No. 70 Embracing the Numinous

Facillitator:
Date:

Group Session Plan from FUSN (developed by Bob Zeeb)

Opening Words
God finally replies to Job’s accusations . . . The divine speech from the whirlwind recites the miracles of creation and depicts life in its wildness and power. The answer to Job was a vision of nature. Perhaps it was enough. I knew I thought of my life as enlarged by love for a numinous universe – awesome, beautiful, and powerful. My personal; existence was transcended by a power I did not fully understand. This power was not there for me alone, but belonged to the universe itself, and I belonged to that universe.
Rita Nakashima Brock

Check In

Topic
Over the years, many have found the experience of nature, what Rita Brock refers to here as a love for a numinous universe – awesome, beautiful, and powerful, a central part of their spiritual awareness. It is not only the love of such an experience but the very real and tangible experience itself that speaks to them. Rita Nakashima Brock has good company here – Spinoza, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Emerson, Loren Eisley. What about your experience? Describe a time you experienced just such a numinosity, when a landscape or natural phenomena invoked such feelings for you.

Check Out

Closing Words
But after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being, o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion.. . . . . . . .
At noon and ‘mid the calm of summer nights,
When, by the margin of the trembling lake,
Beneath the gloomy hills homeward I went
In solitude, such intercourse was mine;
Mine it was in the fields both day and night,
And by the waters, all the summer long. William Wordsworth

I saw eternity the other night,
All calm as it was bright,
A ring of pure and endless light William Herbert