Awesome. Cool. Wow. Love. These are, by my own humble estimation, a few of the vapidest, overused words in the English language. And I’m as guilty of using them as anyone. My text message streams are filled with these and other similar, easy exclamations. I mean, come on, they have their own emojis.
They are also, I found out over the past year, powerful words of prayer.
About a year ago, I read a book called “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,” by Dacher Keltner, an expert on human emotion. In the book, Keltner sets out to define what we mean by “awe” and illustrates the experience of awe through dozens of individual stories gathered from around the world.
And, indeed, it’s his discussion of the global experience of awe that makes this book worth reading. We are all moved, he writes, by experiences that make us draw in a sharp breath and let out the slow sound of “awe” or “wow” or “woah.” In this sense, in what moves us, we all speak the same language. There is something very important about understanding that.
Drawn from his own deep research, Keltner defines awe as: “The feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” It is about “our relation to the vast mysteries of life.” These experiences come from what he calls the “eight wonders of life,” which can be classified into a “taxonomy of awe.” They are, in order of their commonality around the world:
- Moral Beauty – other people’s courage, kindness, strength and overcoming.
- Collective Effervescence – those moments when, as part of a crowd, we feel we are part of a collective self or tribe — an experience of “we.”
- Nature – not surprisingly, our experience in and of nature can often leave us speechless and with a sense of something bigger at work.
- Music – and its ability to transport us to “new dimensions of symbolic meaning.”
- Visual Design – art and architecture and its power to open our minds to new ways of perceiving the world.
- Stories of Spirituality and Religion – and the way they transform, transcend and give us hope for something more.
- Stories of Life and Death – that lead to awe at such moments as first and last breaths.
- Moments of Epiphanies – when we suddenly understand essential truths that transform life in an instant.
While you won’t find Keltner’s book on the “spirituality or religion” section of your local bookstore or online category, I found it to be a great tool for my regular prayer of reflection and examination of my day — my “examen,” as it known in Ignatian spirituality. Keltner’s “eight mysteries” opened my mind to looking for and finding God in an ever-wider array of my life experiences.
Shortly after reading the book, I began to wonder: What if I paid a little closer attention every day to what astounds me and fills me with awe and wonder? What if I expanded my time of reflection to look more broadly and consider those eight areas of mystery? What if this was the way I ended each day, with this examen of awe?
“Good idea,” I said to myself. “Let’s do it.” A year later, my “year of awe” included some 50,000 words of reflection of my daily encounters with awe, as well as lots of photos of the stuff that caught my eye and heart. It’s not all riveting stuff, as you might imagine. But I learned a few things.
On some days, I found myself open to the possibility of awe and proactively scanned the physical or metaphorical horizon for that day’s moment. And sometimes (more than occasionally) I forgot to pay attention at all, which sent me scampering back through my day searching for something — anything — that could somehow classify as “awe.” Even then, with the clock ticking toward midnight (I was a bit obsessive-compulsive about meeting that daily deadline) it was never very hard to find some thing or moment that brought me up short. That’s the wonder of God moving through our lives and the power of a daily examen of some kind. God always shows up. We just have to be looking.
Here are just a few of those moments, following Keltner’s taxonomy of awe.
Moral Beauty, Kindness and Courage
Living in a time when it can seem like kindness, courage and moral beauty are in short supply, my year of awe revealed to me over and over quite the opposite. There are compassionate and brave people all around us, if we only take the time to pay attention and watch for them. I attended my first AA meeting in support of a friend who was sharing the story of his journey to sobriety. I sensed a holy kind of awe within the room as I listened first to him and then to everyone else’s gratitude for his talk and their reflections on their own sobriety. On a regular basis, I witnessed the strength, energy and grace-filled love of my adult children as they cared for their families. In a hotel pool, I watched the parents of a young child with Down syndrome patiently teach him to swim and not be afraid of the water.
It was never very hard to find some thing or moment that brought me up short. That’s the wonder of God moving through our lives and the power of a daily examen of some kind. God always shows up. We just have to be looking.
Collective Effervescence
Whether singing with the choir at church or chanting and cheering for my city’s Major League Soccer team, I experienced transcendence, inspiration and a communal sense of awe many times during the year. At a fundraiser for immigrants, I listened to their stories and felt a rush of kindness and compassion in the room — a natural and unitive sense of awe and pain for those who come here seeking a better life and have found unjust obstacles, hatred and violence. I stood on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu watching the July 4 fireworks, breathing in the “awes” and “oohs” of people from around the world. I sat and prayed regularly with a small group of friends, sharing our faith, doubts and fears with equal honesty and fervor.
Nature
The world around us is an easy and obvious source of awe, of course. It’s where I most often catch God showing off. I suppose it can be even become a bit repetitive and ordinary if we let it. But, as I discovered, even the repetition of beauty is a moment of awe. Over and over, there were sunlight and shadows, sunrises and sunsets, and rare full moons with names like blue, harvest and blood. Autumn colors and the power of the ocean. I waded near sea turtles and got pretty darn close to an active volcano spouting smoke and Pele’s hair, golden-brown strands of volcanic glass. I hiked to majestic waterfalls and stood on the side of an Indiana cornfield, transfixed by a murmuration of starlings. I watched a red-tailed hawk soaring low just above roofs of cars on a parking lot, a praying mantis eating, a pileated woodpecker pecking, and a great heron wading a few feet from me. Don’t be fooled: Our Creator is still creating.
