I just got back from an excellent and honest conversation with a gentleman at the church I used to attend here in the city. I am very thankful for the conversation we were able to have, and that not all Christians are fundamentalists (thank God!). That is one way to abate the stem of thoughts flowing in my head. But there are still more, flooding my consciousness. Perhaps a Sunday-installation, given that I’ve blogged more lightly, may also alleviate the explosive tension of my thoughts. And perhaps not.

‘Numinous’ is a term that was coined by the German theologian Rudolph Otto in an attempt to categorize and define human sentiment and reaction to perceived or imagined spiritual forces. The numinous is something that is ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ – mysterious in that it is wholly Other, stupefyingly different and beyond comprehension; tremendous in the size and scope of its power, mighty and awful and unapproachable; and fascinating in that despite the previous two qualities it draws the human viewer in, possessing a strangely attractive quality.

The experience of the numinous is not constrained to a particular religion or belief set, but is something universally experienced, Otto maintains, and different in quality from other feelings. One may feel a sense of dread and terror and awe and attraction to a tiger, for instance, but this is an entirely different emotion from that experienced when telling ghost stories around a dim campfire late at night and deep in the woods; and in the same way the sense of awe at the tiger is distinct from the religious experience of acknowledging, witnessing, or even participating in divine processes.

I, for example, when I was very young, was for a time filled with the sensation of the numinous when I considered the skeletons that, after my parents had gone to bed, would inevitably inhabit the half-bathroom in our house next to the home office. This would lead to my, when for some reason I needed to wake my parents (usually because of bad dreams), running past the office as quickly as possible, not stopping or slowing until I launched myself cannonball-style into my parents’ bed. Sometimes in my haste I tripped while in the hallway, adding to my terror of That Awful Something that might come and get me. But the numinous, while remaining on the verge of presence, is always just out of reach.

This is also the emotion evoked in suspense or thriller movies, at least when they are successful. I thought there was much good about Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds for this precise reason. The aliens were discovered to have buried giant machines deep underground, which were always there as we were building our cities and going about our business. We are never told the whys of the aliens’ actions, or what their motives are, but only shown what it is that they do, while we are powerless to do anything in return. (The brief disclosure of the aliens’ physical form later in the movie does much to spoil this.) But their presence, just out of direct human knowledge, and their inexplicable actions, made the aliens very numinous indeed. Other films evoke the same reaction in different ways; Hitchcock was of course pretty darn good at it.

But the existence of this emotion does not mean that its object really exists. The skeletons in the half-bathroom of the house of my childhood were not real. But neither does the existence of this emotion mean that its object does not exist. I imagine it could have been felt as the Plague ravaged Europe, or as the Native Americans on the east coast of the continents first encountered white Europeans. Both of those were very real things. The experience of the numinous does not confirm or deny its object but only confirms that the experience itself (to be a good existentialist), simply Is. What else besides this emotion Is remains to be discovered.

I wonder sometimes whether religion depends wholly on this experience. It may be that religion is not so much about the object of its worship as it is about the state of the worshiper. And certainly some spiritual realm, in whatever shape, filled with whatever kind or kinds of spiritual being more powerful than we, unknowable and incomprehensible, at once attractive to us and dangerous, fits neatly with the numinous experience. But does that mean it truly exists?

Experiments in human sensory deprivation in the past century have demonstrated how much we rely on our connection to the physical world for the functioning of consciousness. While brief periods of sensory deprivation may result in relaxation, extended periods of time cause hallucination and psychological damage. It seems like our physical senses ground us in reality – or as a professor of mine in artificial intelligence put it, they ‘keep the hallucinations away.’ Our senses allow us to gather information about the world around us, but since we are finite beings with a finite number of ways of experiencing the world, there is always to some extent a ‘sensory deprivation’ that we experience – that is, the things we don’t know. As a child it may be what is behind the closet door when it closes. As an adult, and throughout life, it may be the closed door of Death, or the myriad possible futures we could possibly experience, or the purpose behind strange circumstances, or any one of a thousand ‘grown-up’ things. One wonders if it is here, among the Unknown Things that our sense of the numinous originates, those vague hallucinations and ponderings that dance at the edge of knowledge yielding in us a sensation of awe, perhaps congealed into a somewhat familiar form by our cultural conditioning. And perhaps this is where spirituality and religion begins, and comes into our lives through all the things we can’t know or explain. This experience requires a lack of knowledge on the part of the beholder, and in that sense, science truly is religion’s enemy, for it takes what once may have qualified as the object of our numinous experiences and demystifies it, pushing our spiritual experience further out into the realm of what is still unknown.

