I do
not know how to prove there is an unconscious terror of the Holy in the core of
humanity as a whole. But I am convinced
it is there. Since this terror is unconscious, it moves and motivates us
without our awareness. This is a primal condition begun in the soul of mankind
with the sin of Adam and Eve. Before the fall, we felt comfortable in God’s
presence. After the fall, we had to run and hide because we could not stand to
let Him look at us. To hide an awareness of Him became the way block Him out
and live as if He did not exist. We could
not experience Him as anything but Threat because of our guilt. Before the fall,
His Majesty inspired awe and wonder, even though it also made us quake and
tremble. But the quaking and trembling
was not terror. It was a realization of our nothingness in comparison to His greatness. After, we could not even entertain the
thought of Him without cringing in fear. His greatness was Threat to us since
we were now experiencing ourselves as His enemies and not as His image. The
fact that He did not experience us as we experienced ourselves was not
something our minds could grasp.
I think this
terror of the Holy is still common to primitive peoples and cultures. In such a
“progressive” civilization as ours, the enlightenment achieved by Psychology
and Progress has anesthetized this terror into sophisticated numbness. Unlike
more primitive societies which are still somewhat capable of awe and wonder,
for us “moderns” boredom is new starting point where our conversion into
Christian life begins. In the past,
surrender to Christ as He who saves us from our sins removed our terror of the
Sacred and set us at peace with God. In the present, we first have to be made
open to the Sacred, become aware that the Sacred is Goodness and Love we can
trust, and let this new consciousness enkindle its love in us. The
complications are our own fault because of the great lengths we have gone to
insulate ourselves from the Sacred.
The wrong way to
avoid the terror of the Holy is to hide from Him by denial. (We have yet to
find a “right” way to hide from God because there is none.) Denial once begun becomes easier and easier in
its expansion. Denial of guilt becomes denial of sin. Denial of sin becomes denial
of God, of obligation, and of responsibility. Denial also ego-inflates into an
assertion of freedom, independence, and autonomy. The need for consistence and
coherence in our lives either moves us
to open our selves more and more to God, or close ourselves off from Him more
completely.
In our Culture we believers go back and forth,
forth and back, between conversion and denial. This movement in us affects the way we view
the relation of the natural to the Supernatural. The more converted (holy) the person, the more
awareness there will be of the presence of the Supernatural in the natural. The
more into denial the person, the more absent the Supernatural will be from the
natural. The person who takes one step forward and two backwards (most of us)
will probably imagine the Supernatural on top of the natural, as a kind of
layer that blankets it in a heavy invisible fog. There will be no awareness of
the immanence of the Holy. The person who lives in Faith, Hope, and Love will
“sense” the Supernatural present within the
natural. The mystic will “see” the natural shimmer with Glory.
What has all of
this to do with Clericalism? Clericalism is obviously more than abuse of power and/or
enjoyment of perks that go with the priestly profession. It is a
defense mechanism: our human attempt to “protect” ourselves from the intrusion
of the Holy into our lives. Since the clergyman is a sign of the Holy, two perpetually
easy ways to avoid what he stands for are to idolize him or despise him. From apostolic time to today, it is easier to
stop at the sign than to face what it signifies.Thus an encounter with the
Holy Itself is avoided.
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