Numinous. It’s a five-star word that describes the tingly feeling you get, sometimes in church, sometimes through personal devotion, and sometimes for no reason at all, when you get the feeling that God is sitting next you, breathing on you. Only not breathing, exactly, since God doesn’t need oxygen, but if God had breath, that’s what would be making the hairs on your neck stand up. It’s a good feeling, but not a comfortable one.

It’s first cousin to another feeling, one best described by a two-star word. Creepy. Not a comfortable feeling either, but one that’s a lot easier to come by, especially this time of year, when, at least in my neighborhood, it seems as if every third house has plastic skeletons digging their way out of graves in the lawn, and there’s a ginormous fake hairy spider spinning a fake web over all the bushes and one corner of every McMansion. At ours, we have skeletons in the flowerbed, life-sized ghosts hanging everywhere we can string wire, spiders galore, and a spotlighted ghoul peering out of an attic window. Continue reading →