What Awe Serves
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. (Mark 9:2–9)
Phil Zuckerman is a sociologist aiming to give awe its due.
I don’t imagine we here would have it any other way. I don’t imagine any here would prefer that awe be ignored or discounted. “It’s just a chemical blip in the brain.” “It’s a dopamine burst.” No, I imagine we’re all fans of awe, appreciators of its reality and hold on us.
As fundamental to the human experience, to human creativity and curiosity; as perhaps one of the qualities and capabilities that makes us human: awe. Who wouldn’t uphold this as an experience worthy of further exploration and appreciation?
Come to think of it, one of my favorite characters in one of my favorite pieces of contemporary literature or theater or performance art, or whatever it is, is Trudy, a homeless woman in Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, written by Tomlin’s now-wife Jane Wagner. Trudy wanders New York, speaking to what she calls her “space chums,” showing them around while they visit from another planet or another plane.
One night, under the dim stars of the city sky, she suddenly finds herself in awe.
But it doesn’t stop there. It goes on: “Then I became even more awestruck at the thought that I was, in some small way, a part of that which I was in awe about. And this feeling went on and on and on. . . . My space chums got a word for it: awe-infinitum. Because at the point you can comprehend how incomprehensible it all is, you’re about as smart as you need to be. . . . And I felt so good inside and my heart so full, I decided I would set aside time each day to do awe-robics. Because at the moment you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don’t understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time.”18
Right? Awe as gateway to insight, to wisdom—what calls us to worship (quite literally this morning, in the Call to Worship). I’m not about to call that into question.
But Zuckerman’s intention around his experiences of awe goes astray, to my mind, when he speaks of “aweism.” He does so in his recent book Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions, a book I haven’t read and (to be honest) don’t intend to. I learned of it, and a bit of its contents, from an article on Religious News Service by religion reporter Kimberly Winston. She seems to give it a fair hearing.19
According to her, Zuckerman, who counts himself among “secularists”—these being, as he lists them, atheists, humanists, agnostics, and other self-described “nones”—aims to explain how such people “raise their children, decide right from wrong, and build communities without the benefit of religion.”20 I’m not sure to whom he means to explain it. To religious people who perhaps assume the irreligious are without moral orientation? Or to more hardline secularists who reject any talk or thought of transcendence? I don’t know who his audience is, and perhaps he doesn’t either. This is a sort of scholarly memoir.
Whatever. According to Zuckerman, secularists might live and socialize and decide by this guiding experience, awe, which Winston summarizes, perhaps quoting Zuckerman, as a “nonreligious impulse you can’t explain.”
Frankly, this is a description I think so vague it’s nearly meaningless. A nonreligious impulse you can’t explain. But pressing the issue, I wonder what’s meant by “can’t.” Is it that you aren’t able to explain it or that you aren’t allowed to?
Remember, hardline ideologues come from all camps.
The editor of Free Inquiry, Tom Flynn, rejects awe almost altogether, criticizing Zuckerman’s project because awe has a referent, a source back to which awe is offered. “To the degree that reverence is understood transitively—as denoting awe, veneration, or respect toward something beyond”— to that same degree it must be rejected. “The domain of everyday experience can’t be transcended,” he claims. “There is nothing above it, nothing beyond or over it, nothing to revere . . . only reality.”21 Of course, what qualifies in his mind as reality he doesn’t say.
And again, I wonder what’s meant by “can’t” here, because of course everyday experience can be transcended. People do it all the time: in prayer and meditation; with music—listening to it, performing it; in relationships—marriages, parenthood, lifelong commitments come what may; in physical activity and challenges. A hiker reaches the top of Mount Washington: I doubt he’d merely explain the experience as a long series of footsteps, though that certainly is the “real” “everyday experience” just embarked upon. So, by saying that “everyday experience can’t be transcended,” our “freely inquiring” Flynn must mean that he won’t allow for such a thing.
So much for free inquiry.
I remember once a little boy at a playground took some woodchips and threw them toward other children playing. His mother, meaning to discipline him, told him, “You can’t do that.” Looking puzzled, he glanced down to the wood chips lining the playground, picked up another handful, threw them, and then looked at her as if to show, “Yes, I can! And you could, too, if you tried.”
“You can’t explain this impulse, awe.”
“Well, maybe you could if you tried.”
But back to Zuckerman. As for how he describes this impulse: it’s a “profound, overflowing feeling,” which he knows best in fleeting moments: “playing on the beach with his young daughter, eating grapes from his grandparents’ backyard, sledding in the dark of a January night, dancing with abandon at a favorite concert.”22
As for aweism, Zuckerman explains that this “is the belief that existence is ultimately a beautiful mystery” and has the capacity to “inspire deep feelings of joy, poignancy and sublime awe.” 23Our friend Trudy, homeless, hearing voices, wandering New York City, might say the same, and, since I go with her, I would agree.
Zuckerman continues, though, and now defensively, as if anticipating the attack from his harder-line secularists: “Aweism . . . though steeped in existential wonder and soulful appreciation, is still very much grounded in this world. It is akin to what philosopher Robert Solomon dubs a ‘naturalized’ spirituality: a non-religious, non-theological, non-doctrinal orientation that is right here, in our lives and in our world, not elsewhere.”24
As to aweism’s end, its goal, Zuckerman explains, “An aweist just feels awe from time to time, appreciates it, owns it, relishes it, and then carries on.”25
And concluding about aweism, Zuckerman assures any who would worry about a religious agenda being set upon them: “My awe stops there.”26 He’s not trying to do anything with his awe. He’s not trying to get anyone to join him in awe. He just feels it, notices it, keeps it to himself, stops there.
Huh.
Trudy might call it “Awe interruptus.”
Peter might say, “It is good for us to be here. Let us make three dwellings.”
Peter, Jesus’ near constant companion; Peter, the disciple who, only verses earlier, confessed that Jesus isn’t merely a reiteration of the ancient prophet Elijah or John the Baptizer redux, but is the Christ, something unique and one-time in the world, the anointed one of God; Peter, the rock on whom Jesus would establish his church, which is to say the foundation upon