I guess this is my week for movies, as the other night I saw Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins's stunning portrayal of the legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock during the making of his masterpiece, Psycho.  Hitchcock knew suspense very well.  He knew how to frighten, he knew how to titillate, he knew how to create a longing to see what was next.  He was a master of cultivating fascination.
     The word fascinate comes from a old Indo-European word that means awe or fixation.  We are awed by suspense, we are fixated on waiting to see what will come next.  Why?  Why do we crave suspense, however macabre it may be?  We are such small and limited beings, yet we change worlds, ours and others, with our longing for the bizarre.
     Maybe we are inherently bizarre; maybe we are inherently beings who are made to seek the odd and unusual, the mysterious and unsettled.  Maybe we are entities who can only live if we step into things that we believe will turn our emotional worlds upside down.  Such things do not need to be frightening, nor do such things need to be gruesome.  But they need to be things that we did not expect.  After all, if we know how the story will end, why start it?
     Perhaps that's why the writer of Deuteronomy suggested, in Deuteronomy 29:29, that there are things we will never know, that we will only know what we can physically know, and only God knows the rest.
     We live, fascinated, with the suspense of God.