The Sublime and the Beautiful

Edmund Burke's essay The Sublime and the Beautiful makes me think about the fearsome side of the Holy. The Holy is Awe-inspiring, but it is also Awe-full in the sense that it inspires terror in the minds of many throughout history. As I drove home today, I saw a sign on a church which said that one could not look at the beauty of nature without thinking of the hand of God. This assumes that we are in a good frame of mind and are looking at some prospect - say, the setting sun or rising moon with a glad eye - and feel God's in His heaven and all is right with the world. I mean, do we ever extrapolate from the horrors of the world to God's creation? Yes, we do. People with depression do. They don't put it up on a sign, however. God, the Holy, is a complex conceptual structure and may be hard to encompass with a holy haiku on the sign in front of the church. Not that I disagree with the sign approach. I just feel that while we dwell on the awe-inspiring, we neglect the awe-filling. There are these two aspects to God. It is apparent in accounts of visionary experiences. When anyone says that they are speaking to God, or that they know God's mind, no one can ever be sure what to expect from that statement. For example, if someone were to ask God whether one should go to war and God says, "Bully good idea!" like Teddy Roosevelt, one should really anticipate at least a smidgeon of horror.