“It is one thing merely to believe in a reality beyond the senses and another to have experience of it also; it is one thing to have ideas of ‘the holy’ and another to become consciously aware of it as an operative reality, intervening actively in the phenomenal world.” — Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
The rock is the color of sand, and unevenly flat, like a scale model of a vast but low mountain range worn down by ancient glaciers. Or, here, by human touch and the gravity of what people carry in their depths to this hallowed ground.
It’s a square that measures roughly 10 feet by 10 feet. It is in the floor of what is called the Church of All Nations, also known as the Church of Gethsemane or the Basilica of Agony, in Jerusalem. It is next to the Garden of Gethsemane and the rock is traditionally believed to be the place where Jesus prayed to God for the last time—Father, take this cup, yet not as I will, but as you will—before he was betrayed by Judas, as he knew he would be, and arrested. The rock is alive. It resonates with the profound history of the Christian faith, takes you back 2,000 years to when and where it all began.
I am standing nearby, a learned and curious observer. The lighting is dim and the sounds are hushed. I watch people approach the rock with what I imagine to be awe, reverence, and most likely some inarticulable blend of many other emotions. Everyone is respectfully silent or speaking in whispered tones. Some people stand and gaze at it, others kneel beside it and for a moment remain there in an attitude of prayer.
The solemnity is occasionally broken. Some people pose to have their pictures taken with the rock behind them, fixing their hair just so for the sake of posterity. Others video the place, their camera lights piercing the dimness like police searchlights, rending the contemplative air. I wonder: What do these people hope to capture. Or remember? Taking photos or videos can project you into the future. You’re hoping to remember a place and time in which you were never really present to begin with. And if you aren’t present in this place, you miss the whole point of being here, which is to affix yourself to the passion of Jesus and pay homage to the life and death of a man who changed the course of humanity by showing us the direct way to God.
This is what I’m thinking when, above the din of the traffic outside and the hushed voices inside, comes the faint and mournful cry of a woman kneeling by the rock. She is dark-skinned and dressed in a bright green sari. There are a few others with her, also with dark skin and in saris of other bright colors, each one standing or kneeling by the rock, some bowing down to kiss it and to lay their foreheads on it. The woman in the green sari lets out a wail, like she’s just learned about the death of her only child, pulls back, then collapses on the marble floor, and is consoled by her companions. Then another woman collapses nearby and is held in the arms of yet another as she gazes up at the vaulted ceiling, painted a deep blue and filled with stars and olive branches, reminiscent of the nearby Garden of Gethsemane at night. Another from the group steps close to the rock, kneels, bows, and lays her forehead upon it, and begins to cry—a little at first, then in big, heaving sobs.
At the time, I was a fledgling theologian. It was June 1999, the summer before my final year as a seminarian in New York City. I took my studies seriously and at one point in those inspiring but difficult years, I concluded that any Christian theologian worth his or her salt had to make a pilgrimage to the place on earth where Jesus Christ lived and died. To sidestep that part of my education felt like someone learning how to cook by studying recipes but never setting foot in a kitchen and making anything. Or learning how to love another by reading about it.
No doubt, the academy was filling my head with new knowledge and the wisdom of the ages, which is an important component of any theological education. But I felt there was no substitute for immersing myself in the geography of where Christianity began. We are all born of a place; we all come from somewhere. And so does religious faith. We can learn a lot about ourselves and others by tracing our historical roots. So too when it comes to religious faith. At the time, this was important to me. And it remains important to me now.
As I watch these women sob at the site of Jesus’ final hours before his crucifixion, I have to admit that all the years up to then, learning from wise professors and from hefty tomes and fragments of primary sources found in the seminary’s catacomb-like library stacks, had done nothing to impress upon me an undeniable feeling for the Christian faith—its complete embodiment—that I was witnessing in these women.
The memory has stayed with me for all these years. I am writing about this now because I’m coming to understand that without feeling rooted—not only to place, but also to an inexpugnable transcendent vision of human existence—we become easy prey for the manipulative whims and dark, shifting winds of certain overlords who have always been with us and who have aspired to nothing else but to render us all into human chattel. They did it during Jesus’ time. And they’re doing it now.
