“How to Have an Awe-Full Life”

By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

October 11, 2009

            I want to talk with you this morning about the feeling of awe.

            There is a certain irony in the fact that the week I had scheduled myself to write a sermon about feeling awe-full, I came down with a cold that left me feeling awful, or more accurately, like death warmed over, but for me, this is just more proof that the universe may indeed have a sense of humor, if perhaps a somewhat cruel one.

            When do we feel awe?

            In my life, I felt awe standing under the stars at night, contemplating the mystery of why the universe exists rather than nothing at all.

            I have felt awe too, contemplating the fact that the twinkling in the stars I have seen above me above me originated not nano-seconds ago, but has taken millions of years to travel through space to become visible to my eye.

            I have felt awe too, contemplating the fact that most of the heavier elements in my own body were once part of a star that exploded billions of years ago.

            I have felt awe just looking at my own hand, contemplating how over 4 billion years,  through the trial and error of evolution, life has evolved from one-celled organisms into beings who can make music, send email messages over the Internet, travel to the moon, and contemplate their own place in the universe.

            I have felt awe walking through the Grove of the Patriarchs at Mount Rainier National Park, putting my arms against a Douglas Fir tree hundreds of feet tall and over a thousand years old that was a sapling long before the first European settlers arrived on this continent.

            I have felt awe holding newborn babies in my arms and knowing that never before in the history of the universe has there ever been another child exactly like this one, and I have felt awe at the bedside of a person taking his very last breath, witnessing that subtle but distinctive shift between life and death, and knowing too that there never will be another person exactly like this one.

            I have felt awe watching my father-in-law, a retired businessman from Tokyo, Japan,  sitting on the floor of our family room, playing with my son, whose birth mother lived in a poor, war-torn village outside of Medellin, Colombia, contemplating how much these two potential strangers have come to mean to each other and contemplating all the serendipitous coincidences beyond anyone’s control that brought them together.

            I have felt awe standing in this very spot, officiating the marriages of members of this congregation, witnessing them participating in one of life’s rarest acts - - making a life-long promise in the face of all the uncertainty that life may bring.

            I have felt awe when I least expected it.

            This past summer, Hiromi , Kai, and I were traveling from here to Glacier National Park in Montana. Driving along U.S. 2, we stopped at a gas station in Troy, Montana.  After pumping gas, I took Kai to the men’s room. On the way out, I was reaching for the door . It was a flimsy, wooden door with a sliding metal lock on it. On the back of the door there was a poster of ice cream novelties for sale. In the lower left-hand corner of the poster there was a picture of one of those red-white-and-blue popsicles. When I saw this, I thought how good that would taste on such a hot, dry, dusty day but how quickly it would melt in the day’s heat. For some odd reason, my very next thought was of my own transience. “I am alive today, but I will not always be,” I thought to myself, “but I am alive today and what a gift and opportunity that is,” and for the next several hours I tingled with a sense of awe regarding my own life.

            One rather half-expects to have epiphanies on the top of Montana mountains while contemplating the grandeur of nature, not while in a podunk town’s gas station’s men’s room while contemplating popsicles, but the spirit moves in mysterious ways.

            Why do I want to talk with you about awe this morning?

            One of the questions with which I have wrestled throughout my adult life and through my years of ministry with you is the simple yet confounding question, “What does it mean to be a spiritual person, especially when one doesn’t hold conventional beliefs?”

            Over the years, I’ve tried to answer that question in various ways.

            I wrote a sermon a few years ago titled, “How to be a More Spiritual Person in 15 minutes a Day or Less,” and in that sermon I talked about what I understood to be four core spiritual values - - compassion, gratitude, acceptance, and faithfulness to worthy values, and I talked about four questions we might ask ourselves every day if we decided we wanted to grow spiritually: “How can I live with a little more compassion today?” “What am I most thankful for in my life today?” “What is it that I need to forgive or accept today about myself, somebody else, or life itself?” and “What values and commitments will I be most faithful to today?”

            It was a sermon that seemed to strike a chord when I preached it here for the first time - - and it’s also my standard “take it on the road sermon.” Occasionally, I’m invited to preach in other pulpits, and during the past few years, I have preached this sermon more than 25 times at other Unitarian Universalist congregations in the Pacific Northwest. Last spring, I preached it for a Buddhist congregation in Tokyo.

            But sometime around the 19^th or 20^th time, I preached this sermon, I began asking myself, “Do I still really believe this?”

            It wasn’t that I no longer believed that compassion, gratitude, acceptance, and faithfulness were important, but I began to wonder if, in talking about what it means to be a spiritual person, I hadn’t left something very important out - - and that was the experience of awe.

