Awe as Treméndum (I)
(7/12/23)
[Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023).]
O Lover,
Of late bits of my lifespan have been converging around the rich theme of “awe.” The immediate trigger has been Keltner’s book which several family members are pondering together.His definition of “awe”: the experience of finding oneself in the presence of that vastly transcending one’s understanding.Anantecedent nearly sixty years ago, Das Heilige (“The Idea of the Holy”) by Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), has him writing that experiencing the numinous (“the holy”) involves both allure or fascination, on the one hand, and discombobulating mind-blowing, being totally out of one’s depth, on the other. Otto paradoxically bundled the two dimensions, attraction and repulsion, in the term Mystérium Treméndum arguing that the two are commonly experienced together (a la Kierkegaard’s notion of “dread”) albeit in wildly varied proportions. In this and the following post, from my perch within the orb of You, O Lover, I seek self-awareness in terms of these two expressions of “awe” beginning with treméndum (“terrible”).
Alas, my earliest experiences of awe were heavy on dread, this largely the result of the apocalyptic imminentism prominent in church and home. Its most obvious impact on my childhood was a fearful pattern of nightmares in which I found myself hopelessly marooned in space between a gigantic molten sign of infinity (∞) and, inexplicably, a humongous pair of silver spurs. I was totally alone, paralyzed by the spatial emptiness, forever “left behind,” “lost.” Amidst a loving family, my initiation into awe was via the portal of dread and horror, my awesome awful. Ligatured by my age and fears, this sensitive child was unable to integrate such darkness, and scars of it would remain. If in my youth I experienced awe as being drawn toward, positively attracted to, mystérium, I have little memory of it.
In the religious thresholds and rites through which I passed—conversion (“getting saved” at age 6), baptism (13), a half-dozen “rededications” in public services (11-21)—the imprint of the treméndum persisted. Whatever else was transpiring in these passages, they were high on merit-anxiety, beliefs, and will-power, low on any attraction component of awe. My deity was one of uncertain relationship with my unhealed PTSD. Only much later would I self-I.D. as a dualist sans resolution, a Manichaean of sorts. My religiosity and moralism were laced with angst.
As I stumbled into adulthood the melding of repulsion from and attraction to the treméndum continued. Not unlike the pattern in my family—driving to train wrecks, grain elevator fires, and tornado damage—I found that which I dreaded to be, oxymoronically, alluring. I experienced this in literature as well: Kurtz’s “The horror! The horror!” (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness); Wiesel’s “Where is [G-d]? Here [G-d] is—[G-d] is hanging here on this gallows” (Night); and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (The Brothers Karamazov).In October of 1973 this pacifist tellingly attempted to drive up to the Golan Heights to witness the Syrian-Israeli conflict. My love for my otherwise-abled son Chad was laced with the treméndum experienced in both his medical realities and my self-assessment as his father. His death, preceded by that of my father when I was 31, a younger brother when I was 46, reinforced the imprint of the treméndum.
One particular locus of treméndum was that of torture, both the repulsion and allure. I had encountered this issue tangentially in occupied Palestine, and I recall an abortive exploration of a museum of torture in Amsterdam. But it was only in 1981 during a six week itineration in Central America, Guatemala in particular, that I encountered survivors and family members of torture victims, conversations which I sought out. A la Kurtz: “The horror! The horror!” But a week after returning to Michiana I, nocturnally killing Guatemalan military, would enter protracted therapy.
Enough already. O Lover, what I am here acknowledging, including that not itemized, You know to the full. Only in the second half of my life has who Your Christ is disclosing You to be really taken root. Via him You have been shown to be a Tsunami of Agápe, the Mare Pacífica in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), The One to whom “darkness [treméndum] and light [mystérium] are alike” (Ps 139:12). Are You not an equal-opportunity Tabernacler, present amid the horror (e.g., bishops protecting institutions more than children) as well as the rapturous, the treméndum as well as the mystérium? “If I make my bed in hell [or tethered in outer space], [are] You not there”[?] (vs 8). Was it not out of the horror in Guatemala that You reached and Self-disclosed to me via Jürgen Moltmann lectureship and book (The Crucified God)? Were You not, in retrospect, shown to be presénte in my son’s decades-long descent into thánatos, and in its aftermath? How can one indebted to Juan de la Cruz, as am I, disregard what You are up to, especially in the “dark night”? Is not darkness Your hiding place (Ps 18:11)? Are You not but a cosmic illusion if not Immanuel (“[You] with us”), everywhere and always? And, across the decades, has that not been enough? Básta?!
But now to the Mystérium!
