The Holy and the Terrifying
It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
James Chastek
The holy has a strange affinity with the terrible. One of the hardest things to explain to people who didn’t live through September 11th is just how gravely serious the days were after it happened: radio stations that played bubble-gum pop cut all their programming and commercials and just turned into 24 hour reporting stations; late night comedy shows were mothballed for over a week and came back without jokes; football was cancelled on the following Sunday, etc. Everything lighthearted, entertaining, ironic, bawdy, clever, etc. all vanished. It was not so much that it was inappropriate to the time, though it was, but rather that it seemed to entirely lack its proper basis.
The holy and terrible are not dour or stuffy, but they do exist in a space above humor or irony. A partial explanation of this is found in the fact that both transcend normal, familiar categories of human experience since humor – like the sexual personhood that will always be the deepest source of humor – is something peculiar to human personhood.
This might account for the close unity between holiness and dread: it is not a mere recognition of sin, since even if one were sinless he would still feel this peculiar sort of dread in the holy places. The pocket catechism descriptions of the “fear of the Lord” all tend to miss this peculiar sort of dread in the face of the transcendent…. Fear of the Lord is the first awakening we have to the transcendent, understood as that place in which what we are doing is not something we can joke about.
From Just Thomism (2014)
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