Building the monument

The disciples who were with Jesus made a little error. The gospel writer even says so. Peter, James and John all wanted to be able to concretize and define their experience. They could not sit with the mystery and the unexplained nature of it. Their response was to erect booths or tents so that it the experience could be contained and to some extent understood.  I guess they also felt that the buildings could help convey their experience. But in some ways what they were trying to do was to limit God, to define God in their terms and in their own space and they were doing so for very real human reasons.

           This is just what we do whenever something of importance happens, we tend to want to put up a monument, partly in order to honor the people, partly to aid our memory of the incident, but also in order to make it confinable and explainable. It has been argued that the Church is nothing more than a historical monument to God. Not something vibrant and alive, but rather something more to do with memory and our inability to cope with the freedom of God and so we make a structure in the hope of being able to contain God. 

"Then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that God is far beyond all that we can possibly think of God.” (Thomas Aquinus)