Thinking God an Adjective

God the Adjective, part 2

In the years after high school the issue in my mind gradually shifted from being about God to being about "God" – that is, from the ontological question about the way reality is to the semantic question about the way words are used. Might not the word “God” be used, not to make a controversial empirical claim about what is, but to draw our attention, as a good poet does, to certain qualities of existence – qualities which are not subjects about which to dispute, but are a felt reality momentarily overlooked?

It’s not about being convinced or persuaded. It’s not about believing. It’s about being reminded of what we already know deep down: that this present moment – if we truly show up for it – is so sweet and so delicious that we need words like “holy” and “divine” and “God” to help us notice it.

It’s not about what exists; it’s about the qualities of existence: is it wondrous, mysterious, beautiful, awesome? Those adjectives are the crux of the matter, and that’s why I suggest to you today that God is an adjective.

Glen Thomas Rideout’s poem, "god is no noun" is beautiful and evocative (SEE IT HERE) -- and it is dismissive of the idea of God being an adjective. The poem begins:

“God is not a noun and certainly no adjective.”

But I think Rideout overlooks that the qualities of things are more important than the things.

It doesn’t matter much whether it’s a house or a cave if it’s luxurious, comfortable, warm, cozy, affordable, and conveniently-located. It’s those adjectives that matter. It doesn’t matter what we say exists or doesn’t exist if whatever exists – existence itself -- is holy, sacred. “God” is an allusion to the quality that existence has when we are so fully present to it that we perceive divinity there.

Dewey and Bonhoeffer

Let me mention two writers – one of them who did not identify as Christian, John Dewey, and one who did, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They both support this emphasis on the adjectival.

John Dewey said religion, the noun, didn’t do much for him. But he recognized the deep value of religious, the adjective. “Religious” referred to a kind of experience, a special quality that suffuses some experiences. You don’t have to have a religion in order to have religious experience.

The noun, religion, indicates some particular religion, and any particular religion carries a lot of particular baggage – doctrines, rituals, theologies, moral dictates. The religious quality in experience, on the other hand, requires no doctrines, rituals, or moral rules. A religious attitude “may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal,” wrote Dewey.

When something feels profound, or moving, or like a revelation or an epiphany – while on a nature hike, or through involvement in some project – we might say “it was a religious experience!” We wouldn’t say it was a religion. An experience has religious quality when it results in adjustments to life’s conditions, orientation, a sense of peace and security. It might be brought about by devotion to a cause, by a passage of poetry, by meditation. The religious quality is a unifying, connecting quality. It re-orients us, brings a feeling of peace through awareness of interconnection with everything.

Writing along lines similar to Dewey was Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- a German theologian and outspoken critic of Hitler, imprisoned and eventually executed by Nazis. Bonhoeffer called for a religionless Christianity. Wrap your mind around that term: “religionless Christianity.” Bonhoffer wrote in a letter from prison:

“The New Testament must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a precondition of faith” (329).

Religion, he said,

“is only a garment of Christianity – and even this garment has looked very different at different times.”

I think Bonhoeffer had in mind the same idea Dewey had: that this noun, religion, denotes some set of doctrines and practices. No single set is necessary for giving experience that religious quality. A wide variety of sets of doctrines and practices can help cultivate the religious quality of experience.

In Bonhoeffer’s way of putting it, the religion of Christianity -- that is, the doctrines and practices -- was only a garment covering over the true Christianity beneath – a Christianity that had nothing to do with doctrine or ritual and everything to do with the experience of transcendence in our lives. Christians discarding the garment of their religion – Christians, that is, who possess “religionless Christianity” – will recognize that very different doctrines and practices – say pagan ones, or Buddhist ones – also facilitate our awareness of that which goes by many names: the oneness of reality, the divine, the ground of being, the transcendent, the awesome quality of the universe, the interbeing of everything, the interconnected web of existence -- God.

Christians discarding this religion garment, said Bonhoeffer, will cease to regard themselves “as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world” (280-81).

