And Then There Was Awe

 

Awe is a very important word in Christianity. It is the human response to God’s divine acts; it is even God’s reaction to divine creativity; and as such it evokes and focuses human response ability.

‘And awe came upon them all’ is the phrase which describes the response when the Holy Spirit breathed the Word of God upon all gathered after the resurrection on Pentecost. Specifically, the cacophony of tongues created a confusion which was also a cosmic witness to that which surrounded, inspired and bound all humanity. 

And today in Mark’s gospel in the calming of the stormy sea, not a confusion of language so much as a chaos of survival dimensions was calmed by the Peace which passes understanding. And awe came upon everyone. 

I am fascinated by awe. It strikes me as the response whenever even the tiniest sliver of holiness is revealed in the world shrouded in darkness and anxiety, violence and injustice. 

Awe is the response to unexpected mercy, to beauty peeking through clouds, to first cries and last breaths, to discovering some as yet unknown courage or power within to meet a seemingly impossible situation. 

Awe is the response to the inbreaking of the Holy Spirit, to the miraculous works of Jesus, to God’s eternal grace offered toward redemption. 

In her book Awe: The New science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, the author Dacher Keltner defines the essential emotion of awe as follows: Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.

Jesus calmed the storm which certainly transcended all expectations and this transcendence into Peace is the metaphor which might bring us to a greater appreciation of everyday, ordinary moments of transcendent beauty and healing as well as to orient us toward hope for this awareness of the sea of grace in which we live and move and have our being.

Within the Gospel is a hint as to the ‘how’ of this reception…Jesus commands the sea, the chaotic force to Be Still. In turn, So might we hear the invitation to be still as that which is necessary to calm our inner seas when churned, or to realize a holy calming power.

to be still and know as the psalm tells us, in order that we might not only experience a redemptive peace but also the emotion of awe leading to gratitude for the transcendence.

In that same book there was story after story from Keltner’s research which documented moments of awe, even negative ones. 

This one was particularly moving for me: Louis as a six year old witnessed his father murder a man. His mother was a sex worker, a life which not only filled this child’s days but led him to the almost inevitable path of pimping himself. Eventually Louis was sentenced to 229 years in prison for pimping and pandering multiple counts. 229 years!

Louis experienced what the author defines as threat-based awe which manifests in anger and shudders and cold shivers. But the story doesn’t end there…

Facing a life inside prison Louis had a vision of bringing an extraordinary peace to the confines of the prison which would emanate to the outside world. Prisoners might exhibit kindness and courage within and in so doing allow a holy goodness to speak, to have a voice, as yet unheard and certainly unexpected. 

Louis became a producer of shows which documented stories which ultimately were gathered as part of a restorative justice project. “It was a radical and ritualized implementation of the idea that if we allow people, even those in the heat of conflict the chance for allowing goodness its own speech we can build more peaceful relations often fragile ones. “

This voice of goodness from the most unlikely source transcended our expectations of justice, our expectations of who is in and who is out not to mention demonstrating an efficacy hardly imagined.

Awe is all over this story…in Louis, in the storytellers, in the outside witnesses and in us today

God reminds us that no matter how horrible, how tragic, how unjust, how desperate, there is a voice, often a whisper, which speaks beauty and goodness into the world. When we spot it, when we experience it, when we are it, we are transformed by awe.

I close by offering a poem by Mary Oliver entitled Maybe which speaks to the power of Jesus and the Holy Spirit to transform our deepest storms, maybe just maybe, ..

MAYBE

Sweet Jesus, talking
   his melancholy madness,
      stood up in the boat
         and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
   So everybody was saved
      that night.
         But you know how it is

when something
   different crosses
      the threshold — the uncles
         mutter together,

the women walk away,
   the young brother begins
      to sharpen his knife.
         Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
   like the wind over the water —
      sometimes, for days,
         you don’t think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
   after the multitude was fed,
      one or two of them felt
         the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight
   before exhaustion,
      that wants to swallow everything,
         gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
   as they are now, forgetting
      how the wind tore at the sails
         before he rose and talked to it —

tender and luminous and demanding
   as he always was —
      a thousand times more frightening
         than the killer sea.

+ Mary Oliver

May we be still and know this inbreaking of wondrous love and peace. May awe come upon us when even the most anxiety producing situations are transformed by God’s grace. May we gaze in that awe at a radiance before unknown. May awe be spoken into the world…