Awe as Mystérium (II)

(7/12/23)

[Rudolf Otto, The idea of the Holy (1917).]

O Lover,

In my previous post I sought to explore Dacher Keltner’s notion of “awe,” the experience of finding oneself in the presence of that vastly transcending one’s understanding. I noted how Rudolf Otto viewed awe as including both abhorrence and allure, the two paradoxically bundled in the term Mystérium Treméndum. Having pondered treméndum, I turn now to seeking self-awareness in the attraction dimension of awe.

My earliest decades might be characterized as an unfolding two-fold syndrome. First, my experiences of awe were dominated by the horrendous. Second, I sought, at least intermittently, to compensate by pursuing the rapturous, this via biblical, doctrinal, and pietist resources available to me. While there were occasional moments of self-transcendence such as when I first held my adopted daughter, it was not yet You for whom I longed, O Lover. It was rather for safety, certitude, security, that I, the wounded and redoubted self, yearned. As such, my experience of mystérium in those decades was meager.

However, across the long sweep of midlife I, my origins landlocked, repeatedly encountered an alluring depth in the marine: the Mediterranean off Gaza City (1972); the Pacific off Carmel, CA (1978); the Atlantic off Edisto Beach, SC (2004) & Ocean City, MD (2005); the Chesapeake surrounding Smith Island (1997-2006). In each setting I experienced a vague yet vitalizing shift from egoic and solipsistic tendencies toward and into a vast . . . what? Even more riveting was the intersection on Smith of a donated telescope, a third-floor balconied perch, a paucity of artificial light, and winter nights beneath our wheeling local galaxy. My 1st (& 2nd & 10th!) sighting of Andromeda left me blindsidedly awash in tears, experiences which I acknowledged as awe bleeding into prayer. The irony of the unfriendly night sky venue, now revisited, was not lost on me. 

Years pondering those Chesapeake nights persuaded me that rather than providing support for Aquinas’ rational arguments for Your existence, my experiences had taken me far out beyond what any such faculties could measure, depict, validate, or imagine. Nor did such former preoccupations any longer move me. In the words of Isaiah of Jerusalem, I was experiencing no less than that “The entire earth is full of [Your] glory” (6:3). With traces of treméndum ever residual (my minuteness, seared images from conflict zones, my cringing before the very notion of ∞), these were being enveloped within awareness of my being drawn up into solidarity with that immeasurably vast, trans-cognitive, and sublime. And wonderful! Mystérium opened me more to the webbed interconnectedness of all having being, what Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence,” to all of which You, O Lover, are Grúnt (“Ground”).

While You, never merely this or that, are not awe, nor is awe restricted to theists, such occasions ever can be, and for me are, the flume the Télos of which is You. Awe-triggers, broadcasted like seed (Logos Spermátikos) throughout all having being, can and do become for this believer conduits into Your glory. The implication of acknowledging You as Sublimity Itself—everywhere is now the “gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17)—is nothing short of transformational, what Paul calls a “new creation” (II Cor 5:17)!

Little of the above is new, for all of the major faith traditions, not least Christianity, are varyingly overtured by awe. Momentary receding of the tunnel-like egoic, the flowering of multifaceted solidarity amidst the vastness, being opened to that beyond the visual, auditory or imaginative (I Cor 2:9), all of this is both miracle in and of itself, and a preparing of the way. Much more than rule-book or dogmatic compendium, the Scriptures are an archive of such preparatory awe, one substantively expanded, embellished and, occasionally, kairotically re-centered in the paper trail of the mystics in particular. This awe-some library, repeatedly punctuated with Mystérium Treméndum, is an itinerárium of Your drama of irrevocable solidarity with Your finite beloveds. “Awe” is a clue, a discumbobulator, a channel, an escort via which You are drawing all You have gifted with being into Your full-bodied embrace, O Lover.