Something I read in an essay in “God and Man” by Fr. Anthony Bloom brought together thoughts of the season and reflections about the Ark of the Covenant. That’s a pretty long journey to take in a couple short paragraphs, but I’m glad I came across it, because it helps me tie up some loose ends.

Father Anthony’s essay was entitled “Holiness and Prayer,” and in it he says:

The scandal of the New Testament, the impossible thing, is that the Inaccessible One has become accessible, the transcendent God has become flesh and dwelt among us. The holiness which surpassed every human notion and was a separation reveals itself to be otherwise; the very holiness of God can become infinitely close without becoming any the less mysterious; it becomes accessible without our being able to possess it; it lays hold of us without destroying us. …

In Christ, we are something which could be revealed by God but which could not even be dreamed of by man: the fullness of Divinity in human flesh. Here is the crux of holiness. It is accessible to us because of the fact of the Incarnation. This does not lessen the mystery of God: a purely transcendent God is easier to understand or imagine than the God of the Incarnation.

I meet these sorts of people sometimes and they amaze me. They say they believe in God — or a god, at least — who orders all things and hears our prayers and makes the stars go around, but they just have to draw the line at the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to say. You would have to believe that God is involved on one hand with in the very least aspects of your life and on the other with the most immense functions of operating the universe without believing that He would work a miracle somewhere in the middle — namely, in human history and society. And that is, after all, what Christmas commemorates.

Or maybe this says it better:

And when we stand or imagine the creche of the Nativity in our imagination or in plastic representations and can take the Child-God in our hands, we are confronted with a greater mystery than that of the imperceptible God. How can we understand that the full depth of infinity and eternity lies here, hidden and at the same time revealed by a frail human body that is fragile and transparent to the presence of God?

As Father Bloom explores this point, he contrasts the holiness of the Old Testament with that of the new.

… the Old Testament was aware of a created holiness within the created world. Every which God lays hold of and which becomes His own possession, such as the Ark, a person, a holy place, participates in a certain way in God’s holiness and becomes an object of reverential fear.

I had been thinking about the Ark of the Covenant because Greg sent me this article from Smithsonian Magazine. A reporter went to an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery that maintains that it keeps the Ark and has for many, many centuries. Ethiopian tradition holds that the Ark came into the country in the 10th century BC and has been kept there ever since (and how it came there is a fascinating story in itself, and worth reading the article for, but I’ll leave that part for now). The reporter doesn’t see the Ark because no one sees it except one monk. That monk deigns to meet with the reporter, but leaves more questions behind than answers:

A few feet from where I stood, through the iron bars, a monk who looked to be in his late 50s peered around the chapel wall.

“It’s the guardian,” the priest whispered.

He wore an olive-colored robe, dark pillbox turban and sandals. He glanced warily at me with deep-set eyes. Through the bars he held out a wooden cross painted yellow, touching my forehead with it in a blessing and pausing as I kissed the top and bottom in the traditional way.

I asked his name.

“I’m the guardian of the ark,” he said, with the priest translating. “I have no other name.”

I told him I had come from the other side of the world to speak with him about the ark. “I can’t tell you anything about it,” he said. “No king or patriarch or bishop or ruler can ever see it, only me. This has been our tradition since Menelik brought the ark here more than 3,000 years ago.”

We peered at each other for a few moments. I asked a few more questions, but to each he remained as silent as an apparition. Then he was gone.

“You’re lucky, because he refuses most requests to see him,” the priest said. But I felt only a little lucky. There was so much more I wanted to know.

The commenters to this article were overwhelmingly skeptical; some were downright contemptuous. I was struck by how very little they could imagine what it would be like to be exposed to this kind of Old Testament holiness. Commenters offered suggestions of how the monk could’ve been overpowered, how an infrared camera would reveal whether there was a metal object inside. One commenter is of the opinion that if the ark is there, then the monks should turn it over to the world so that it can be seen by everyone, like a traveling circus. None seem to understand what the reporter felt.

It’s hard to believe in anything in the world as it is now. That might be one thing that the holiness of the Old Testament and the holiness of the New Testament have in common — they are both overlooked, both disregarded. People who regard themselves as enlightened think little of them, when they think about them at all.

But sometimes miracles are quiet, and always they’re unexpected. As the second verse of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” tells us:

How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is giv’n!
So God imparts to human hearts
The treasures of His heav’n.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will
Receive Him still,
The dear Christ enters in.