"How Not to Look at God" by Jeff Reimer

Five hundred years ago Martin Luther felt oppressed by the terrible weight of damnation. Fifteen hundred years ago people were tempted to worship images of God or the saints. Now we have trouble working up the requisite terror or wonder to much care about God at all. Something has been lost. Trends in modernity condition our way of encountering the divine: Technological orientation to the screen dominates our vision, and the image saturates our gaze; a sense of immanence buffers us from the transcendent so that our experience of the world feels flattened out and disenchanted. But that disenchantment also entails a remainder, experiences of the transcendent that can’t be accounted for and imply a ghostly beyond. Experience of this “beyond” is categorized under a variety of concepts: wonder, the sublime, the numinous, the saturated phenomenon. The beyond breaking in, being given.


Because of our state of permanent satiation, however, the most reliable, profound “access” to the transcendent, I argue, must involve a turning away from the object, a disciplining of the gaze that shapes us toward true contemplative encounter with God. Respect for the uncontrollability and otherness of these phenomena should lead us to emphasize reverence and piety in the face of the transcendent. Because we by default participate in our culture’s indifference to the transcendent, especially under the auspices of organized religion, we tend to insist that if the divine be present it must be accessible. In order to purge ourselves of this tendency, looking away becomes a form of looking at.