I think we have lost a sense of the holy, the transcendent mystery that surrounds us. In our effort to be casual, we've flattened our existence to the more mundane. You could tell what we thought was important when you looked at how banks and churches were built.m We don't make a great vault in contemporary churches; that is now left for malls and sports arenas.

 

Uzzah encounters the holy in the nature of touching the ark. It is a reminder of the biblical scene that Raiders of the Lost Ark touches where people are consuming merely for peering inside the ark. We tend to think that Uzzah is being punished for something. No, in the Bible the encounter with the wholly other, holy God is more than mere mortals can bear. It is the same sense as the fear that one could not encounter the face of God and live.  I have a feeling that the trouble lies in forgetting that the ark was to be carried in a special way, with special poles, not with the efficiency of a cart. The Holy One is not to be handled as merchandise, but with special care.

 

The same actions can be holy or unholy. David danced before the ark in a mode of ecstatic, uninhibited prayer. Michal was understandably bitter toward David. He was gone from her for years, and she was married to a man who loved her. Out of spite or power politics, David ordered that she be returned to him. I don't know the content of Salome's dance, but her mother knew that it would entice the king to a rash promise. Perhaps it was an unholy dance for a most unholy purpose of execution of John the Baptist. John the Baptist certainly wasn't holy in a sense of being well-scrubbed and mannerly. We've domesticated the holy with a sense of being prim and proper.  He had the fire of God in his soul; he was holy in the sense of being wild for God beyond any conventions or signs we would make.

 

It seems that one place where the holy is encountered is by nature writers such as Annie Dillard. they look carefully at nature, and in so doing, lose its romantic sense of being a pretty spectacle.. They see it in its dangers in poison, tooth, and claw. In that spectacle they find an awed awareness of the hand of the Creator. Nature is less an object to be analyzed, not a 3-D painting for us, but a living trace of the living God. Dillard writes "If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe it existed."

 

When I've been present at the birth of a child and at its polar opposite, death's door, I realized I am in the presence of the holy. When we face a moment of deep meaning, beyond our capacity to fully grasp, we are in the presence of the holy. God's holiness can be glimpsed, in part, in its extravagant diversity, astounding beauty, sheer abundant generosity of life. Our response to this truth is the religious act of praise, of adoration, in the face of the holy.