So that’s a little conceptual background from Dewey and Bonhoeffer.
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This is part 2 of 3 of "God the Adjective"
See also
Part 1: How We Argue About God
Part 3: The God Life in This God World

How We Argue About God

God the Adjective, part 1

God is traditionally used as, thought of as, a noun. Last week I talked about "God the Verb." Today: "God the adjective." I should let you know I have no plans for sermons on "God the Preposition" or "God the Pronoun." You might have been particularly looking forward to "God the Expletive"!

Ah, expletives. Expletives do come up when we get to arguing about God. And when we tire of the bickering, we just stop talking about God – which is a shame. The argument about God starts ontological, then gets semantic. At root, however, it is neither ontological nor semantic, but tribal. Let me explain.

It starts ontological: What exists? Is there an entity that knows, desires, and creates?

To the question, "Do you believe in God?" many Unitarians long ago developed the habit of saying, “Depends on what you mean by God.” So then the argument shifts from the ontological to the semantic. What does the word “God” mean? Is it a legitimate use of the English language to use the word “God” to refer NOT to a person-like entity that knows and wants, but only to a source of beauty and mystery; a power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; an ultimate context and basis for meaning and value; the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; or the Cosmos: “all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”? Can you say that there is nothing in the universe except what the scientists describe and still call THAT “God”?

Why do people get riled up over semantic arguments about the word “God” when no other semantic argument elicits much concern or passion? I think it's because the real conflict is neither about ontology nor semantics. It’s about tribe. Are you in my tribe – do you speak the tribal passwords, affirming or denying the existence of God, adopting my tribe’s definition of the word “God”? If you’re not in my tribe, then we must fight – or else avoid the subject altogether.

There are meanings of “God” acceptable within the English language that don’t mean person-like or supernatural, so I want to ask you: Do you still prefer not to use the word because of tribal identity? You don’t want anyone to think for a minute that you might be in the Woo-Woo tribe? I think, for some of us, that’s the hang-up. We’re more interested in protecting our self-identity as members of the No-Woo tribe than we are in connecting with other people through the meanings that we share: awe, wonder, beauty, mystery, source of hope and healing that we call by many names.

Let me tell you some of my history with God.

The G-word and I have had an uncertain relationship. When I was in first grade, in Pinetops, North Carolina, where there was no Unitarian Universalist congregation, the neighbor kid sometimes invited me to go along with him to his church. Several times that year, I went, and as a result of the instructions given me at that Presbyterian Sunday School, there was a brief period in my life during which I did a nightly bedtime ritual called “prayer.” “Prayer” involved asking someone named “God” to do, for various friends and relations, something called “bless.”

By fourth grade, I had left behind “that kid stuff.” I was then living in a different small southern town: Carrollton, Georgia. Carrollton didn’t have a Unitarian Universalist congregation either, but it was only an hour’s drive from Atlanta, where, sporadically, I was taken to the UU church. Soon after learning there was a word “atheist,” I decided that I was one. I made this declaration at the UU church, and no one seemed very interested. I made this declaration during lunch at my elementary school cafeteria, and a palpable buzz shockwaved through hall.

The news reached an ardent and incredulous girl a few tables over. She arose, and, flanked by a silent friend to function as diplomatic observer, came over and confronted me. “You don’t believe in God?” she asked.

“No,” I said, suddenly interested in the lima beans on my plate.

“Do you know what the Bible is?” she pressed.

I offered my considered and scholarly assessment. “Just some book by some stupid people,” I said sullenly.

She gasped. The diplomatic observer gasped. The two of them withdrew to tut-tut with others over the lostness of my soul and the rift to their social fabric that my apostasy represented.

That was the beginning of my career in theology and scriptural hermeneutics. In my remaining seven years in the town’s public school system, I ventured no further discourses on religion, but that was enough. Throughout that time I was “the class atheist.”

Back then, it was clear what “God” meant – and clear -- to me – that the universe included nothing that instantiated that meaning. Now, nothing about God is clear: there’s only ambiguity and mystery – beautiful, rich, joyous ambiguity and mystery.

