After viewing the total solar eclipse in April, a friend from high school posted this on Fa-cebook. 

My friend’s twin sister, who is a doctor that works with cancer survivors, commented, “The im-portance of awe and Collective Awe is being studied in cancer survivors.” I commented on my family’s eclipse experience and shared, “Taking time to notice awe in the everyday is a spiritual practice I would like to cultivate in my life and encourage oth-ers—get us out of ourselves and our bent towards self-centeredness. Thank you for sharing this!” Finally, a person recommended a book: Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner. I’ve been reading the book and listening to the audio book over the past few weeks. In a couple weeks, we’re having a virtual book discussion. 

In their study of the experience of awe, which the author and his fellow researchers define as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world, the authors discovered eight wonders of life that led people around the world to feel awe. 

Those wonders were: 1. moral beauty (other people’s courage, kindness, strength or over-coming, 2. collective effervescence, 3. nature, 4. music, 5. visual design, 6. spiritual and religious awe (mystical awe), 7. life and death, and finally ,8. epiphanies when we sudden-ly understand essential truths about life. 

It’s interesting to note what wasn’t mentioned in stories of awe from the twenty-six differ-ent cultures included in their study. Absent were money, technology, social media, con-sumer purchases. The author writes, “Awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition, and status signaling—a realm beyond the pro-fane that many call the sacred.” 

In the chapter on spiritual and religious awe, Keltner shares a story of Rev. Jennifer Bailey who finds mystical awe in the strength and courage of African American women. Rev. Bailey uses a metaphor of “composting religion.” If you know what it means to compost, you know this is an interesting metaphor. In a compost pile, raw materials like food scraps, grasses, and leaves are gathered. In their storage place, they decay. Over time various microorganisms break down the raw materials and distill a humus. 

The nitrogen of the humus can then be used to nourish the life of plants. Keltner suggests that our experience of mystical awe or spiritual experience follows this pattern of decaying, distilling, and growth. 

I invite you to consider how your experience of awe, your spiritual experience, has followed this metaphor. For example, I can recall attending VBS as a child. At each day’s opening, we would say a pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States, the Christian flag, and then the Bible. I was taught to believe that the United States was the shining city on a hill, a beacon of freedom against the evils of communism. 

Over the last forty years this nationalistic faith has decayed. In its place is a distilled vision for God’s king-dom—made up of people grouped under heaven. This distillation has led to spiritual growth. I have moved from being exclusive to inclusive. From embracing a white Christian nationalism to God’s kingdom vision. This process has led me to embrace spiritual practices of reconciliation, peace, justice, embracing and extending grace to all people. 

What about you? When have you experienced awe? When have you experienced mystical awe? Has it led to a pattern of decay, distilling, and growth in your spiritual life? Have you ever experienced the decay of what you inherited and a distillation of some essential feeling that gave rise to your own spiritual belief and practice? If you have, I would love to grab a cup of coffee with you and listen to your story. 

Pastor David