Thought for the Week: God. Holy? Pure?
Jill Allum reflects on whether holiness/pureness is possible
What does a word mean? How do we know what thoughts are in someone’s head? If we are listening carefully, we are listening for the meaning behind their words, from the smallest child to the cleverest intellectual.
I love doing theology from a phenomenological perspective: what that person, wherever he is, says he thinks is what he thinks. It’s his truth, so we must listen. There is no hypothetical truth. We will never all agree.
So, let us ask some questions. Say we start with a three-to-four-year-old and ask: What does holy mean? What does God mean? You will be surprised by the answers. Simple, direct and honest. Children haven’t learnt to be otherwise and give no wordy, intricate answers, where the hearers switch off after the first two sentences. I have met so many people who say, ‘When I was three, I had a sense of the holy/numinous/mystical,’ and they can tell you exactly where they were when the ‘revelation’ came.