The theist says there is such a thing, the atheist says there isn’t such a thing, and the agnostic says “I don’t know whether there’s such a thing or not,” – but they all pretend to know what sort of thing it is they’re talking about. The universe, however, is more amazing – life is more profoundly awesome – and the Bible’s authors, editors, and redactors were wiser and more insightful – than my fourth-grade self was prepared to comprehend.

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This is part 1 of 3 of "God the Adjective"
See also
Part 2: Thinking God an Adjective
Part 3: The God Life in This God World

Transitive, Intransitive, and God

God, the Verb, part 3

In the last part, I gave a brief and rather flimsy account of Process Theology -- there's a lot more to it than I was able mention. (For a short-without-being-uselessly-short introduction, you might start HERE, and if you're ready to dive in the deep end, take a look at Whitehead's Process and Reality and browse books by and about Charles Hartshorne and John B. Cobb.)  I mentioned one idea coming out of, or influenced by, Process Theology: that God is a verb. You might find this perspective radical or exhilarating. You might also have noticed that the God-is-a-verb people are not actually using “God” as a verb.

They say, for instance, that reality is more a matter of events than substances. “Events” conveys a more dynamic quality than “substances,” but if we’re talking about parts of speech (which, supposedly, we are), “event” is just as much a noun as “substance” is. They speak of God as “process” and as “creativity” and as “energy.” All three are nouns. Jean-Claude Koven said God was “unfoldment,” and “infinity,” and “everything,” and “a dance.” Nouns every one. For that matter, “verb” is a noun.

Still.

The point is: there is in our life and our experience a cause for wonder, mystery, reverence. This is better thought of as a process, a dance, a creativity, a love than as a person or entity. Calling it a verb is just a way of alluding to its active doing. But supposing we did want to be sticklers for actually meaning what we said. How would that go for God to be a verb?

Verbs need a subject, if we’re going to speak in sentences, so we could say: The universe gods. There’s the vast cosmos, quietly, grandly godding along through the ages. Reality gods. I god, you god, he she it gods, we god, you god, they god. All God’s children…god.

And what sort of activity is it “to god”? Following the lead of the process and the creativity theologians, to god is to unfold, like an infinite flower opening its petals; to develop through a process of interaction with all the rest of the godding universe. To god is to become transparent to the creativity of the universe shining through you. To god is to fandango across the ballroom of oneness, to trip the light fantastic not “with” but “as” the mountains and rivers and great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars. To god is, in the words of Sufi poet Hafiz, to “laugh at the word two.” It is to swim in the sea of mystery; to quaff from the cup of abundance. To god is to suffice. Whoever you are, whatever your imagined shortcomings, you are enough. To god is to do and be everything that you do and are.

Why would anyone want to call these activities "godding"? We might call them godding to help us remember, to help us wake up to, and attune ourselves to, the fact that everything we do and are is a part of the whole, a part of the dance, the mystery of creativity, the unpredictable unfolding of new things under the sun. For the medievals, to apprehend reality at its most ultimate meant to conceive of changeless eternity. Above this world of corruption and change, God was pure, immutable, outside of time.

To think of God as an active verb is to emphasize the time during which the actions take place. It is to put God in time, rather than removed from time. It is to perceive the holy in change, rather than imagine it in changelessness. It calls attention to divinity as spread throughout all of nature, as manifested by the activities of nature.

Verb theology fit with modern science, which tells us “that reality at the most fundamental level is composed of shimmering waves of probability, fluctuating, intertwining matter and energy.” (Steven Phinney) Instead of saying species just are, biologists now understand species as in flux – as media, we might say, for the playing out of unpredictable creativity. God the verb is a response to these developments in both physics and biology.

I have been imagining God as an intransitive verb. What if God were a transitive verb? If reality gods, what does it god?

The universe gods you, and it gods me. Reality gods the mud and the flowers alike; it gods the Republicans and the Democrats alike. It godded Abu Ghraib and the Syrian refugee crisis. It godded despotic governments at the very moment they were disappearing their people and turning away aid. There is an activity of relationship between all things, an active connection of each thing with all things. In the fullest realization of God-as-transitive-verb, everything gods everything (else).

