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.