Musings: God as Other

Musings are thoughts that we have on literature-related things that don't necessarily fall into neat categories. These posts will tend to be rambling and, at times, philosophical. Books and literature affect our everyday lives, and these posts are where we explore the intersection between life and literature.

I (Jenny) had an epiphany at church a couple of weeks ago. It, honestly, had nothing to do with the song we were singing at the time and nothing to do with the sermon to come. The song was not one of my particular favorites, so rather than sing along, I decided to try and contemplate the holiness of God. Have you ever tried that? To try and grasp, however briefly, an aspect of God's character in its completeness? It is not possible, of course, but it is humbling and mind-blowing to try.

The holiness of God is not, I admit, something I dwell on often. Mercy? Yes. Omnipotence? Yes. Omniscience? Definitely. Holiness, however, is something inherently foreign to myself and the world I inhabit. It does not have a place in our culture the way the more.... appealing qualities such as love and mercy and kindness do. Holiness implies a standard, which implies judgment, which implies feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Pushing all that aside, I was trying to think of God as holy, not of myself in contrast to this holiness. In doing so I stumbled across- hence my epiphany- a wonderful facet of God that I had been not grasping fully in my self-centeredness.

God as Other.

In a culture that is constantly trying to bring God to our level, to make him more approachable and more likable, we often forget that he is not like us and he will never be completely knowable. What does this have to do with literature? I am so glad you asked, for it is exactly this- literature- which led me to this. I am writing on Grendel, one of the monsters from the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, for my MA thesis. Grendel is the ultimate liminal figure- constantly on the outside looking in, not quite monster but not quite human, either. He is Other. He does not fit neatly into any of the categories that humanity is so obsessed with. Do you see where I am going with this? There is always some small part of us, even if we don't want to admit it, that feels a bit bad for these characters. We are drawn to them even as we are repulsed by them. Humanity, as a whole, does not do well with what it does not understand. When we can know something, know how it works and why it works the way it does, we are able to safely put it in a box. There is a certain security in knowing.

The beauty of this otherness is often overlooked in everyday life (I am not talking about Grendel, who ate men whole). I am talking about the unknowability of otherness; the foreignness of things that are not like us and do not conform to our taxonomy. When we seek to bring God closer to us, we lose an inherently important aspect of who he is. In not acknowledging this holiness, in being offended by it, we are ultimately seeking to remake God in our own image. We are trying to make him more like us so we can be more comfortable with who he is. It is into this otherness that we are called. We are given the chance to experience the wonder and the peace and joy and the mystery that holiness offers. We are offered a chance to become other ourselves, a chance to become more like God, to share in his holiness. In doing so we are able to know him a little more each day.

So, next time you are uncomfortable with something, be it God or something else, don't try to change it. Try to understand it without projecting your own fears and fallacies on to it. Embrace the beauty and the uncomfortableness of holiness. Don't banish it because of your own limited understanding. The figure of the Other, of the Liminal is not something that exists solely in literature, it just so happens to be easier to find there.

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”  ―Thomas Merton