Numinous

I hang with quite a few charismatic and Pentecostals so I am around people who are always “feeling the presence of the Lord.” I think that phrase is the Christianize that is used to explain the sense that God is near or maybe it is the jargon that is applied to indicate what the Holy Spirit is up to. It’s hard to say what it means exactly because we as Christians fall back on the tried and true phrasing and then all nod like we understand. But do we really understand? Christianize so often becomes the equivalent of the secret handshake—it’s a way of bonding but really nobody quite knows what it means. Also, the jargon ends up excluding people who are new to the faith or seeking. Arrrgghhh!! It makes me crazy.

C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain does a better job of describing that encounter with the supernatural, that awareness that there is something beyond the comprehension of our senses. He even has a word for it: Numinous. It is the object, though unseen, that stirs a sense of awe in us. A sense of the Numinous can happen when walking in a forest, or reading an exquisite poem or entering a cathedral, when waking from a vivid dream anywhere, anytime. It is a moment to which we cannot really attribute words but we come into a unique “knowing” that is beyond words.

Numinous is not God specifically because even pagan religions acknowledge the existence of the supernatural. Numinous serves as the doorway to enter into that wordless understanding that God is here right now. Now I have goose pimples. The verse in Romans 1 shows us how we get from the Numinous to a creator God. The verse that says that what examining what God has created leads in one of two directions. One. we start to comprehend the intelligent mind behind the artwork or Two. we start to think that the numinous power is in the created thing i.e. paganism.

Not That Clean

Maybe I am the only one who did this, but when my kids were little, it would never fail. After a stressful time of getting kids dressed and ready and loaded into the car, I would look over at the passenger seat and there would be one of my kids with chocolate stains on his or her face or mud or whatever.

So what would I do? You got it. The mommy spit clean. Didn’t want anyone thinking I was a bad mom who couldn’t keep her kids clean. The problem was even though the mud stain went away and my kid looked clean, he or she actually had my spit germs all over his or her face. The kid was way dirtier than when he had the mud stain on his face. Spit cleaning is gross. It was my fear of men (or in this case other moms) and what other people would think of me as a mom that made me do something like that.

When I first became a Christian so much of the advice I was given focused one externals, the stuff other Christians would see. Don’t do yoga? Horoscopes are evil? Don’t date a non Christian? It’s important to “witness” to non-believers, go to church. Nobody talked to me about the condition of my heart, which was really broken. Focusing on externals and thinking that is the way to be a good Christian only leads to self righteousness if you can maintain all the externals. I am reminded of Jesus telling the Pharisees that they were like whitewashed tombs with dead bones on the inside.

And if you can’t maintain all those externals, it just leads to feeling really defeated. I remember being wracked with guilt because I glanced at a horoscope in a woman’s magazine. When he chose a king, God cared more about David’s heart than he care about his physical stature. And when He chose me, he knew I loved him with all of my broken heart.
I think I have spent the second half of my Christianity trying to get back to that first love. How easy it is to be happy with the spit cleaned Christian life and the germs nobody sees. The problem is that people who do things to please men and people whose fruit is a result of a heart turned toward God often look the same. We can fool everyone but the one who matters. But God sees my heart and I want him to be pleased with what he sees, regardless of the world thinks. Regardless of how I fall short of those legalistic and kooky definitions of “good Christian mom” and “Good Christian wife.”

No More Masks

“We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well—except that it gets very lonely inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known.”
Frederick Buechner
The Hungering Dark


And I am tired of my mask. So much of Christianity is about pretending. Gotta keep up the profile of “Good Christian Woman.” Arrrgghhhh! I can’t do that anymore. I don’t want a faith that is like a coat I put on to impress people. I want something more. I want faith in the marrow of my bones. So here I am taking off my mask.