But yet again, what if the numinous is a reflection of something that actually exists? Is it a vague, as-yet undirected but real emotion toward Some Thing which does exist, of which we have some degree of awareness but are not adequate enough to grasp its source? Or is it just the experience we have as human beings of living with finite knowledge? But if it exists, then like H.G. Wells’ (and Steven Spielberg’s) aliens, however incomprehensible and numinous That Thing may be, to know of its existence it must intrude somehow into the physical and knowable realm of human knowledge, so that while it may not be possible to fully demystify it or strip it of its awe-full-ness or curious fascination, it may be possible to know That Thing really Is, and it is not just our experience, but an object and perhaps even subject of it.

Last week I went with some local friends to hike up to Lake Twenty-two. I’m not feeling all that verbose about it, so I will leave you with some pictures of the beautiful area. I will say that it was good times; I really do love the folks I was hanging out with. And I will also note that my tripod continues to get somewhat beat up by use (the best way to get beat up – it’s rather a shame when people buy expensive equipment and never use it). Alas, poor tripod, I need to fix thee.

I said I wouldn’t write weightier posts and I am trying to keep myself to it. But my mind is like a whirlpool of these lately, and my lighter reading is rapidly coming to an end. In appeasement to myself, I will post a few ‘weightier’ links.

Andrew is back to the online world, for which I am somewhat happy. I wish I had his knowledge about church history (which he finds depressing), for then I could say more than just that Christianity became progressively a political force, and it did, but also such things like ‘Cyril of Alexandria is an “uber-super-unmatched-bastard.”‘ Although I am not as knowledgeable as he, I have wondered about the ‘heresy’ of Nestorianism as it seems to deal with erudite matters over which ‘heresy’ is an overstrong word. And anyone willing to rationally defend Pelagius (who does seem to have far more in common with the early Fathers than Augustine!) gets automatic addition to my list of cool people. I don’t know why I still have so much interest in all this. Perhaps I really am turning into Bart Ehrman.

On another church-related note, it deeply saddens me to see the looming schism in the Anglican church. Honestly, for a church that remained united despite the issue of slavery, I find homosexuality a rather trivial thing to schism over. In fact, are they splitting over what it means to be a Christian, or who Jesus is, or the nature of God, or (for God’s sake) even over how to organize a church? No – it’s that members of the Global South can’t stand that there are congregations that disagree about whether it’s okay to advance a sexual ethic of monogamy regarding approx 3% of the human population. This may become a contentious issue to debate, but schism over it, really? Akinola I find to be a rather harsh and intolerable man, who has supported and advanced the passing of the world’s harshest anti-gay laws, which I should hope one opposes regardless of one’s ‘position’ on the morality of the issue. In light of the sort of legislation he backs, I am even more appalled that many US episcopates have switched allegiance to the Global South – I’d like to think that they are blind to Akinola’s political policies, as sadly few people know or care about this sort of thing, but that does not fully excuse them.

The world food crisis has me progressively concerned. And as Dan of Poser or Prophet points out, we typically find entertainment in stories of horror and exploitation when we should find transformation. I have been lax about finding a place to dedicate myself to the underadvantaged (a too-weak word: poor and exploited) this summer. I don’t know where to go through if not through a church, and don’t know whether to go through a church, but these are no excuse. And then at times I find myself wondering what the good is of working where I am, and if it is not just an exercise in selfishness.

Other deep currents in my mind have been spun off by listening to a very interesting interview of Jonathan Haidt by Will Wilkinson on the topic of happiness and morality, from a social sciences and, at least on Wilkinson’s end, libertarian perspective.

Well, that wraps it up for this installation of The Blog.

Hardball delenda est.

I went kayaking with a group of interns yesterday. It turns out that the one who set this up – for it was her birthday – knows a very close friend of mine who I went to high school with, since she went to the same university as him. It was a rather astonishing thing to discover! It was fun, but in all I think I’ve spent all of my allotted gregariousness for this month. Well, we shall see – one hopes not.

Though I’ve put them up elsewhere, I wasn’t sure about putting readily identifiable pictures of anyone up here (or at least of anyone who I may spend time with again). So there are a couple of more obscured images of a couple of folks. And me with a shaved head.

I apologize in advance for the poor quality but in my defense I was in a moving two-person kayak and using my cheap little digital camera rather than the hulking more-expensive one. These shots were very much on-the-go. And do indulge the occasional black and white, though I’m open to criticism. I recently learned at a local photography group a rather neat trick for Photoshop b&w conversions which works a heck of a lot better than what I had been doing. Without further ado, here are the pictures, without the typical intermittent explanations:

I have been watching movies. Here are my thoughts on them.