            Throughout the centuries, many people have even argued that the experience of awe or something like it is the primary spiritual emotion.

            Zoologists have witnessed chimpanzees dancing in response to a rainstorm, and have speculated whether what they were seeing was a religious response to the event.

            One can easily imagine the earliest humans reacting in awe to events in the natural world and out of this developing the first human religious rituals.

            In Proverbs in Hebrew scripture, there is the well-known verse, “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” How many of you have heard this verse before?

            There is more than one way to interpret this verse. A very traditional interpretation might be, “If you know what’s good for you, you should do what God says, because the last thing you want to do is mess around with God.”  Yet, there is another, and I think better, interpretation of this verse. Most English bibles translate the Hebrew word yir’ah as fear, but a better translation according to my own study, is “awe” or “reverence.” When we look at the verse this way, the verse is transformed from a warning about a vengeful God to a verse about an existential truth about human existence - - that to live in reverential awe before the mystery and miracle of creation and all life within it is the first step toward leading the most fully human life possible.

            In the 19^th century, many of the early Unitarians and others who associated with them - - gave central importance to their experience of mystery and wonder in contemplating the natural world - - here I’m talking about individuals such as Raph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman - - and Albert Schweitzer, the great Unitarian humanitarian, used the phrase “reverence for life” to describe his philosophy, with awe and reverence being very related words.

            In 1917, the German theologian Rudolph Otto, wrote a book titled The Idea of the Holy, and in this book, Otto used the Latin phrase mysterium tremendum et facinas  - - in English, the tremendous and fascinating mystery - - to describe the experience of the sacred that is found in almost all human cultures. You can hear the echo of Otto’s words in the Unitarian Universalist Association’s description of one of the sources of our liberal religious tradition - - “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder affirmed in all cultures.”

            Similarly, Abraham Heschel was one of the greatest Jewish theologians of the 20^th century, and one of the central themes in Heschel’s writing was of what he called, “radical amazement.” In fact, he believed that living our lives in “radical amazement” was at the core of what it means to be a spiritual or religious person.

            Forest Church died two weeks ago after a three-year struggle with esophageal cancer. For three decades, he was the minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, the author of dozens of books, and probably the most well-known Unitarian Universalist in our country. Forest famously said that religious is our response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die, and at least in my experience, that response is often one of awe.

            But what exactly is awe? It’s hard to talk about awe. Listening to a particular piece of very beautiful music, Victor Hugo once said that is was an experience “of which nothing can be said and about which it is impossible to remain silent.”

            I want to suggest that the experience of awe is not tied to any particular set of beliefs. It doesn’t matter whether one believes or does believe in any Gods to experience awe. My bet is that both Richard Dawkins and Pat Robertson have experienced awe in their lives.

            I also want to suggest that the feeling of awe is more than just a feeling of wonder or amazement. But how so?

            Let me tell you a cheap thrill you can experience not too far from here, and here’s what you have to do…

           First, drive up to Burien, and get a dozen donuts and a cup of coffee from Lucky Donuts on SW 152^nd Street. Then go and park your car in one of the parking lots off Des Moines Memorial Drive just south of SeaTac Airport. Then get out of your car, spread out a sheet on the grass, delve into your coffee and donuts, and wait for a jumbo jet to appear on the horizon. When it’s almost overhead, lie back on the grass because there’s nothing quite like being on a caffeine and sugar high and having Boeing 747 fly just a few hundred feet directly over you with its landing gear already down.

            There is something in that experience - - the loud, terrifying sound of the jets engines and the sight of the massive jumbo jet itself flying over one’s frail human body - - that feels something like awe. It is at least awe-ish.

            Awe, I believe, is always a feeling of contrasts.

            We experience awe when we contemplate the contrast between some aspect of our humanity with something that is much greater than our humanity.

            It’s what we experience when we contemplate the contrast between our own limited, finite, imperfect knowledge and the ultimate mystery of all existence. It’s what we experience when we contemplate the contrast our own size, even our own planet, and the vastness of the universe. It’s what we experience when we contrast our lives with our mortality. It’s what we experience when we contemplate the contrast between our limited powers and the miracle of life. It’s what we experience when we contemplate the contrast between our own limited control and the randomness of life.

            And this experience of awe  - - at least according to my own experience and what I’ve read of some other people’s experiences - - engenders in us a host of other feelings - - yes, anxiety sometimes, but also wonder, amazement, dependence, humility, preciousness, and aliveness.

            As one person I read about said, “Awe makes us feel powerless and insignificant yet at the same time strangely empowered. It is feeling more totally and completely alive than we thought possible before we were in awe.”

