Awe, Wonder, Beauty and Mystery
How Filled with Awe: A Prayer
Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.
Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing;
let there be moments when Your Presence,
like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk.
Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed.
And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness,
and exclaim in wonder:
How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it!
Blessed is the Eternal One, the holy God!
--Gates of Prayer, a Jewish Prayerbook p. 170
When we are stunned to a place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it's down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is "Wow," that's a prayer.
-Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Tree Essential Prayers, p
In Finding Awe -- by Pastor Shamaine Chambers King
When I gaze at the night sky, hike to a mountain lake, notice a hummingbird flit from flower to flower, listen to the hush of a snow-covered morning, sing a favorite hymn in the congregation, dance with a crowd at a music festival, look into the eyes of a child, or happen upon a small act of kindness, my heart stirs and feels full to bursting. I experience awe.
Experiencing Awe
Awe causes us to feel our smallness and finitude. At the same time, it connects us to the enormity of life itself—to all creation and each other. We stop in our tracks. We stand back in amazement. We feel reverence, wholeness, gratitude, and connection.
Coming out of the social isolation of the pandemic, awe, wonder, joy, beauty, curiosity, enchantment, and the like are being newly appreciated as crucial to our humanity and healing, pathways for personal growth and societal transformation. There is a physical and psychological benefit to experiencing mystery, that which takes us out of ourselves.
Transform Your Life
Dachner Keltner, founder of the Greater Good Science Center, who researches the science of happiness concludes that the secret to experiencing the good life is to FIND AWE. In his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, he describes many different ways to find awe, from collective effervescence to awe walks. Perhaps surprisingly, his research suggests that observing the “courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.” of others, their “moral beauty,” is the most powerful source of awe. It helps us feel better and to do better.
Put Yourself in the Way of Beauty
In this time of polarity and upheaval, what better antidote than to be in nature, be with each other, to stop and notice with wonder and amazement the gifts of grandeur in the enormous and the small, the simple and profound, the beautiful and heartbreaking? As Cheryl Strayed writes, “There’s a sunrise and sunset every day. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.”
Origins -- from "Love Holds You: Poems and Devotions..."
by Christine Valters Paintner
Origins
If I could peer far enough down
a robin's pulsing throat, would I see
notes piled there waiting to be flung
into freshness of morning?
If I close my eyes and burrow
my face into peony's petals,
would I discover the source
of its scent, a sacred offering?
Can I plunge inside
and find a lifetime of words
spooled tightly inside my heart
ready for a tug?
If I dig beneath the bedrock
will I find love there,
solid like iron or does it flow like magma
filling in all of the empty spaces?
Psalm 84:1-4
Salutation
In one salutation to thee, my God,
let all my senses spread out and touch this world at thy feet.
Like a rain—cloud of July
hung low with its burden of unshed showers
let all my mind bend down at thy door in one salutation to thee.
Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains into a single current
and flow to a sea of silence in one salutation to thee.
Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day
back to their mountain nests
let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home
in one salutation to thee.
by Rabindranath Tagore
