The Experience of The Holy

In the early 20th century, the scholar and theologian Rudolph Otto sought to describe humanity’s encounters with the holy in a scientific way. Otto found that although the experiences were common across cultures, they were also difficult to fully articulate or put into words. An experience with holiness is both beautiful and awful; terrifying and transformative. It both attracts us and repulses us, simultaneously. We yearn for it and we despise it. We can’t live with it, but we can’t live without it.

This paradoxical reality is nowhere better illustrated than in the call of the prophet Isaiah. While one king was dying, Isaiah is given insight into the throne room of God where another King is reigning. Angelic beings cry out in antiphonal praise, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his GLORY!” This is a super-superlative; no other attribute of God is repeated to the third degree. God’s holiness is therefore not one quality among many; it is the blazing sum of all His perfections.

The Hebrew word for glory is kavod, which means “weight” or “heaviness.” So how do we know we have truly met the holy God and beheld His glory? Like the threshold of the temple and Isaiah’s identity, everything lighter and trivial in us is shaken to the foundations. A feather can fall on water without disturbing it; a two-ton boulder will cause a massive wave. Likewise, when God moves from a concept to a reality in our lives, that which is more weighty disturbs and displaces that which is ephemeral and less weighty.