Holy of Holies
In many older European churches, and in Orthodox Christian churches throughout the world, a screen stands between the congregation and the precinct of the priests, where the altar is. In traditional Gothic cathedrals so constructed, this “rood screen” separates the entire choir area – the place where the monastic community and various clergy worshipped several times daily – from the great “nave,” the place where the public gathered in thousands.
The Christian architecture reproduced the structure of the earliest Hebrew tabernacle for worship of God, whose entrance was covered by a veil into which even the priests could seldom enter – described as the “holy of holies.” It was further developed in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. In the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament, Jesus is described as a high priest “entering once for all into the Holy Place,” thus “obtaining eternal redemption.”
Religion is all about metaphor. It is about images, words, and concepts of things unseen – the reality that underlies the “reality” which we negotiate daily. Religion has to be about image and metaphor because, as Jesus says bluntly in John’s Gospel, “No one has ever seen God.” (John 1:18)
In religion these choirs, rood screens, and holies of holies have often been interpreted as ways of maintaining the authority of priests, or as ways of safeguarding the mysterious holiness of God. And all this may be true. But today we are looking at them as ways of representing, as teaching, the nature of the religious quest for the meaning and purpose of life.
And what we are saying is this: the truth of our lives exists beneath what we do and feel and see. There is a deeper reality, seen and represented in and through what we see and say and think, which is the full reality of being. The thought is ancient, not new. The great myths which were known to our forbears when we emerged from the fog of history are ways of trying to represent the various parts of the deeper story. Check out “The Cave,” the great analogy of visible and invisible reality in Plato’s monumental philosophical work The Republic.
We live in a very literal time. If it can’t be digitized, it isn’t important. The system of knowledge and measurement which we have developed in this fashion claims to be able to determine what is important and what is true. Nasty digitized short answer testing is being used to compel “education” in public schools. [This is only for the masses, it seems: research reveals that a high percentage of the political and entrepreneurial leaders currently propelling computerized, high-stakes public school “reform” educate their own children in expensive private schools whose students and teachers are insulated from these privately lucrative, publicly destructive innovations.]
Learning to think and to question, learning to imagine, learning to converse and discuss – these are the eternal means of awakening the human being not only to her deepest meaning, but to her highest potential. We are on a journey which is defined by things invisible, and in which the spirit – not the letter – is the essential discovery. To be precise about the “letter” of things – the measureable realities – is essential to getting the spirit right. But to act as if the letter of things represented the purpose of the enterprise by aggressive, ignorant commandeering of time and resources is to fall into a deep, bottomless pit of despair and take others with you.
Tending the Spirit
Everything we see, everything we do, everything we say has meaning. Beneath and within it there is meaning. That meaning is a sense of the full and deeper world of which we are a part – a world which is absolutely attached to measureable surface reality and history, but which is telling deeper stories and working out deeper mysteries and entertaining deeper destinies.
This is not a rehearsal.
We are in it now, today. Our eternal life this minute is all bound up in daily life and history. It plays out in and for each of us, and in and for our communities and our society and this tumultuous world.
To call the deeper world “spiritual” is to be easily misleading, because the word “spiritual” is so fundamentally misunderstood. The deeper world is “spiritual” in the sense that the conflict between Israel and Palestine is “spiritual.” It is “spiritual” in the sense that the failure of metropolitan Richmond to have ordinary public transportation is “spiritual.” The world is not moving by rationality and by data, but by intentions and spiritual injuries and greeds and indifferences and displaced or misplaced meanings. Individuals move that way, peoples move that way, communities move that way, and history moves that way.
The heavens may declare the glory of God – who cannot look at a beautiful sunrise or sunset and hear a deep truth? – but the cacophony of civilizations seems to declare another confused and conflicting reality or realities.
In the process of living and learning, stories and images emerge which describe to and for us this journey in and through the visible and invisible realities. The full story of Jesus presented visually at the altar, the story of heroic journeys, the stories of independence and freedom, and many other myths and frightening, enlightening symbols acquire and represent for each of us – or for groups of people – the things that we are learning.
This is not a rehearsal. It is happening now. The future comes in the present, and with a depth far greater than what we see. We are in and out of the holy of holies, catching infinitesimal glimpses of the fire that burns deeply and brightly and both enlightens and incinerates the world that is on the surface.
We are a part, the tiniest part, of something far greater than ourselves, something quantifiable only on the surface, something lived through meaning and purpose and intention and love. The holy of holies is the greatest reality. It is qualitative. It can neither be seen nor felt by a computer. It cannot be defined or ignored out of existence. And walking daily in the holy of holies is the active and living Source of all things.
B. P. Campbell
Senior Pastor
