A quote I ran across recently…
“The strong urge to tender allegiance and therein to achieve security and salvation, which characterizes the human response to the numinous experience, contains in it temptation to remodel the image of the numinous ever closer to the heart’s desire, to see it more and more under human forms, to soften estrangement from its stark otherness by seeing it under familiar images taken from human society and human interrelations, so as to broaden the basis for community and contact.” ~Thorkild Jacobsen (1961)~
Jacobsen, of course, is writing about the ancient Sumerian’s experience of the numinous. But human nature being human nature and the numinous being the numinous, I suspect that our experience of the numinous is not so far removed from the ancient Sumerian’s. The temptation to model the numinous to the heart’s desire, to make it more human and less Other is a temptation we face just as they did. How often do we shy away from the Otherness? How often is our spirituality, our prayers, even our Bible study and discussion shaped by our attempting to mold God into our image. After all, if we can talk about God in terms of human relationship and human understanding, we can avoid talking about God in terms of Other… in terms of being above and beyond us in more ways and to an extent greater than we can comprehend. But God is Other. He is so utterly unlike us as to render our attempts at pretending he is rather comical to some degree. What would our spiritual lives be like if we were more willing to embrace the otherness? How would our prayers change? Our worship services? Would we related to others differently, argue differently, change our theologies and move into the realm of the uncomfortable? I suspect we might… and that perhaps the knowledge of that on some level contributes to our trying to make God like us instead of ourselves like him. But of course, being human and limited in our understanding that way, how can we understand the Other and be changed by it?
I think we totally limit God to what we understand – especially in our prayer lives. After all, we’re told that God can move mountains, but do we really believe that? I don’t think very many people do.