Rudolf Otto (September 25, 1869 – March 6, 1937) was a renowned German theologian and historian of religion. His book, The Idea of the Holy, drawing upon a variety of Western and Eastern sages and informed by personal experience, was one of the defining works of the 20th century. Although his work is inspired by a handful of prominent German thinkers, particularly Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jakob Fries, and Karl Barth, The Idea of the Holy stood out from the theological orthodoxy of that time and foreshadowed the religious explorations that would follow and continue up to the present day.
First published in German in 1917 and in English in 1923, the book has never gone out of print and is now available in some 20 languages. Its full title is The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. Consider this title a warning that with this book you’re not getting any “lite” beach reading. To be sure, when I first read sections of it at the seminary, I found much of it impenetrable. I recently read the entire book and still found sections of it, if not impenetrable, then at the very least difficult to understand and absorb. I found myself having to re-read many sentences, and even entire pages, to fully comprehend what Otto was describing. And I really wanted to understand it all because I knew deep in my heart that it was of great value and importance, perhaps now more than ever.
I think part of the reason the book is difficult to understand is due to its origin in the German language and its grammar, which do not always translate easily into English. But another reason is simply because of the subject matter itself. The holy—the entire idea of it that Otto tries to pinpoint and dissect as though under a kind of intellectual microscope—is both simple and complicated. That is, the experience of it, while profound, is simple; writing about it is quite another matter. In other words, Otto claims that we know the holy when we encounter it like we know our own face when we see it reflected back at us, like those women did kneeling at the rock in that church in Jerusalem. But it can be nearly impossible to describe because, as even Otto himself admits, the personal experience of it is almost beyond words. It is, in a word, ineffable.
We may experience the holy but once in our lifetimes or we may have many such experiences, but, in either case, they are always fleeting. Yet, they stay with us. We are changed. Otto calls these fleeting experiences encounters with the “numinous”, a word that Otto coined from the Latin word numen, or divine power, in a similar way that we get the word “ominous” from the Latin word “omen.” Otto described it as a “creature-feeling” or creature-consciousness. Here are Otto’s own words to define this divine power:
“The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its ‘profane,’ non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”
Individual experiences such as these are invaluable because they reveal to us where we stand in the universal and eternal scheme of things: that we are small and insignificant; that we think we know so much but actually know so little. This is an inescapable conundrum of the human condition for those of us with the insight and courage to admit it. Yet, at the same time, these encounters of the holy also impress upon us the capacity to sense and cooperate with a divine authority above all others. We might call this a process of discernment. And it is both liberating and troubling. Once we have had an experience of the divine it should come as no surprise that we can then recognize evil.
And it’s these powers of discernment and divine authority that the contemporary transhumanists stalking the world—just like all dictators throughout history—want to eradicate from us so they can manipulate us and capture us in the physical and virtual web—think of 5G and 6G technology and AI for starters—of their satanic malfeasance. If we lose our connection to the holy, we lose an essential feature of our human nature—our capacity for discernment and our connection to that which is transcendent. Otto himself says as much: “Its disappearance would indeed be an essential loss.” But not only that. Without the holy as a constant presence in our lives we put ourselves at the mercy of those who want to control us, and they are closing in.
Sadly, I think a lot of people have either forsaken this capacity in themselves or have never even known it and, as a result, have unwittingly or enthusiastically given themselves over to the long-running takedown of Western civilization, the final assault of which got underway in 2020 with the COVID-19 psyop, and which is continuing in a myriad of ways today, right up to the recent and fraudulent “No Kings” demonstration that spilled out into streets all over America, funded by—unbeknownst to the riled up participants—as James Howard Kunstler points out, “Shanghai-based software billionaire Neville Roy Singham, Walmart heiress Christy Walton, Paypal partner (and Linked-in founder) Reid Hoffman, and father-and son team, George and Alex Soros.” The demonstrators and their backers are much the same coterie who badgered us to “trust the science” and line up to get injected with a so-called vaccine that, as it turned out—and as many of us knew from the get-go—is a bioweapon designed to control and maim and kill us.