Unitarian theologican Henry Nelson Wieman, said that the “universe becomes spiritual” as

“more events become signs, as these signs take on richer content of qualitative meanings, as these meanings form a network of interconnective events comprehending all that is happening in the world.” (Wieman 23)

It would seem, to carry Wieman to his logical conclusion, that the universe will have attained total, complete and perfect spirituality when everything signifies everything else -- or when, we might say, everything gods and is godded by everything else.

Godding, then, would be the activity of building meaning by building interconnection and relationship. The butterfly in Australia gods the weather in Chicago. You god the stars and the stars god you. Joy gods sadness and sadness gods joy. This use of “god” seems to mean something like “connects with” or “interdependently arises with.” But more. This way of thinking maybe helps us see through the illusion that there are any separate things. Everything IS everything else.

Verbs need a subject -- that is, if we’re going to speak in sentences. But what if we dispensed with sentences? Could we tell the story of life, of creation, in a language without subjects or objects, a language of only verbs, a language that perhaps the Cosmos itself speaks when it whispers to itself -- or in your ear? Having no tense (because it is timeless), and being neither singular nor plural (because it is both one and many), the infinite Cosmos speaks in the infinitive.

To come, to go,
To run, to jump, to twirl.
To birth, to grow.
To laugh.
To fall, to break, to cry, to rage.
To abandon.
To return, to embrace, to love.
To wound, to bleed, to weep.
To arise.
To work, to play, to smile.
To journey.
To heal.
To arrive, to arrive, to arrive.
To bless.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "God, the Verb"
See also
Part 1: What Are You Saying When You Say "God"
Part 2: Processing Theology

Processing Theology

God, the Verb, part 2

Whitehead gives us Process philosophy, and while Whitehead did write about the place of God in his philosophy, process philosophy did not become full-fledged process theology until the Unitarian Charles Hartshorne’s work expanded, extended, and revised Whitehead.

The main name in Process Theology is Charles Hartshorne. Born in 1897, Hartshorne was 103-years-old when he died in 2000. I never met him, though I could have. He was at our UU General Assembly as recently as 1994. Then 97-years-old, he participated in a seminar there put on by the Unitarian Universalist Process Theology Network, delighting attendees “with his lively, extemporaneous answers to their questions.” (Charles Hartshorne had one child, a daughter, Emily, -- who I did have the pleasure of meeting, -- in the sanctuary of Community UU, when she was visiting White Plains and attended one of our services a couple years ago.)

For Process Theology, God is not omnipotent. God is finite – changing and growing along with creation. Reality is made of events, not material substance. God, being finite and not omnipotent, doesn’t have full control of what happens. Rather, God engages with us in a process in which both we and God develop together. God changes.

God offers us possibilities the full meaning of which God doesn’t know. As we, God’s creatures, explore the offered possibilities, Creator and Creation alike learn, grow, develop, allowing new possibilities to be offered. Hartshorne held that people do not experience subjective immortality, but we do have objective immortality in that our experiences live on forever in God, who contains all that was. Just as you, throughout your life, build on your experiences, developing new experiences shaped by all prior experience, so, too, God, after your death, continues to build on your experiences. Your experiences continue to contribute to God’s new experiences for all eternity.

Yes, God transcends the world, but the world also transcends God. Yes, God creates the world, but the world also creates God. We are a part of God. Our growth is a part of God’s growth. God’s knowledge is the sum total of the knowledge of all life-forms – God’s desires the sum of the desires of life.

The emphasis on change leads to the idea that God is a verb – the active, creative principle in the universe. Buckminster Fuller, in 1940, wrote:

Here is God's purpose –
for God to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law,
not academic dogma, nor ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.”

The traditional notion of God as creator isn’t entirely off-base, says Process Theology. There really is a connection between the function of creating and the deep mystery, awe, wonder and sense of reverence that goes with the notion “God.” God the creator wasn’t entirely off-base – but God isn’t a person-like creator. Instead, God is creativity itself.