            Now, I can tell by the way that some of you are looking at me that you think I should have taken it easy on the cold medicine this morning, but let me try to bring this down to earth, at least just a little bit.

            I was sitting in a Starbucks earlier this week - - this was before I came down with my cold - - and I was just looking around at the other people sitting near me. I let myself dwell for a few moments on the mystery of all of us being there. No not the mystery of why so many people were sitting around drinking over-priced coffee at Starbucks when they should have been at work somewhere, but the REALLY BIG mystery of why any of us were alive at all.

            Then I let myself dwell a little longer on the miracle that we were there at all. I fully admit that there are times in my life, more often than I would wish, I find other people just completely annoying - - ignorant, irrational, bad-behaved and bewilderingly bizarre - - but at this particular moment, I was allowing myself to dwell on the miracle of each of our lives, and if you allow yourself to think about it in a certain way, each human life truly is a miraculous thing.

            Then I let myself dwell on how truly short all of our lives were. In a hundred years, we’ll all be dead, I thought, and then I couldn’t help thinking, I wonder how much Starbucks will be charging for a latte by then.

            The thought of our own transience made each person around me seem even more precious.

            I suddenly had the urge to get up and just hug somebody, anybody. I didn’t. I restrained myself. I started concentrating on somebody talking too loudly on a cell phone and the urge quickly passed.

            In his book Awe: The Delights and Dangers of our Eleventh Emotion, the clinical neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall says that many of us, or perhaps even most of us, do not experience awe often enough in our lives. In fact, Pearsall, says, many of us suffer from what he calls A.D.D. - - “Awe Deficiency Disorder.”

            He also uses other language to describe what is wrong with many of us. Many of us, he says, are languishing. What does he mean by languishing? “To languish,” according to at least one dictionary, means “to continue to exist in a miserable condition,” and we often think of people languishing in a prison cell or perhaps in a hospital bed in a nursing home.

            But when Pearsall says that many people in today’s world are languishing he means they have mistaken “an intensely busy life for a meaningful connected one.” Let me say that again. Languishing, he says, is mistaking “an intensely buy life for a meaningful connected one.”

            So how do we live lives that are more full of awe?

            The simple answer is that if we are to live lives that are more full of awe, we have to make room for awe in our lives, and a big part of that is learning to live lives that are less busy. Busy people, he says, rarely experience awe.

            In addition to learning to live lives that are less busy, I think we need to make a habit of inviting awe into our lives.

            As I’ve mentioned before, I have an individual spiritual practice, and part of that practice involves sitting for about 10 minutes every day in a time of reflection, meditation, and prayer. As part of that practice, I recite a meditation, and as part of that meditation I say, “May I be ever more aware today of the mystery, miracle, beauty, and preciousness of all creation,” and just as with compassion, gratitude, acceptance, and faithfulness, I have found when I am more intentional about inviting awe into my life, I am more likely to experience it.

            However, Pearsall says, and I agree, that we shouldn’t be too quick to invite awe into our lives.

            Inviting awe into our lives is always somewhat of a mixed bag.

            When we feel true awe, and I actually believe moments of true awe are somewhat rare, it confronts us. Like an earthquake, it shakes us up, and may even shake us to our foundations, even causing the beliefs and values that we have created to give order and meaning to our lives to crumble down around us. A truly awesome experience can make us question the assumptions we had always believed before with a degree of certainty, the assumptions on which we may have built our lives, and make us look at our lives and the world in a new way.

            Pearsall suggests that our ability to experience awe is most likely an evolutionary response, something that nature has built into our brains as a way of shaking us up every once in a while to make sure we never get stuck too much in a rut. “Maybe that’s what awe is for,” he says, “to act as a consciousness stimulant that makes us more aware of just how unaware we usually are…Maybe it’s our emotion that serves as nature’s alarm clock designed to awaken us to its wonders before we sleep right through our lives.

            But being shook up like that can have consequences…

            I read a story the other day about a British woman who was sitting on a park bench watching a sunset, and something about the experience of watching that sunset was so powerful, so transformative, so awesome - - to use that word in its non-trivial sense - - that she quit her job, divorced her husband, and took her life in a whole new direction.

            So if we make the decision to invite awe into our lives, perhaps we should be ready.

            In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard warns, “It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

            But let me reiterate…we have a choice.

            It is up to each of us.

            Do we want to live lives that are intensely busy or meaningful and connected? Or perhaps not intensely busy, but just comfortable, easy, routine, and predictable with no threats to any assumptions we have made about ourselves or about life. Or do we yearn for something more, to live life as fully, richly, deeply, and abundantly as possible, even if that means being shaken to our very foundations?

            The choice, my friends, is somewhat ours.

            May we each choose wisely.

            So may it be. Amen.