Rediscovering Awe
by Bishop Joensen | July 16, 2024
The late Catholic physician and novelist Walker Percy in his essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” ponders the challenge of allowing ourselves to really behold the world as it is without imposing preconceived notions or expectations upon the scene or objects we encounter. He poses this example and question: “García López de Cárdenas discovered the Grand Canyon and was amazed at the sight. It can be imagined: One crosses miles of desert, breaks through the mesquite, and there it is at one’s feet. Later the government set the place aside as a national park, hoping to pass along to millions the experience of Cárdenas. Does not one see the same sight from the Bright Angel Lodge that Cárdenas saw?”
He answers his own question, “No.” “Why is it impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and see it for what it is—as one picks up a strange object from one’s back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind” (excerpt from “The Loss of the Creature,” in Being Human, ed. Leon Kass, pp. 541-52, and 542-43).
Following Percy, we all carry our own personal “postcard collection”—or today, perhaps, the memory bank of “selfies” that others have shared with us—and employ these as the gauge by which we measure our experience, often waiving our personal capacity to see and sense nature and human cultures as they actually are in lieu of what we have supposed them to be—which is most unfortunate. When we succumb to this tendency, then inevitably we reduce God’s and humans’ creations, making them more inaccessible, boring, inauthentic. True being eludes us when we elevate our imaginative constructs over the more modest, receptive, and contemplative capacity to simply watch and wonder at the world, letting what is reveal itself to us on its terms rather than flexing our own prerogative as knowers. We remain tourists rather than pilgrims set on a mysterious encounter with a destination and goal that discloses itself in graced moments we cannot orchestrate.
And, as Pope Francis has cautioned in his critique of “spiritual tourism,” this phenomenon can happen not simply among explorers of national parks and other treasures nature holds in store, but even within the spiritual and religious realm where excursions and events become constricted by the limits of our subjective “I,” rather than by a bold foray where we humbly submit to the “what” and “Who” that await us.
The Catholic Percy proposes his own strategies to slip beyond our reductive tendencies, but I turn here to what was for me, ironically (given my own presumptions), a most surprising source: the atheist social psychologist-professor and prolific author Jonathan Haidt. In one of his most recent works, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, “Haidt documents and diagnoses the causes of the precipitous decline in teen mental health that has taken place since 2010 with the advent of smart phones and their four foundational harms: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.
There is much to consider and be concerned about in Haidt’s analysis, including his recommendation that access to phones during the course of a normal school day be pretty much unilaterally curtailed; I commend your own reading of Anxious and anticipate serious conversations with our Catholic school educators and parents and guardians in the months ahead.
Yet Haidt also offers some positive counsel aimed toward self-transcendence that can conduct us to genuinely spiritual (albeit not inherently religious) experience that quiets the “profane mode network” of cognitive circuits that social media capitalize upon. They habituate us to “think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers” (The Anxious Generation, pp. 208-9).
Haidt, in concert with another social psychologist, Dacher Keltner, author of the 2023 book, “Awe”, coaches us to cultivate a sense of awe that opens us outward rather than reinforcing the domination of an egocentric view. Keltner’s catalogue of awe experiences is sorted into “eight wonders of life”: “moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spiritual and religious awe, life and death, and epiphanies (moments in which a new and grand understanding dawns).”
Both Keltner and Haidt assign their students to take “awe walks” that may not totally step beyond urban settings, but which locate the oases of nature lurking in parks and other human-friendly spaces such as those designed or inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. (which, besides Central Park in New York City, closer to home include Grandview, Greenwood, Union, and Water Works Parks in Des Moines).
Student reflections on their experiences testify to the awakening of the sense of beauty and wonder that contemplation of both nature and people can elicit, likened to “sparks” that resonate with our “biophilic” attraction to mingle and “affiliate with other forms of life.” There is a therapeutic, restorative effect that quiets anxiety and stress—but only if we set aside both our phones and our preconceptions. A new habit of being begins to take precedence that obliges investment of our own sweat equity, yet quickly leads us to acknowledge that what we receive far transcends our own initiative and effort.
In contrast to full-fledged awe, Haidt compares the experience where you “see a photo of Victoria Falls, taken from a drone that gives you a better view than you could ever get in person, and yet, because the entire image is displayed on a screen the size of your hand, and because you did no work to get to the falls, it’s just not going to trigger as much awe as you’d get from hiking up to a much smaller waterfall yourself” (ibid., pp. 212-15). Percy, I contend, would heartily agree.
How’s your summer awe quotient doing? If you’ve been privileged to pause for a few hours, or even a few days or more to claim some time for leisure and holiday, how “awe-filled” have these experiences been? Were you more ‘tourist’ or ‘pilgrim’? If you anticipate participating in RAGBRAI as it traverses and stops in four towns within our Diocese, do you look to cultivate a contemplative spirit in the early watches of the morning as the sunrise breaks over the verdant fields of corn and forests adjoining creeks and rivers, or do you look more to be awash in suds and street celebrations? And will the ability to behold beauty and the awe it stirs as it presents itself to us speak for itself, or will the experience only be validated when one takes the requisite selfie?
In terms of my own personal awe-quotient, I got to have my cake and eat it on at least two occasions recently: the first was the June 24 morning of the Serra National Eucharistic Procession that proceeded along the Wabash Trace Trail from south of Council Bluffs to a point shy of Glenwood. The focus upon the Monstrance bearing our Eucharistic Lord carried in turn by another priest and myself surrounded both by faithful followers who alternately sang and quietly contemplated the love of the incarnate Lord sacramentally present under the cathedral ceiling of shade trees lining the trail was--pardon the colloquialism--truly “awe-some.”
And I also was blessed recently by the chance to join my brother Mark, his son and other friends at an ocean bay shore locale for days where I could simply sit and meditate upon the crashing waves advancing and receding with the tide at various hours of the day—before joining our group for another scrumptious meal, courtesy of Mark’s culinary artistry. It was a graced chance to slip beyond myself and the sometimes constraining yoke of cares and concerns that I can tend to pull down upon my soul before again turning to the mysterious Author in whom all things were created.
Only when I allow the Spirit to nudge me and call me to my true senses am I again converted from tourist to pilgrim—and at the same time, receive the peace, the energy, the desire to press on toward the Light that lies just across the canyon whose immense scale and luminosity no photo can fully capture.