Here’s how the poet Wild Bill Balding puts it:

God is a verb, not a noun:
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be.'
dynamic, seething, active
web of love poured out,
given, received, exchanged,
one God in vibrant community
always on the move,
slipping through our fingers,
blowing through the nets we cast
to hold and name,
confine to nouns, to labels,
freezeframe stasis,
pinned like a butterfly,
solid, cold, controlled, lifeless.
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be' -
not pinned down by names, labels,
buildings, traditions,
or even by nails to wood:
I am: a verb, not a noun,
living, free, exuberant,
always on the move.

Jean-Claude Koven writes:

“God is indeed a verb. He is not the creator. He is the ongoing unfoldment of creation itself. There is nothing that is not a part of this unfolding. Thus there can be nothing separate from God. . . . When we perceive God as a noun, we envision him as the creator, the architect of, and therefore separate from, his creation. Identifying ourselves as part of that creation, we see ourselves not only separate from our source but separate from each other and all other manifest things as well. . . . Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life shifted. Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was only God. When someone spoke to me, it was with God's voice; when I listened, it was with God's heart. As you begin to view God not as the creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself, you'll discover God in everything you see – including yourself.”

UU minister Stephen Phinney puts it this way:

“I believe that the holy is in the process of giving and taking of the love we have. In other words, the holy or God is the process of interchanging love.”

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "God, the Verb"
See also
Part 1: What Are You Saying When You Say "God"?
Part 3: Transitive, Intransitive, and God

What Are You Saying When You Say "God"?

God, the Verb, part 1

I used to have a ponytail. For seven years during the aughts decade I had a ponytail. I was aware that a ponytail makes a certain statement, and a ponytail on a man – or, person apparently presenting as male -- makes a different statement from a ponytail on a person apparently presenting as female. But what statement? What does a ponytail say? Now I have a beard – and what does that say? I don’t know. Different things to different people, I guess.

What does the word “God” say to people? (An even hairier question!) It says something, though it’s not exactly clear what. Whatever it is, does it need to be said? If it does, can it be said as well, or better, without using “the G-word”?

If I don’t know what “God” means, then I don’t know what “atheist” means either. Declaring you’re an atheist – or a theist -- makes some kind of statement. But what? Some people say they believe in God. What are they saying? Others say they don’t believe in God. What are they saying?

And is there a real disagreement here or only the appearance of a disagreement? If you say something is red, and I say no, it’s yellow, but by “red” you mean orange – and by “yellow,” I mean orange – then we don’t have a real disagreement. Thus, some people say they believe in God but not the God that the atheists don’t believe in. They agree with the atheists that that God doesn’t exist, but they believe in another one. It reminds me of the mythological beast described in an early Woody Allen essay. The “Great Roe,” he says, has "the body of a lion and the head of lion, but not the same lion."

So let me ask you some different questions.

Have you felt awe? Have you ever felt a fulsome beauty that stopped you dead in your tracks? Have you felt grandeur in the world, the planet, or the space in which it floats? Have you felt a deep humility in the face of that grandeur? Have you ever felt a oneness with another being – perhaps watching a hawk soaring across the sky felt that you, too, were soaring there – that the boundaries of your self expanded, or dropped away entirely? Have you ever felt mystery and wonder? For all the world’s tragedies and atrocities -- the holocaust, mass famines, horrible hatred and violence, have you ever felt that the entirety, the whole enchilada, the full catastrophe – the stuff we judge good and the stuff we judge bad – all of it together -- the laughter, the tears, and heartache, all added up -- all fit together somehow into a whole that, tragedy and pain and all, is good and beautiful and true?

If your answer to all those questions is “no,” then if you want to identify yourself as an atheist, I won’t quibble. If your answer to even one of those questions is “yes,” then if you still want to self-identify as an atheist, a quibble or two may be in order. To wit: Why not call that feeling a feeling of God?

Maybe one person defines God as the universe – the universe with nothing in it other than what scientists describe. Meanwhile another person defines God as a super-powered person with knowledge and desires. Two such people can have a conversation in which they each mention God. For all their differences, they are both invoking what is of ultimate concern, what is awe-inspiring, what is the source of life and beauty and mystery – that toward which an attitude of reverence is appropriate.

There are a lot of options for how to think about God. In what follows, I will look particularly at an option offered by a school of thought called Process Theology.

