Mysterium Tremendum

© Coya

At around 12 years old, the age where you do your First Communion, my grandfather would offer my cousins and I a Bible. On mine, he wrote:

The sum of Your word is truth.

Psalm 119:160.
and

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God

Matthew 5:8

My Bible is orange, with a golden dove on the cover. I carry it with me, every year, when I move from a city to another. I haven't opened it often except to stick some paper in, a letter from my Grandpapa read at his funeral, canticles we sang at my grandma's and I'm about to add some wild thyme that I picked yesterday in the south of France. My sister put inside of hers dry flowers, lavender, photos, a round of symbols to make the bible breathe.

When studying philosophy, I remember coming across 'Religion' as a theme. I didn't like it very much. Why so many men had to write books about it, understand what some saw as the weakness of mankind? A servitude to the unknown. What couldn't be scientifical, couldn't be philosophical. I just saw people's relationship with God as a private phenomenon, almost secret, that noone should have dared to attack.
Fortunately, Rudolf Otto threw the concept of Mysterium Tremendum in The Idea of The Holy (1917) to satisfy those individuals who believed in the odd.

One day my ex boyfriend and I visited St Peter's Basilic in Rome. He said to me:

Do you understand why I don't believe? Look how much they spent on this... Poor people entertaining the richest to buy their place in paradise

I knew what he meant but couldn't help calling him an idiot for making such an amalgam. Religion might be getting scary, bringing the mass together, ruling, and narrowing the mind - that's what they say. But in the end, man is alone facing the unknown.

I saw yesterday 2 blue strings bringing a brown coffin deep in the ground. I bent above the hole, the darkness freaked me out. So deep, she's going to be lonely. Down there, uncles, aunts, my grandfather. I don't know how their soul can travel to the sky if their body lay in the ground. Ashes spread in the bay of Sidney is all I wish to myself, where they can meet with others I like. Sometimes, Religion, stranglehold.