The following excerpt is from Ocholophobist’s Website, as always well-written. It’s an excellent meditation for the feast.
Fr. Hopko speaks of the fact that when one encounters holiness, if it is indeed holiness one is encountering, one will be filled with both fear and a desire to stay in the presence of that holy place, thing, or person at the same time. If one encounters something which causes all fear, or all attraction, then one knows that the thing is not holy. Ours is an age of überattraction. We want to be comforted and entertained at all times. It would seem that the reintroduction of fear would be the right course, but I am not sure that such a direct approach would work anymore. Our age has no vocabulary of rightly ordered fear, it offers instead only despair. One is either comfortable and entertained, or one is in despair, and when there is no way of getting out of despair, perhaps it is time to crush something up in the applesauce and go to sleep forever, or so the evil story goes. The best tactic, it seems to me, is to counter überattraction with farce and godly ridicule – make a spectacle of it – show it for what it is – thus the need for a Holy Fool. Once the überattraction begins to wobble and loose its balanced, calculated control on the soul, perhaps then right and godly fear can be reintroduced.
The entire article can be read here.
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