Music
Music, much like nature, has brought people together and created a sense of harmony and wonder for millennia. From early drum circles and the singing of stories around a fire to symphonies and stadium-filled concerts, music has the power to draw us toward the divine and deeper into ourselves. Music made an appearance in my journal almost as frequently as the natural world. I was astounded and had my breath taken by perfectly placed songs in movies and television shows. I walked in on a small, perfectly harmonized choir rehearsing music for evening prayer. In Paris, I sat mesmerized by a woman on a Montmartre streetcorner playing old French songs on accordion and by a 20-something gypsy jazz guitar phenom in a small and cramped jazz club. In Giverny, I listened to a world-class pianist playing for a crowd of 12 in Claude Monet’s old church.
Visual Design
When we wake each day watching for God and seeking awe, the whole world and its multitudinous parts can seem like works of art. But so, too, is human-made art and design a reflection of the Creator. Our ability to create and to appreciate works of art make us co-creators with God. I was astounded again and again by paintings and sculpture both classical and modern, by light streaming through stained glass, by the soaring arches of cathedrals and by the simplicity of a simple square chapel constructed at the center of an early 20th-century factory building. I wrote: “The light streaming in from the old, high industrial-age windows once again was working wonders on me. Shadows and light and reflections, all catching my eye and reminding me of the glory of the light of the world, streaming into our lives in this celebration, this gathering, this feast.”
Stories of Spirituality and Religion
Although Keltner’s book is not overtly religious, he is mindful of and leaves room for religious and spiritual experiences when we go looking for awe. Those can be both personal or communal, and they can be our own stories or our witness of someone else’s. What I discovered most often was a frequent sense of God moving and working and creating in me during my uninterrupted time of reading, writing and praying on my back porch in the early mornings. I noticed an upswelling of awe as I attended Mass in my parish church, in massive cathedrals and in tiny chapels surrounded by a handful of believers. Scripture came alive for me as I lectored at Mass, as I practiced Ignatian imaginative prayer, and as I watched episodes of “The Chosen” that brought me into a new kind of encounter with humanity of Jesus of Nazareth and the foibles and weaknesses of his first followers. As a spiritual director, listening to the stories and struggles of others consistently brought Scripture and stories of faith to life and made them all the more relevant and transformative.
Stories of Life and Death
In addition to all the grand moments of awe I experienced during my travels and sojourns into places like nature, art museums and concert halls, I emerged from my “Year of Awe” with a deeper appreciation for the stuff of ordinary life — for quiet mornings of reading and prayer, special days out with our grandkids for their birthdays, family gatherings, and cooking and sharing weekly dinners with my elderly in-laws. We celebrated birthdays and anniversaries and watched our grandkids grow and stretch themselves toward adulthood through sports, music, school programs and scouting. I discovered a deeper appreciation and love for the generosity and companionship of Sue, my wife and best friend of nearly 50 years.
Death, too, continued to both haunt me and bring me to my knees — a different kind of awe. I attended seven funerals or memorial services, visited the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, and discovered my great-great-great grandparents’ grave in a small unmarked cemetery on private property in southern Missouri. All of that, the life and the death, left me deeper in love with life, with God and with the time we have been given here.
Moments of Epiphanies
There are times, when we’re paying close attention, when God seems to be speaking directly to us, opening up a new conversation and drawing us toward wisdom. Standing in that family cemetery, I came to a greater awareness of the beauty and fragility of life, of the ever-quickening passage of time, and of the incredible set of circumstances and couplings that needed to take place over all those generations in order for me to be sitting here right now, writing about it. My awareness of what I so often dismiss as “ordinary” became extraordinary for me. I developed a deeper appreciation and gratitude for the innovation and ingenuity of others that gave us electrical switches and hot water on demand, safe airplane flight, medical technology, and the wonders of noise-cancelling headphones.
If you go a day without experiencing awe in Paris or Hawaii, you’re doing something wrong. But everyday life can be tougher.
Throughout my year, I found it nearly impossible to not repeat myself, so I gave up trying. If you go a day without experiencing awe in Paris or Hawaii, you’re doing something wrong. But everyday life can be tougher. I decided early on to pay equal attention to those moments that demanded attention over and over again — sitting on my porch praying and writing, singing at church, praying in adoration and worship, being with family, the green of the forest and the red of cardinal, sunsets and sunrises, and being in spiritual conversation with another person during spiritual direction.
These and so many other moments drew me in and beckoned for my attention so often that I could not help but write them down. These moments, upon reflection, changed me in small, significant ways and confirmed my core belief, as St. Ignatius of Loyola famously wrote, that God, indeed, can be found in all things.