Your "Ark of the Covenant", your placeholder for the Source.
Fr. Richard Rohr spoke to me in his post this morning. The Ark of the Covenant Monday, June 27, 2016 In his book The Soul's Journey into God , Franciscan theologian Bonaventure uses a most wonderful Old Testament metaphor to describe the contemplative mind; he says it is like the Ark of the Covenant housed within Israel's temple. Exodus 25 describes in great detail how the Ark was to be built. It was first of all a kind of traveling temple so the Israelites could carry God around with them, wherever they went, until they finally settled the Ark in Solomon's permanent temple. But it didn't really hold God, which would have been idolatrous. The Ark of the Covenant was instead the "place-holder" for God--a brilliant metaphor! The open space above the Ark of the Covenant was rightly called the "Throne of Mercy." Two golden cherubs protected the empty space, directly facing each other. "In that space," God