Reading: “Morning Watch,” by Barbara Pescan

Patiently
We waited in the dark
The planet turned
And we upon it
Stupid with sleep
Hoped something would happen.
While we leaned toward the east
The weight of the night sank behind us,
Toward the north a comet passed so close
We could see it through the sleep in our eyes,
And then dawn flung itself up
Swirling with clouds and color and birdsong.
Look – this is our world for another day.
Reach out to it, it is your own life.
Know, too, that this day is dear
Even to strangers you will never know.
Stretch out your arms to embrace it.
Do not go back to sleep.

Sermon: “Awe,” by Rev. Eric Banner

Last week, after our service with a focus on spirituality for atheists, agnostics, and other skeptics, I was talking with more than a few of you who told me the same story. A story I’ve heard many times in UU congregations across the country and across the years. Sometimes it’s a story about your child, sometimes it’s a story about yourself, but it’s the same basic story. I went to a church, and they told me I asked too many questions. You have to have faith, they said. It’s a mystery, they said. It’s in the Bible, so it must be true, they said.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always called our congregations my spiritual home. Because I always seem to have more questions. Not always to my benefit, mind you, but always more questions. So much so that in high school a friend of mine took to calling me not Eric, but “philosophical man.” True story.

But here’s the thing about questions: sometimes they come not from curiosity or joy, but from places of struggle, despair even, and what I know is that there are some of you here today who have asked yourself recently, “Is this all there is?” You have found yourself in the midst of a life that is filled with tasks that are drudgery and disappointment. You’ve found yourself wondering when, or if, there will ever be a change. You’ve found yourself with your nose to the grindstone, and struggling to see much beyond the two feet in front of you, and you feel it in your bones. The kind of weariness that says my life is too small for what I long for in my heart.

It’s in moments like that we all need inspiration, a reminder that there is something bigger than us, and yet connected to us. And this is why this morning I want to offer to you the spiritual practice of being present to awe. I thought about finding a set of photos or videos to put up on our screens, but then I remembered the way that, in my life, the moments of awe that stand out were not something on a screen, they were something in front of me, they were, to steal a phrase from that one-time Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an original experience.

It was the opening of his essay “Nature” in which he said:

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

One of the most challenging things to explain about a tradition like ours is that we understand things in a different order than most. For so many people they start with a text, a catechism, a creed, and then whatever experiences they have get filtered through that predetermined explanation. God, Jesus, Allah, Quan Yin, Gabriel… the list goes on and on, and if you have found that you are part of one of those traditions, when you have an experience that feels spiritual, you interpret it through the religious framework you’ve been handed. But not here. Not in this place. Because here we understand that the experience comes first, and the explanations only come later. That for all time we have been having experiences that move us, that take us beyond the workaday lives we live, beyond that question of, “Is this all there is?” And then, and only then, do we, with that original relation to the universe Emerson wrote about, ask what it means. It’s why, when we do pathways to membership, so many of you say, “Yeah, I’d say I’m spiritual, but not religious.” You mean that you’ve had experiences that matter, but didn’t fit in tidy little boxes that never felt big enough for your questions. You mean that your life has shown you things that are sometimes hard to talk about, vulnerable to talk about, and you want a place where those experiences are welcomed, and many of those experiences, I’m sure, were experiences of awe.

Emerson, of course, suggested that it was nature that inspired this feeling of awe in us, and it does, and he was right. It’s why I wanted to share with you this morning our reading, “Morning Watch.” They lay, perhaps on the ground, perhaps on the bed of a pickup truck at the end of a dirt road, perhaps on the rooftop deck, or somewhere else, but they lay down and waited for dawn to come. And then, it came:

“Look – this is our world for another day.
Reach out to it, it is your own life.
Know, too, that this day is dear
Even to strangers you will never know.
Stretch out your arms to embrace it.
Do not go back to sleep.”

Nature is a source of awe, a chance to reconnect with what is all around us, and a sight bit further from our face than the keyboard or wrench or patient that is in front of us. And because we know that experience of awe so well in nature, it can be hard to remember that getting that reset that comes with the practice of being present to awe does not require us to climb a 14er, or discover a lake that is hidden in the forest. It can, and does happen in our lives, if not every day, then, if we look for it, every week.

Just last year the research Dachner Keltner put out a book about awe, based on decades of research in communities around the world. Unlike a lot of psychology research, they didn’t just depend on the accounts of the college freshman they could get to participate for the cost of a pizza, they engaged native speakers to gather data far from their Berkeley, California home. And, not surprisingly, they did find that nature was a source of awe for people around the world, but they found that there were other sources, too. “Awe,” he said, was “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” And because it was that sense of vastness, that transcendence, that “amazement at things outside yourself,” as Jane Goodall once put it, there were so many more things that could inspire it. In an interview he said—

“We did the research to pinpoint an answer to the questions of where and how? We gathered narratives of awe from 26 countries and found what I call the eight wonders of life in the book. They include moral beauty, nature, and collective effervescence. Then you get to the cultural ones: art, music, and spirituality. You also have epiphany. And our last finding from the study was about life and death. People around the world find it awe-inspiring when life emerges and when it goes.”

You don’t have to go somewhere far away to experience it. You can experience it, right here. I know. I have. Most Sundays I sit up here. But a few months ago I was sitting over there, listening to the message and the music just like everyone else. And as I sat there I noticed little plaque on the back of the chair in front of me. It said, “Rev. Alexander S. Fales, Minister 1947-1949.” It’s a name I don’t know, and a time in the history of this congregation I know almost nothing about. We were on Colfax Ave. back then, in a building that has been gone for decades. And as I sat, I looked around this room, up at the ceiling with each piece of beetle kill pine that makes the ceiling, so carefully selected, and I looked at the people around me, gathered here, still, 130 plus years after this congregation first started, and it hit me. This room, this room, used to be all there was. This space, this circle, contained everything our church had when we moved here in 1959. Every little part of what we were about, the wedge-shaped classrooms and offices and the sanctuary with its small little rise for the minister and the fireplace behind him, it was all in this space. All of it. No Friendship Hall. No Hospitality Center. No Education Hall, or Colvin Commons. Just this circle, surrounded by streets still waiting for houses, and a future waiting to unfold. It’s amazing. Vast. And, in the moment, transcendent. All the people, all the lives, all the connections, the births and deaths, marriages and divorces, that have called this place their spiritual home. And here we are. Here we are.

But the part about Keltner’s book that amazed me the most was the reminder that there are all these ways to experience awe in our lives. Not just nature, or art, or music, or life, or death. And those things were more common in the cultural west. But the most commonly held experience that led people around the world to experience awe was none of those. It was the inspiration that comes from, “Other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.” “Exceptional virtue,” he wrote, “character, and ability – moral beauty – operate according to (an) … aesthetic… marked by purity and goodness of intention and action,” and that moves us to awe.

I was reminded of a photograph that went viral long before that was a term we used. It was in the 90s, and some of you will remember the picture, and the story. It was 1996, and the Klan had decided to hold a rally in Ann Arbor, and an 18-year-old black woman, Keshia Thomas, showed up to the counter-protest. It was tense, police in their riot gear, Klansmen in their robes, and there, in the crowd, a man on the sidelines in a Confederate flag shirt and a racially offensive tattoo. The crowd turned on him, began to chase him, and when he fell to the ground, the started to beat him, to kick him, shouts of, “Kill the Nazi!” filled the air. And in the midst of it, Keshia knew what her conscience called her to do. She threw her body on top of his, protecting him from the mob with her own body, when no one else would. And in so doing, she saved his life, putting her own at risk.

Asked about it later, she said, “I knew what it was like to be hurt. The many times that that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me.” And so, she did. And nearly 30 years later, I still remember that picture with awe at the courage and character of a young woman who knew and understood that someone must stand in and stop the cycle of violence, and that day, it was her turn.

So, why make space in our lives for the spiritual practice of awe? I could tell you all about the research that came with Keltner’s studies over the years. The way that experiences of awe reduce inflammation in our bodies, the way it activates the vagus nerve, which helps coordinate your heart and your breathing, the way it reduces stress, and pain, and anxiety, and depression. I could tell you about the way it makes us feel more connected, and less lonely, and that would all be good. But perhaps, more important than all of that, is the way it helps us live most fully, away from the struggle and the questions, and lets us learn to just be, here and now.

So, look in your life for these things. The ones that help you feel that sense of presence in the face of the vastness, that transcendence, that connection to that which is outside us and inside us, and helps us know the miracle that is this day, this world, this life we live. And in so doing, I hope you’ll find that there is, indeed, something more than just the view two feet in front of you.

So may it be.
Amen.