Process Theology began in the early 20th century, as a development from Process Philosophy, created by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Whitehead, a mathematician turned philosopher, published Process and Reality in 1929.

Western thought since Plato has privileged Being over Becoming. Whitehead flipped that. He said reality is fundamentally becoming. Process is what’s fundamental, and things are just temporary manifestations of unfolding process -- as opposed to the predominant presumption that things are fundamental and that they change is nonessential, an imperfection, a design flaw.

The perfection of God, from the Platonists through Thomas Aquinas and up to modern times, was God’s unchangingness. Whitehead said change is not a bug in the system. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Change is not nonessential – it is the essence. The ultimate principle is creativity – the process of creating takes precedence over any product creation.

NEXT: Charles Hartshorne makes Process Philosophy into Process Theology

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This is part 1 of 3 of "God, the Verb"
See also
Part 2: Processing Theology
Part 3: Transitive, Intransitive, and God

In Praise of Not Knowing

Cultivating Awe, part 3

A koan from the Book of Serenity – case number 20:

Master Dizang asked Fayan, “Where have you come from?”
“I pilgrimage aimlessly,” replied Fayan.
“What is the matter of your pilgrimage?” asked Dizang.
“I don't know'” replied Fayan.
“Not knowing is the most intimate,” remarked Dizang.
At that, Fayan experienced great enlightenment.

“Not knowing is most intimate.” Not that knowledge is a bad thing. Knowledge is great. Ignorance really is a big problem. Here's a story about that.

Many years ago when I was serving our congregation in Midland, Texas, the University of Texas of the Permian Basin -- UTPB -- was then a fairly new addition to the Texas University system. A colorful lawyer had been an important force in the creation of UTPB. During the planning and proposal stages there was concern that the region was too sparsely populated. At a public meeting for citizen input, someone asked, “Can west Texas support a four-year institution?”

The lawyer drew his breath, leaned forward, and said, “There’s enough ignorance in west Texas to support an eight-year institution.”

Yes, absolutely, ongoing continual learning and acquiring knowledge are essential to a full and engaged life. I’m just pointing out that you sometimes can deliberately set aside what you already know because it might be getting in the way of learning a new thing.

Knowledge is a tool – and it’s worth remembering that just because you have a really great wrench doesn’t mean you have to always use it. What we know – the story we have, the categories for putting things in – is very useful, but sometimes the story and categories distance us from the intimacy of a unique moment. So Dizang says, “Not knowing is most intimate.”

Or, as the Korean Zen master Seung Sahn would repeatedly tell his students, “Only don’t know.”

And we can practice that – we can undertake to cultivate openness to awe: the not knowing that stretches us. One of the options for this month’s spiritual practice in the October issue of “On the Journey” – is “Take a Walk Until the World Lights Up.” Just start walking -- in the woods or along a beach or even just down a city sidewalk – opening yourself to see, smell, hear, touch something new – or something old in a new way. Instead of your usual way of sizing things up and moving on, look through that initial quick dismissal to find the incomprehensibility behind the familiar, the perceptual expansion behind your mental map that makes you draw a new mental map. Look for something that will knock you temporarily off-kilter, and you’ll probably find it.

Sometimes we’re so sure we know what to do that we miss the little something that’s calling us to do something different.

So there’s Jonah. He’s running a small prophecy business. He knows how to do it. He knows his clientele, he has a relationship with them – he knows how far he can go, as a prophet, in criticizing them to change their ways. He knows how to work with them and motivate them on social justice projects. And then he gets an invitation – a call from God, as the story goes – for a prophesying gig in Nineveh. He doesn’t want to go. He knows his business, and the people of Nineveh aren’t Jewish and won’t listen to him.

What he knows is getting in the way of being open to the freshness of his situation. In fact, he decides to get on a boat and go in the opposite direction. But then Jonah has an experience of awe and wonder: an awesome storm – he’s swallowed up by it, as if by a giant fish. Yet he survives – wonder of wonders. Now he’s had an experience of awe, which has pulled him into the present moment, out of his usual self concerns, and re-oriented him toward kindness and compassion. Maybe he can do something helpful for Nineveh after all.

