All of us, whether religious or not, long for transcendence because the human heart was made for it. By transcendence I mean the awareness of something greater than ourselves; something bigger than us. It’s that experience of something so beautiful, so powerful that words fail and our hearts are stirred.
Perhaps you’ve felt this when gazing upon a star-filled night sky, or hiking the Ozarks, or entering a breathtakingly beautiful cathedral. Such natural experiences of transcendence are gifts that point us toward the transcendent God. God is wholly other—He is uncreated, infinitely holy, and beyond human comprehension. He is also far more unlike us than like us, and yet God made us in His image for relationship with Him. So, while the human heart longs for all kinds of encounters with something greater than itself, it yearns particularly for an encounter with the God of the universe.
Unfortunately, many things in today’s culture pull us in the opposite direction—to things smaller than ourselves. So much is reduced to the entertaining, the pleasurable, the useful. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the mundane and small. Such things make up the bulk of daily life and God designed it that way. But we run into problems when that is all we experience, and the only things our lives are focused on.
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