I preached in a local United Church a couple of weeks ago. In the sermon, I spoke about how Jesus was a man of sorrows, but also a man of joys. Afterward, a retired minister came up to me and said, “Another way to think about it is that Jesus was a person of awe. When I think of Jesus, I think of the emotion of awe as much as the emotion of joy.” He recommended I read the recent book by Dacher Keltner, an expert in the science of human emotion, titled Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it can Transform Your Life (2024). Sensing it might offer me something for my Good Friday blog post, I bought it and read it in two days.

“Awe,” Keltner writes, “is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand” (xvi).

Brené Brown says something similar in her Atlas of the Heart: “In the midst of … moments [of awe], we can feel overwhelmed by the vastness of something that is almost incomprehensible—it almost feels like what we’re witnessing can’t be true—like we’re seeing something that doesn’t fit with how we move through and understand our everyday lives” (p. 58).

For the last fifteen years, Keltner and his colleagues have been studying the emotion of awe. They’ve uncovered the way it manifests in our bodies, showing up in brain scans and in physiological responses like goosebumps on skin. They’ve also studied behaviors that occur in the wake of awe-filled experiences and collected stories of awe from 26 different countries. Based on their research, Keltner has named “Eight Wonders of Life” that are most likely to evoke awe: nature, visual design, music, spiritual or religious experiences, birth and death, epiphanies, collective effervescence (large groups of people experiencing something together in an embodied and often celebrative way), and moral beauty (exceptional virtue in another person acting courageously or kindly in the face of the suffering or need of another).

Personally, I have felt awe in extraordinary experiences like last year’s total solar eclipse and northern lights displays, my mom’s death, the first time I heard the cymbal roll and build and crash during a Good Friday Tenebrae service, and riding Avatar Flight of Passage. But I have experienced swifter shivers of awe in more ordinary moments: bearing witness to my daughters singing or drawing or parsing the relational dynamics of a classroom, hiking in the forests of Northwest Washington near Deception Pass, listening to shared vulnerability in the grief group I lead or to music that brings me back to earlier eras of my life.

Feeling awe is different from simply admiring something or someone we find beautiful. Awe in the presence of moral beauty (one of the eight wonders of life) “activates different regions of the brain than those activated by physical beauty, namely cortical regions where our emotions translate to ethical action… When moved by the wonders of others, the soul in our bodies is awakened, and acts of reverence often quickly follow” (pp. 82-83, emphasis mine).

In order to inspire awe, the beauty must hold a kind of vastness – a vastness that includes, at times, a thread of the dreadful. That experience of vastness has the power to transform us and empower us toward actions of collaboration and care. How does awe do this? “By quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life” (xx). Or as one of the elders at my church said last week about his relationship to playing music with others: “I feel like I both lose myself and find myself at the same time.”

The self that we lose in moments of awe is what Keltner calls one’s “default self.” The default self “is focused on how you are distinct from others, independent, in control, and oriented toward competitive advantage” (p. 33). Regions of the brain’s cortex – called the default mode network (DMN) – light up in an MRI when we are processing things egocentrically, when we are anxious, or overly self-critical. When participants in Keltner’s studies were shown awe-inspiring videos, these DMN areas of the brain dimmed and quieted down.

In moments of awe, we lose ourselves. We lose the default self. We lose what Aldous Huxley called “‘the interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show’” (p. 32). What emerges in the place of that part of ourselves is humility and a deep sense of interconnectedness with other people and with forces beyond our control. Keltner’s studies show that “as our default self vanishes… awe shifts us from a competitive, dog-eat-dog mindset to perceive that we are part of networks of more interdependent, collaborating individuals” (p. 37).

Does this remind you of anything? The old self and the new self? Being transformed by the renewing of our minds? Seeds remaining seeds until they fall to the ground and die in order to bear much fruit?

Today, we survey the wondrous cross. The awe-full cross.

What if we could let our default self – which, according to Keltner, is so “impatient with the unexplained” – quiet down today? What if we took our richest theological gains and counted them but loss? What if we let the vastness of the moment pour contempt on our proudly produced atonement theories? What if we could bear witness to the sorrow and love without codifying it or assigning it to certain groups of people? What if our soul, our life, our all could awaken and rise up in the presence of the moral beauty of Jesus’ love?

In the penultimate chapter of his book, Keltner opens our eyes to awe in the face of death by referencing the work of Roshi Joan Halifax (pp. 232-234). After spending years with young men dying of AIDS, Roshi Joan wrote her book, Being with Dying (1997). The three principles she offers are the postures I will embrace today as I seek to Be-With-Dying – as I exist alongside the death of Jesus.

1. Not Knowing: “Quiet the chatter of the default self. We don’t truly know what dying is like… Be open. Observe. Wonder.”
2. Bearing Witness. “Let the dying guide the experience. When facing the uncertainty, fear, and horrors of dying, our tendency is to take action, provide a hopeful interpretation, reframe, or turn away. Instead… just be there. Listen. Sit in silence. Rest your hand on the arm of the dying. Breathe. And follow where the dying will take you” (emphasis mine).
3. Compassionate Action. “Be open to suffering and its companion, kindness… Breathe in a person’s suffering, and then breathe it out transformed.”

Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a present far too small.

Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.

Northern Lights and Eclipse Photos by Stryd Photography

Seedling Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash