Jeff Pfeiffer -- free blog

"This is as much as to say that religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence. This religous need expresses an unquenchable ontological thrist. Religious man thirsts for being. His terror of the chaos that surrounds his inhabited world corresponds to his terror of nothingness. The unknown space that extends beyond his world -- an uncosmicized because unconsecrated space, a mere amorphous extentinto which no orientation has yet been projected, and hence in which no structure has yet arisen -- forreligious man, this profane space represents absolute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving in Chaos, and he finally dies."


The scene that struck me the most in the movie the Seven Seal, was when Block entered a confessional in a Catholic church and cried out for knowledge that God was real, for proof that God was all that he had ever dreamed of the sacred to be. He cries out to be assured, to be given proof of God. He could no longer bear to live on faith alone. The mystery of God or the ‘mysterium’ as Otto refers to it in Ideas of the Holy, was too much for Block to handle. He lives for nothing else but to ‘know’ that God is real.
An interesting addition to the scene was the fact that on the other side of the confessional was not a priest it was Death, who would later use Block’s weakness against him. The scene was a perfect representation of a dark time in my own life, when the world I built around me could no longer be held by faith alone. I felt I needed more, I needed to KNOW that I was living in reality and not a world of illusion. It was the hardest time in my life. I cried out in the same way as Block did. I felt that no one was listening or even worse my enemies were listening and using my doubts against me.
What is it about humans that we will search our entire lives to touch sometime that God has touch, to come in contact with something sacred or even the sacred itself? The Bible states it as having eternity written on our hearts. Why does the mystery of God scare us so much?