the individuals he encountered on his travels in the East seemed to experience the sacred in ways that were both immediate and deeply emotional.
To describe this phenomenon of directly apprehending—or perhaps, more accurately, of being seized by—the sacred, Otto coined the word ‘numinous’ from the Latin numen, referring to a local divinity or the spirit of a particular place. He also observed that the experience of the numinous is comprised to two quite different – even opposing – responses in us. One of these two instinctual responses to the numinous – described using the Latin word fascinans, or fascination — is to be gripped and transfixed by a profound sense of wonder that transports us to place of rapture. The other response – which Otto described as tremendum, or trembling – fills us with an overpowering sense of awe, as in the root of the word “awful,” literally meaning to be “filled with awe.” While the experience of wonder in the presence of the numinous fills us with delight and even a sense of rapture, the experience of awe fills us with a realization of what Otto called our “creaturely-ness,” a profound awareness of our all-too-human limitations.
As I reflect on my own experiences of the numinous, I realize that one of the most formative occurred many years ago on my first camping trip. I was in my mid-twenties at the time and, like many children who grew up in or near cities, it was also my very first experience of seeing the full majesty of the night sky undimmed by manmade light. As day drew toward evening, I became more and more transfixed by both the enormous number of visible stars and the brilliance of their collective light. I ended up spending the entire night outside of our tent, gazing up at the breathtaking vision of the Milky Way slowly streaming across the heavens. I also vividly remember feeling for the first time a profound sense of how infinitesimally small my tiny spark of consciousness felt in the presence of such overwhelming celestial majesty.
This combination of wonder and awe – the paradoxical realization of the power of human consciousness to perceive the numinous combined with the equally profound recognition of the limitations of that consciousness – offers us one powerful frame of reference as we seek the sacred in our lives. Future postings will look at other powerful perspectives and paradigms which can help us to deepen both our appreciation for and our understanding of the sacred dimension of human experience.