Reflection: The Idea of the Holy

Although I have never as intense an experience as Otto describes in his book I think the same kind of spiritual awareness can come from non-religious experiences and objects. Appreciating the beauty of nature, art, music and literature can awaken something inside us that cannot be explained. Having played in an orchestra for many years my idea of a shared spiritual connection is the joy that can be felt during a piece of music both within the orchestra and the audience. I was always taught that the longer an audience held off applauding the more they felt during the music, and I have always found this to be true. In the few seconds silence between the last note and the first clap the music echoes through and there seems to be a collective sigh throughout the room.  

In his novel Starbook (2007) Ben Okri gives a description of the reaction to a statue in an African tribe. I think the emotions he evokes and describes echo the sentiments Otto refers to in his book:    

         "The whole tribe was troubled by the new revelation in the square: the great wooden sculpture of three men and a woman bound together by chains at the ankles, in positions of intolerable lamentation and humiliation, and yet rendered with stoic dignity, as if gods had been made the slaves of fools...
            So profound was its effect that this sculpture seemed to come alive, seemed to appear in the midst of those who talked about it. Words seemed to make it materialise. Slowly, quickly, suddenly, the sculpture was everywhere, in the tribe's mind, in their dreams, in the work, in their play. The sculpture accompanied and haunted their every activity, like a spirit desperately trying to draw attention to its reality, or like a dream or nightmare that can't be shaken off...
            The sculpture accused, haunted, frightened, soothed, troubled, perplexed, annoyed, paralysed, trapped and engulfed them. It was like a curse, an anathema. It was stronger in the mind than in reality. To see it at first is to perceive it, to encompass it merely with the eyes. But afterwards its horror and its mystery grows, like a dreadful infection deep in the body where the hands cannot reach. It grows so in the mind, horrible and mighty, and the monstrous sublimity of it is such that those who have seen it do not know what to do with their heads afterwards... The world changes for them. They feel the need to die, or do something awful, or make a long journey, or undertake a great spiritual pilgrimage, or, better still, find the cause of the sculpture, why it came into being, understand what it is saying, and do something about it. 
            But unable to do this the elders began to whisper the unthinkable. They felt the sculpture, in its mysterious power, was becoming so powerful and obsessive and soul-sapping to the tribe that maybe it should be hidden away as a dangerous object, or destroyed, before it destroyed the psychic fabric and spiritual cohesion of the tribe." 




Reference:

Okri, Ben. Starbook. London: Random House, 2007.