I am loathe to give any globalist a fraction of an inch of this column, but we need to know their agenda, and it’s been stated in no uncertain terms by Yuval Noah Harari, a key advisor of that demonic alliance, the World Economic Forum:
“Some governments and corporations, for the first time in history have the power to basically hack human beings. There is a lot of talk about hacking computers and hacking smart phones and hacking bank accounts, but the big story of our era is the ability to hack human beings. And by this I mean, if you have enough data, and computing power, you can understand people better than they understand themselves, and then you can manipulate them in ways which were previously impossible. And in such a situation, the old democratic systems stop functioning. We need to reinvent democracy for this new era in which humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have a soul and spirit and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening inside me so whatever I chose, whether in the election or whether in the supermarket, this my free will, that’s over.”
It’s not over, I’m here to say, and it will never be over as long as we summon the strength from within to not only turn off in every way possible the globalist’s attempts at “hacking” our minds and bodies and souls, but also by developing and maintaining our capacity to remember the holy. The holy is the foremost antidote to the transhumanist toxicity. But the holy is not something we do. It is something we experience; it’s something that happens to us. It cannot be taught. It cannot be bought. It can only be awakened in the mind, Otto insists, as “everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.” Perhaps most important, according to Otto, it is something that is felt. And this feeling for the numinous is an experience of the divine that, Otto maintains, eludes comprehension in rational terms. We can set out to find it. But more often than not, the transcendent finds us. And it goes way, way back. Otto writes:
“It first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny’, ‘eerie’, or ‘weird’. It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point, for the entire religious development in history…. And all ostensible explanations of the origin of religion in terms of animism or folk-psychology are doomed from the outset to wander astray and miss the real goal of their inquiry, unless they recognize this fact of our nature—primary, unique, underivable from anything else—to be the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution.”
Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane perfectly encapsulates this holy awe. It is in light of this ancient numinous experience that we can begin to comprehend the import of this agony. Otto writes: “Can it be ordinary fear of death in the case of one who had had death before his eyes for weeks past and who had just celebrated with clear intent his death-feast with his disciples? No, there is more here than the fear of death; there is the awe of the creature before the mysterium tremendum, before the shuddering secret of the numen.” The women I saw weeping at the stone in the Basilica of Agony seemed to me to have felt this essential and ungovernable “awe of the creature” that Christ must have felt 2000 years ago.
As I watched those women, I felt a little envious of them. I longed to feel what I believed they felt, to trade in the critical and exegetical machinations of my mind for the simple yet profound embodiment of Christ’s passion. When we recall that agony, either there at the rock where Jesus prayed, like those women, or at the altar of the holy feast of the transubstantiated bread and wine, or anywhere else for that matter—when we recall those final hours of the earthly life of Jesus, as he commended us to do during what we call the Last Supper, we unite his agony with our own. It is the agony experienced by anyone who stands up to despots and their evil diktats in the struggle for the individual human sovereignty divinely bestowed upon each of us at birth, nay, even at the moment of our conception.
The Idea of the Holy has had many admirers over the years, including from the very outset the prominent Swiss psychologist, C.G. Jung; the renowned Romanian historian of religion and philosopher, Mircea Eliade; and the celebrated British Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis. Other prominent figures who claim to have been influenced by Otto’s work include Mohandas Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, Martin Heidegger, and Ernst Jünger.
In his 1938 book, Psychology and Religion, Jung defines the numinous as “a dynamic existence or affect, not caused by an arbitrary act of will.” He goes on to say, “On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human subject, which is always its victim than its creator. The numinosum is an involuntary condition of the subject, whatever its cause may be…. The numinosum is either a quality of a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence causing a peculiar alteration of consciousness.” All told, for Jung, the solution to all our dilemmas is found through an encounter with the numinous. Jungian analyst James Hollis writes in his book, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times: “Until we can find that which links us to that which transcends us, in whatever arena we may find it, we will be torn apart… until then, our conflicts have brought us only suffering without meaning.”
