Richard Rohr insists we thrive when we understand our rightful place in the cosmic order:
Our ordinary lives are given extraordinary significance when we accept that our lives are about something much larger. Our pain is a participation in God’s redemptive suffering, and our creativity is God’s passion for the world. I don’t need to be the whole play or even understand the full script. It’s enough to know that I have been chosen to be one actor on the stage, playing my part as well as I can.
The word disaster comes from a Latin word meaning “to be disconnected from the stars.” The stars represented the great and universal story. Our lives are usually a disaster unless we live under these stars. When we sense that our little story is part of the great story, we are basically content. No amount of psychology and therapy can offer us such a cosmology; I believe only good religion can. [1]
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), known for his prophetic work for justice, also modeled a commitment to “radical amazement”:
The world presents itself in two ways to me. The world as a thing I own, the world as a mystery I face. What I own is a trifle, what I face is sublime….
We manipulate what is available on the surface of the world; we must also stand in awe before the mystery of the world. We objectify Being but we also are present at Being in wonder, in radical amazement.
All we have is a sense of awe and radical amazement in the face of a mystery that staggers our ability to sense it….
Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.
Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for the … mystery beyond all things. It enables us … to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.
Faith is not belief, an assent to a proposition; faith is attachment to transcendence, to the meaning beyond the mystery.
Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe precedes faith; it is the root of faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith.
Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you. The loss of awe is the avoidance of insight. A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom, for the discovery of the world as an allusion to God. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 134–135.
[2] Abraham J. Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford University Press, 1965), 88–89.
Image Credit and inspiration: Mieke Campbell, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The child’s wide-eyed wonder mirrors a heart open to awe: seeing the sacred glimmer even in the most ordinary of moments.
Story from Our Community:
Over time, the universe, the earth, and nature have opened me up to see the many ways that I am judgmental, selfish, and angry. This acknowledgement has led to change, which is a never-ending journey. It fills something inside of me, knowing that change is possible. I feel it as I gaze at the night sky pouring into my solar plexus; it is indescribable. I don’t know anything about God. I only know how my experience of the universe has helped me to see myself and others more clearly and shown me a path to forgiveness and peace.
—Catherine B.