You see, that part of the story about the storm and the fish – that wasn’t just a device to get Jonah to Nineveh. It was the awe-inspiring experience that was necessary to prepare him to serve as he was then able to do.

The invitation of Yom Kippur is to take this time of the year for forgiveness, reconciliation, atonement. Set aside how well you KNOW that guy’s a jerk, and see the relationship with fresh eyes. These are called the days of awe – because a little awe can slow us down, can pull us out of habitual assessments and orient us toward kindness. Then forgiveness can happen. The work of reconciliation and atonement can properly begin. Then we can, as the saying goes, meet each other again for the first time.

These are called the days of awe because a little awe can help that happen. And when it does happen, it’s awesome. It is the feast by which we time-starved become time-fed.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Cultivating Awe"
See also
Part 1: Too Busy? Maybe You Need Some Awe
Part 2: In Praise of Being Temporarily Off-Kilter

In Praise of Being Temporarily Off-Kilter

Cultivating Awe, part 2

Big and Small Doses

Different people experience awe from different things. Overall, travel ranks high. A clear night and a star-filled sky gazed at for a while is also effective for many people. There are certain sensational films that can do it for a number of folks. Anything encountered in a massive quantity is liable to be awesome: a large school of fish, a vast field of tulips in bloom, a bustling market in India.

I mentioned previously a study where staring up at a building wasn’t as effective as staring up at tree. Although nature gets the edge, sometimes really large buildings can also be awesome. The new and the big gets our attention, forces us into the present moment. And, while a profound experience of the Grand Canyon, or standing underneath a massive murmuration of starlings can stay with you for the rest of your life, cultivating small doses of awe in the everyday boosts life satisfaction.

Can you have a small dose of bigness? Researchers into awe generally define it as “an experience of such perceptual expansion that you need new mental maps to deal with the incomprehensibility of it all.” Is it possible to have that on a daily basis?

It’s a matter of being “temporarily off-kilter in terms of your understanding of the world.” Part of that is taking yourself to unfamiliar places – exposing yourself to things you can expect to not understand at first.

Familiarity and Expertise

Another part of that is deciding to set aside your understanding. When we know a lot about something, our knowledge can actually get in the way of experiencing the thing fresh.

In his autobiography, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain explains how becoming knowledgeable and experienced about piloting steamboats on rivers changed his experience of rivers.

“Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!”

He then describes an experience before becoming expert in the ways of riverboating: seeing a beautiful and awe-inspiring sunset over the river.

“If that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, in this fashion:

‘This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark?'

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.”

Twain is wonderful at making vivid and concrete the price we sometimes pay for knowledge and expertise. But were Twain my parishioner, I would challenge him to re-examine his feeling that awe was gone for good from the river. His focus on usefulness for “compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat” may have become a habit for him – but it is still a choice. He can choose to set that habit aside. He would have to deliberately try – and I’m not sure that occurred to him.

It is possible to have knowledge, but to intentionally, temporarily set it aside. Face the river with an intention of seeing it fresh, of opening yourself to the wonder of it again. Before his expertise, he didn’t have to choose that – a striking and beautiful scene simply slapped him in the face, willy-nilly. After expertise, the awe need not be gone for good. It just requires intentional attention to cultivate.

The Way Your Fingers Tie Your Shoe

Twain then makes an analogy that I think betrays his claim of permanent loss. He says,

“I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?”

Perhaps you are, like me, wondering: did Mark Twain ever talk to a doctor about this? In my experience, doctors of either gender are as apt as anyone to notice and appreciate human beauty when they see it outside the context of professional diagnosis.

As a doctor can set aside diagnosis, and a riverboater, when not engaged in riverboating, can set aside the diagnosis of the river, so you and I can intend to set aside, temporarily, our knowledge of the familiar objects and procedures of our day. Decide, for example, to watch with amazement the intricate and flowing way that your fingers move when you tie your shoe.

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This is part 2 of 3 of 'Cultivating Awe'
See also
Part 1: Too Busy? Maybe You Need Some Awe
Part 3: In Praise of Not Knowing