The Spiritual Experience of Awe
Racing on skidoos across the frozen Arctic Ocean, tightly gripping the ropes tying down the pile of supplies we’d need for our expedition to the northern end of Baffin Island, I was awestruck.
Baffin Island Expedition - Majestic Awe
The ice was still solid that spring and nothing else man-made could be seen under the crystal clear skies. Huge snow-burdened cliffs jutted upward and the speed of our travel, the shimmer of white on white, and the brisk air rushing past us stirred my heart. I’d felt it before in vast wild places—that sense of being an integral part of something much larger than myself, connected to the mystery, beauty, and soul of all sentient beings amidst impressive, magnificent natural scenery. That, for me, is a “religious” experience.
Golden Ponds in the Rockies
In her book, Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age, Katherine Ozment, award-winning journalist and former senior editor at National Geographic, writes about awe as “a mix of wonder, reverence, and fear.” I’ve experienced those feelings on mountain tops gazing across an unending series of peaks in the Rocky Mountains and the Swiss Alps, from a sleeping bag deep in the California desert as the night sky filled with an infinite number of stars, in a helicopter skimming deep, seemingly impenetrable forests in the hinterlands of Papua New Guinea, and in territory as familiar to me as fall colors surrounding the outermost lake at Golden Ponds in my little town of Longmont, Colorado.
Recently, with the loss of my precious son, I have experienced awe as people I know well and many I’ve never met have taken extraordinary steps to offer me comfort and support. In the midst of the darkest days of my life, kindness has lit a candle that has warmed my heart.
Earlier this year, Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote about this topic in his Mind and Body column. He suggests that we should look for more “daily experiences of awe.” He reports that during studies of people’s experiences of awe in his UC Berkeley lab, they find,
Evidence of awe in the quotidian. Yes, awe arises during the extraordinary: when viewing the Grand Canyon, touching the hand of a rock star like Iggy Pop, or experiencing the sacred during meditation or prayer. More frequently, though, people report feeling awe in response to more mundane things: when seeing the leaves of a Gingko tree change from green to yellow, in beholding the night sky when camping near a river, in seeing a stranger give their food to a homeless person, in seeing their child laugh just like their brother.
Baffin Island on the way to camp.
Keltner believes that awe is elicited especially by nature, art, and impressive individuals or feats, including acts of great skill or virtue.
Today there is a woeful diminishment in the use of the word “awesome”—I tell a clerk I’ll take the blue blouse instead of the red, and he says enthusiastically, “Awesome!” No, my friend that is NOT awesome, it is mundane. Nor is it awesome that I choose the pear and gorgonzola pizza over the pepperoni and so on. I would like to banish the use of the word to describe the trivial, to uphold its use as a way of communicating that we have been moved to our core by something grand and extraordinary. These experiences lead us to act more frequently for the greater good, put us in the mood to be more compassionate, to see the commonalities among us rather than the differences. Awesome behavior by others can move us out of darkness into light, elevate our belief in our mutual journey, and give us the courage to go on.
To everyone who offered their hand to me in the past few weeks, thank you. You are truly awesome.