Awe Epilogue
"On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’" Mark 4:35-41
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 they were filled with great awe!
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…
Epilogue: Epilogues can be important even necessary. The meditation above was written to be preached yesterday but on Saturday I received a call that my father had taken a turn and was actively dying. I jumped in the car and drove from Boston to Baltimore like a bat out of you know where; well, that is not exactly true because it took 10 hours! lots of time to pray and think and remember.
Upon arriving and telling Dad I loved him and offering prayers and blessing him into the next world of love, he died within a few hours. He may have been waiting; I hope so anyway!
The thing is all this thinking about and writing about awe became so absolutely and ultimately real. Sitting with him in the wee hours of the night waiting for the funeral homr, the room filled with something wonderfilled. There was sadness of course and there was a joy for a life fully-lived.
His caregivers to a one offered testimony to this life, to this love-filled home, as they wept and recounted stories. Even in dementia the man was hysterical, charming, welcoming and impish!
I would like to think that the stormy sea of dementia was calmed that night as a peace descended and transformed. I would like to think that I and we were filled with awe even in our fears and grief.
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