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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
December 8, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
When we consider the magnitude of our universe; observe the intricate beauty and yet the sometimes seemingly random cruelty of nature; contemplate the mysteries of life and living, we can feel both small and humbled, as well as have a sense of being a meaningful part of something much, much larger than ourselves. We’ll explore this sense of awe and how we might cultivate it as a spiritual practice.
Chalice Lighting
As we await the return of the light, we kindle the flame of Community, the second of the five values of our congregation. May the light of Community burn bright, reminding us to connect with joy, sorrow, and service to the Beloved Community that begins within these walls.
Call to Worship
Robert Benson
“Between the Dreaming and the Coming True: The Road Home to God”We do not always see that we should be moving about our days and lives and places with awe and reverence and wonder, with the same soft steps with which we enter the room of a sleeping child or the mysterious silence of a cathedral. There is no ground that is not holy ground.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Moment for Beloved Community
I was just reading a study that found that white employers were more likely to reject a job application without even doing an in-person interview if they thought the person’s name sounded “black” on their resume.
So, our question to ponder this week is what would it be like to be rejected for employment just because of how your name sounded to someone.
As we ponder this, remember there is no need to immerse ourselves in guilt or shame. In fact, these can be counterproductive, we need joy and community to sustain our struggle to do justice and build the beloved community. There is beauty to be found in the struggle itself.
Meditation Reading
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Who is Man?”The Sense of the Ineffable
Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things.
Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.
Sermon
In August of 2017, my spouse, Wayne and I flew to Denver, Colorado. There, we rented a car and drove to a rural area of western Nebraska, where we met up with Wayne’s best friend, Teresa and her two of her sisters.
One of Teresa’s sisters had arranged with a family who had a farm outside of the little town of Alliance, Nebraska, for the group of us to view the total solar eclipse from up on a hillside on their farm.
We gathered on the top of the hill, picnic supplies in hand to wait for the eclipse.
Now, neither Wayne and I, nor the Denny sisters, Teresa, Pamela and Lisa, very often find ourselves at a loss for words. However, when the eclipse began, as the moon moved over the face of the sun and the light began to fade, as night creatures suddenly began their chorus of early evening sounds, we humans fell still and silent.
Evening shadows fell over what had been mid afternoon brightness.
Eventually, the moon completely covered the sun, yet there was still a slight glow around the edges of the moon, casting a glimmer of light on us and all of the creatures and geography below.
I was awestruck. I could feel my skin tingling.
As the moon began to move further across the sun and one edge of the sun began to be visible again, we could see a glow of light in the distant horizon.
The glow surrounded us.
I turned around in a full circle and could see an orange glow, the color of a sunrise, at the edges of the entire 360 degrees of the horizon around us.
Birds began their morning songs.
I felt myself involuntarily inhaling a deep breath. My eyes were brimming with tears in reaction to the absolute beauty and enormity of what I was witnessing.
Later, after the eclipse had ended, and we had returned to the hotel where we were staying, Wayne and I talked about the experience of it.
We both had gotten a powerful sense of how tiny our planet, indeed we are, in the almost incomprehensible vastness of our universe and the limitless sweep of time.
Yet, we also had experienced a sense of expansion and interconnectedness, of being an integral part of that great immensity.
I wanted to start with that story this morning because it is such a strong example of the spiritual theme we are exploring as a religious community during December – the experience of awe.
What does it mean to be a people of awe?
To start, it may be helpful to define what we mean by that little word “awe” that names an an experience which can have such a profound effect on us.
The expression “awe” is rooted in the Greek word “achos”, which also gives us the word ache.
So, the experience of awe opens an ache in our hearts and thereby expands them with a desire to hold on to the change in perspective, the expansion of understanding that we are given by such experiences.
Dr. Dacher Kelner, researcher and Director of Psychology at the University of California, Berkley, who studies the experience of awe, offers this definition – “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.”
He says that “Awe imbues people with a different sense of themselves, one that is smaller, more humble and part of something larger… “
Similarly, neuropsychologist, Nicholas Humphrey, who also studies awe, defines it as “An experience of such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world to assimilate it”
The scientific study of the experience and emotion we call “awe” is relatively new. However, we have already begun to discover some intriguing and potentially important aspects of these experiences.
Several studies of the physiological responses to awe across a variety of different cultures have found a number of commonalities:
- A sudden, often vocalized, involuntary intake of breath.
- The feeling of hair on the arms being raised and/or of having goosebumps.
- Widened eyes and the formation of tears.
- Stillness and a feeling of being struck silent.
And awe seems to be beneficial to us in a number of ways.
First, and this may be one of the reasons we evolved to have the capacity for awe, is that it seems to move us from individualistic and self-centered behavior toward collective interest and prosocial behavior.
And, of course, social behavior has been a major factor in the survival of our species.
Researchers theorize this may arise because of the psychological effects of awe that I described earlier – a sense of smallness and humility and yet at the same time a feeling of connection with something much larger.
For example, near the University of California at Berkley stands a grove of eucalyptus trees that are the tallest in North America. Staring up from beneath these trees with their peeling bark, their odor and the grayish green light their canopy creates can readily induce a sense of awe.
