It is impossible for human intelligence to comprehend God, yet certain places may allow people to experience the necessary risk that opens them, body and soul, to what their minds cannot entertain. God’s places, in scripture and in the history of spirituality, are frequently fierce landscape settings like the storm-beaten slopes of Mount Sinai. God is “an inaccessible and pathless mountain,” as Philo described the peak Moses ascended in fear and trembling.18 Such liminal places are able, symbolically if not physically, to put people on edge, driving them beyond all efforts to control reality
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