In the opening paragraph of Eliade’s notable 1957 book, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, he praises the original point of view that Otto offers:
“Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience…. Passing over the rational and speculative side of religion, he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto has read Luther and had understood what the ‘living God’ meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers…. it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath.”
In his 1940 book, The Problem of Pain, Lewis offers an extensive depiction of the numinous:
“Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room,’ and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room’, and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it…. This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.”
Not all encounters with the numinous are dreadful and disturbing; not all are, as Eliade writes, “manifested in the divine wrath.” They can also be serene and sublime. Otto writes of such encounters:
“The awe or ‘dread’ may indeed be so overwhelmingly great that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making the man’s hair bristle and his limbs quake. But it may also steal upon him almost unobserved as the gentlest of agitations, a mere fleeting shadow passing across his mood. It has therefore nothing to do with intensity, and no natural fear passes over into it merely by being intensified. I may be beyond all measure afraid and terrified without there being even a trace of the feeling of uncanniness in my emotion.”
In The Problem of Pain, Lewis offers what he believes to be the finest example of just such an encounter from the English Romantic-era poet, William Wordsworth, who describes in the first book of his “Prelude” a scene of rowing on a lake one evening in a stolen boat. In the middle of the lake in the quiet of the night, Wordsworth writes:
There hung a darkness, call it solitude Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; But huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
There’s another scene in the fourth book of that “Prelude” that to me speaks of the numinous as an experience not of dread—not “a trouble to my dreams”—but of sublime beauty. It reads thus:
And homeward led my steps. Magnificent The morning rose, in memorable pomp, Glorious as e’er I had beheld—in front, The sea lay laughing at a distance; near, The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, Grain-tinctured, drench in empyrean light; And in the meadows and the lower grounds Was all the sweetness of a common dawn— Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds, And labourers going forth to till the fields. Ah! need I say, dear Friend! that to the brim My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit. On I walked In thankful blessedness, which yet survives.
I took a seminar in college on the English Romantic poets and it was one of my favorites. I still have the textbook, a thick volume, underlined (of course) in many places and whose spine is cracking from all the use I’ve made of the book over all these years, and from which I copied the lines above. One of the lines from the second example that struck me then and still strikes me today is this:
I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me....
Numinous moments—always unexpected yet sometimes invited or evoked or sought after—change us, set us off in directions we had not previously anticipated. They come and they go. Yet, as Wordsworth knows—and we who have had such encounters know—they yet survive. They live within us and guide us through the rest of our days, help us discern between right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Or, in the first example of Wordsworth’s poem, they haunt us. In either case, they become encoded within us and shape who we are in such a way that they cannot be taken from us. And that’s a good thing.
I’ve begun to wonder if these authoritative powers of self-knowledge and discernment and divine authority—what we read in the Letter to the Ephesians as the “armor of God”—can intuitively alert us to the tempting but heinous provocations of illusion and false promises of those wolves in sheep’s clothing that Jesus warns us about, of which the profane realm is chockfull at every turn. And of which we most recently endured in spades during the COVID-19 psyop: Two weeks to stop the spread; masks protect you and those around you; social distancing keeps everyone safe; the school closures, the shutting down of businesses (although, curiously, big box stores and liquor stores were allowed to remain open); the closing of public parks and beaches was for the common good; the COVID-19 vaccines (which were not vaccines) are safe and effective.
Truly, never has there been a greater and more destructive payload of lies rained down upon the human race. I did not fall for these lies and I know many others who did not. And I wonder if having had an initiatory experience of the numinous at some point in our lives—and being attuned to the transcendent as a result—helps us see through the lies of those trying to sell us false promises, be it concerning a used car, a so-called vaccine, or even a way to God. Which is to say that we know Kool-Aid when we see it. And we refuse that cup knowing it is a sham. Or, worse, poison. And perhaps this explains why it’s been so hard for us to get through to others who bought and embraced the lies—and continue to do so. They simply don’t know what the rest of us know. Which gives us no reason to gloat but rather an opportunity to understand.