In one study, researchers had a group of students do just that for one minute. However, the researchers had another group of students look 90 degrees away, at the facade of a science building.
Then, the researchers arranged for each group of students to encounter a person who stumbled and dropped a handful of pens.
Sure enough, the students who had ben gazing up at the awe-inspiring trees were far more likely to help the person pick up the pens. They also reported feeling less self-entitled than the other group did.
And studies like this, demonstrating the prosocial influence of awe, have now been repeated using a wide variety of methods, in diverse subjects and in numerous different circumstances.
Studies have also found that experiences of awe may improve our relationship with time by anchoring us in the present moment, making us feel we are rich in time rather than always running out of it.
Further, researchers have also found that experiences of awe boost creativity and improve scientific thinking.
This may be because awe stimulates the dopamine system, which triggers curiosity and exploration in mammals.
Albert Einstein once claimed that experiences of awe are “the source of all true art and science.”
Finally, early research indicates that feelings of awe may also be physiologically and psychologically beneficial in numerous other ways also.
For instance, several studies have found that even short but regular experiences of awe can help our bodies regulate the cytokines in our immune system.
Cytokines can be thought of as chemical messengers that among other functions help manage our inflammatory response when we get injured.
Abnormally elevated cytokines, however, are associated with depression and other psychological and physical problems.
Awe seems to help us reduce cytokine levels when they are elevated unnecessarily.
Researchers even theorize that experiences of awe may be beneficial to people with post traumatic stress syndrome.
I was struck by the story of of a man named Stacy Bare. Mr. Bare had been through two deployments in Iraq. After returning to the United States, he was suffering from severe post traumatic stress syndrome, burdened by suicidal thoughts and was drinking heavily.
One day, he had gotten into an argument with his brother as the two were hiking in Utah’s Canyon National Park. Things were getting heated, when suddenly, they came upon an amazing natural structure called the Druid Arch. Here is a picture of it.
DRUID ARCH SLIDE
The men stopped short. Their jaws dropped. They began to laugh. They hugged each other. Bare says that in that moment he could no longer even remember what they had been fighting about.
That experience of awe was the beginning of Stacy Bare’s life turning around.
Today, he is the director of “Sierra Club Outdoors”, the environmental organization’s program that sponsors trips for veterans and at risk youth on just such awe inspiring wilderness excursions.
The program has documented clear “improvements in psychological well-being, social functioning and life outlook.
Now, here is something important to know.
It does not take stumbling upon the Druid Arch, seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time or experiencing a total solar eclipse for us to reap the potential benefits of awe.
Certainly, these and other large and stunning experiences of awe, such as to be found in these types of extraordinary natural phenomenon or pieces of art and music, ritual and religious or spiritual experiences and the like are so often unexpected blessings.
However, the research has found that smaller, more run of the mill feelings of awe may be both more common than we might expect and more beneficial over the long run if we look for them and recognize them on a consistent basis.
Here are just a few, more day to day events that people have reported moving them into a sense of awe:
- Becoming absorbed in a pattern of light that the setting sun is casting on the floor through the living room blinds.
- Simpler but more frequent experiences of going into natural areas (most of us can’t visit the Grand Canyon every few days, after all).
- Gazing at the stars on a clear night or upon an extraordinary sunrise or sunset.
- Witnessing a child we love’s astonishment and joy at discovering something new in their world.
- Watching gold and red autumn leaves swirl and dance to the ground in a light wind.
- Observing other people engage in acts of kindness, justice or courage.
And the list of these more common, smaller doses of awe goes on and on.
In fact science has found that on average folks feel awe every third day and that we can increase that frequency even more if we allow ourselves the time to slow down – open ourselves to the potential for awe.
We can even find awe through other’s experiences of it, including their digital video of it!
The Unitarian Universalist Soul Matters group even put together a YouTube play list of potentially awe inspiring short videos.
Here is a short URL I created that I hope may be easy to remember. It is https://tinyurl.com/aweatfirstuu
And here is just a short example from one of the videos.
VIDEO
I want to share one more video with you also.
It’s by philosopher and television and social media personality Jason Silva. Silva thinks that finding awe in what we might otherwise consider the mundane is not only possible, but that we need it to move us out of the banal and toward the more sublime and life fulfilling.
Let’s look and listen.
SILVA VIDEO
I think I agree with him, and I think that means that these smaller doses of awe, as well as the more immense ones we may be fortunate to experience once in a while, are a vital part of our spirituality.
They nourish our souls.
A fascinating study found that practicing scientists who held awe as a a part of their love of science, were much more likely to have deep sense of spirituality and even to hold a concept of God.
Now most often, they did not hold a classic or biblical sense of God, but rather a mystical concept of the divine.
They found God in the seemingly limitless creative potential of our universe, as well as the still profoundly mysterious nature of it – some of them metaphorically and others as an actual, mystical cosmic force.
Either way, they found through awe a deep meaning and beauty in life and a source of creativity and innovation in scientific their work.
What if we made being open to – even actively seeking these experiences, both the everyday and the more extraordinary, a spiritual practice?
Surrender to the mystery.
Immerse yourself in experiences of awe. For therein is where God lives.
Amen
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