The Happening

I continue to be one of those odd people who has hope in M. Night Shyamalan, despite his efforts to break it. I very much enjoyed Signs and The Village – two movies which most rank lower than Sixth Sense, but I enjoyed a great deal more. And I have noticed his capacity to tell a story. That said, The Happening has failed to tell a story well. There are many good moments of the film – particularly scattered throughout the movie’s middle section – and it is very evident that the kernel of the film is good. Unfortunately, Shyamalan is far too heavy-handed in many scenes – from trying to be preachy about the environment (a task, I feel, peripheral to the film, and furthermore better carried out with subtlety) to the acting. His opening and closing scenes are poor and out of step with the mood of the rest of the movie. The sad thing is that this reflects the same types of errors he made in Lady in the Water and even his earlier movies, too. He needs to swallow his pride and team up with a good editor, who could catch these problems (a lack of proper editing was an evident problem in The Happening) and assist him in producing something closer to the artistic vision which his stories aspire to. The Happening came off, all in all, as a half-finished Hitchcock film. It could’ve been great, but failed due to flaws that could easily have been prevented. Though I have not watched it in quite some time and it may have improved since, I felt very much like I did when I tried to start watching Battle Star Galactica: that here was a nugget of gold covered by so much junk that I wince to see such wasted opportunity. I’m afraid Shyamalan is becoming more and more an example of what I do not want to do to Story.

On a side note, I was also disappointed in the soundtrack. James Newton Howard can usually be relied on to do an outstanding job; I don’t know what happened there.

The Fall

Where The Happening is a failed attempt at cinematic art, The Fall exceeds in every way possible. The cinematography, for one, was quite possibly the best that I have ever seen in any movie. Almost every scene was an artistic exploration of the borderline between fantasy and reality. The characters were positioned precisely to show their emotions and relationships to one another – particularly as Roy was story-weaving to Alexandria on his bed. I don’t know that there’s been any other film I have seen where so many times I have been in awe of the deep artistry of the cinematography. The locations helped in part, as well as the simple, clean design of the sets, the boisterous colors and over-the-top costumes, all appropriately made to fit a child’s imagination. Visually, it was extraordinarily moving from beginning to end. The soundtrack, also, was beautifully done and fit the story like a glove.

Beyond just the technical brilliance, the story also was of incredibly high artistry. It is easy to write about dark themes in an adult setting, with adult characters interacting with other adults. To bring this into a story that depends so heavily on a small child is something else. The plot was original. It was deep. It was symbolic. Though it included a child, it did not explain itself fully, or treat the audience like a child. The sets may be that of a child’s imagination, but the child’s imagination speaks from and to an adult’s world. The characters are complex and multi-dimensional. It was not something I have come to expect from most movies.

All that is simply to say that this was easily the best movie I’ve seen this year. I have my doubts whether I will see a better one. I have never seen anything quite like it, and would gladly go again with a friend. If you have not had a chance yet to go out and see The Fall, and you are at all interested in movies that transcend just-entertainment and become pieces of art, I sincerely commend it to you. It is worth the price of admission and more.

I don’t know what I ever did online before I discovered this blog. Oh right – it’s not even two months old. It offers the best of photojournalism: pictures that are so good they transcend photojournalism and become art, while maintaining the story-telling quality of a good journalist. What am I doing in the field I think I am in, and why am I not redirecting my efforts to producing this sort of thing? I cannot urge you enough: take a look.

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! (O friend, not these tones!)
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere (Let us raise our voices in more)
anstimmen, und freudenvollere! (pleasing and more joyful sounds!)

(Twenty points to you and a lollipop if you can name for me, without looking it up or Googling for it, the piece of music whither the above pericope originates. Hint: it is – objectively, in my paradoxical opinion – the most divine piece of music ever written.)

I’ve spent a lot of words and time detailing what has led me to where I am, which is sort of floundering (in more ways than one) on the issue of the foundations of faith. These matters are not so pressing as they appear, and I shall need at least a full nine months of gestation before I have any further thoughts concerning them that are well-formed enough to utter. For now, I remain unresolved amid liturgical and Anglican tendencies and overpowering skepticism.

But friend, not these tones!

I have had the great opportunity to do much photography – three excursions already! – in the time I’ve been here and have been experimenting with the unfamiliar realm of urban work. And so I will post here some photos, more of which can always be found at my flickr – though I’ve noticed it tends to try to ‘correct’ my color palette, often ruining it (stupid machines!). Posting pictures will probably become the trend for the rest of the posts this summer. Pictures that, one hopes, may be worth more than the many words which I so often spill.

But the photography.

And now it is night for me, and yet there is still work tomorrow.

The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end. Amen.

(And another lollipop if you can tell me, without looking it up, when and under what circumstances the above line is said. I already gave the Anglican hint. And James doesn’t count.)