Decalogue 1&5 - Numinous and the Search - Malia

          Decalogue 1 focuses on a father and son who both have different views on the world and place different levels of importance on the holy aspects of life.  The father places his faith in technology and the profane creations of humans, while his son places great importance on the sacred and that which he cannot even understand.  Pavel, as a child, is unblemished by the world's narrowness and his mind and heart is free to wander and be open to the calling of the numinous.  The father, on the other hand, is chained by what is concrete and proven, until the day that it stops working for him.  The father's faith in his technology is shattered when he loses his son.  He then musts start over and begins with no faith.  This is what brings him back to life, though, because he is again a blank slate, like his son was.  

         This is a testament to the fact that the mysterious is both daunting and fascinating.  For the son, he was too young to witness anything but the fascinating. The father, especially after having gone through what he did, experiences both aspects of the mysterious.  From the father's journey that we got to see, it seems to me that he personifies our search for something real; the numinous as the object of search and yearning that we sometimes don't realize we are searching for until all other obstacles are gone or until we are stripped bare of anything else and have only that left to discover. As the father runs into the church at the end of the Decalogue 1, it is a great symbol for the fact that numen begins to tak over everything once it is discovered. From now on, as the church encompassed him, he will be encompassed by his search to find that something more.

            In relation to Decalogue 5 and the murder, the numen relates to Jacek's need to find something more.  He does so in a very wrong way, obviously.  It is a completely human thing to have emotions and desires that we cannot understand , and I believe that this was a misdirection of the yearning felt in the numinous that was misdirected to resemble instead a profane desire. 

          The moral of these two stories is that the inherent yearning for the numinous is in all of us, but depending on the circumstance and what kind of person we are, that yearning can manifest in different ways, either for a benefit or detriment. But at the end of the day, God is here to fulfill that desire for something more in us, and it is our job to be able to discern how to do so.