Holiness?  I thought about holiness the other day as I listened to Australian born singer Megan Washington do her song "Holy Moses."  She is afraid of Moses, she says, afraid of his aura, his aura of holiness, fearful of what it might mean.

    Washington's song underscores our innate human propensity to wonder about what moral perfection really looks like.  Because we are aware that we will never achieve moral perfection, we tend to regard those whom we believe have it with a measure of respect and trepidation, even dread and fear.  Early in the last century, Rudolph Otto, in an influential book, The Idea of the Holy, argued that although we may cower before what we consider to be absolute holiness, we at the same time are drawn to it.  It is a dread of fascination, a dread of compulsion and interest that engenders a quest to know even more.  Like watching a horror movie.



     For this reason, Otto contended, although we may reject the idea of a holiness, particularly in a God, when push comes to shove, we have difficulty escaping it altogether.  Like it or not, it circumscribes who we are:  beings who seek holiness, in some form, yet beings who know that, all things being equal, we will never find it unless we acknowledge our dependence something greater than who and what we are.  We know that we cannot have it both ways.

     As I put it in a chapter on holiness in a book (Thinking about God) I wrote a number of years ago, "Forget about holiness, and you'll be running the rest of your life."