Letter from the Editor from printed issue #1

Numinous: adjective describing awe, fear, and fascination with the power or presence of a divinity.

“There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective…yet showing no tendency to disappear from the mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given.” –C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain


For the first decade of my life I slept under a pile of approximately forty-five stuffed animals.

Yes, I was a part of the Beanie Baby craze and yes, I loved to create elaborate stuffed animal soap operas, but the main reason I nearly suffocated under plush puppies, kittens and teddy bears for ten years was a more serious one—I was scared of the dark. Like many kids, every night I told Mom to flip on the nightlight, close the curtains, and crack the door. There seemed to be something wicked within the darkness back then. My stuffed friends were glass-eyed guard dogs, warding off potential pitch-black monsters in the shadows.

As I’ve gotten older, though, the personality of the darkness has shifted. My heart still beats when I walk through a dark room, but my adrenaline rush stems not from fear but from a sense of awe—there’s Something out there. I don’t quite know what it is, but I kind of like it. The mystery simultaneously scares me and draws me in.

Rocket scientists and college undergrads alike (yes, maybe even King’s students) love to think that they’ve got the whole world figured out. Leave the mystery to the men in loincloths and the babies in Disney character diapers! Twenty-first century grown-ups don’t have time for that crap. The universe has been sliced up and scribbled on by rational thought until it seems to be nothing but one long logical proof completely conceivable by the human mind. But even when my heart spontaneously begins to beat when I walk through a dark room, I remember that mystery still exists, and it’s all somehow wrapped up in the Divine. To paraphrase Lewis, a true sense of numinous awe can only be explained as either a twist in the human mind or a brush with the Supernatural. It’s no wonder that we can only describe God’s character through analogies—the true nature of the Divine is too mysterious to grasp. We see God “through a glass, darkly” (I Corinthians 13).

This is where poetry comes in. Poetry creates images that act as fingers pointing to a Greater Reality we cannot fully understand. A poem is a word-painting of awe. I hope that this little publication can be the beginning of a greater endeavor. I hope that this can be an opportunity for King’s students to embrace and begin to describe the mystery of the Divine in the world around us. For me, the image of the minstrel harks back to a more mysterious era—an era when we sang songs of magic. Will you be an era-maker with me?

Your friendly editor-in-chief,


Betsy Brown