What fills you with awe?
I was listening to a reflection today at the conclusion of the Ten Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, where the concept of awe in both the religious and secular sense was being discussed. It got me thinking about where we experience awe in our everyday lives.
The Oxford online dictionary defines “awe” as “a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.” The word “awesome” tends to be overused nowadays, with its corresponding multiple exclamation marks and emojis 
!!! (I’m guilty, I do it too.) I can’t say I ever uttered the word until I came to the US. But now not a day goes by that I don’t use it, either written or verbal. It’s everywhere. My son’s teachers rubber stamp “Awesome!” on his class worksheets. I can never imagine any of my teachers in Kenya being quite so effusive about any work from their students. The highest praise for a top student earned a simple “Excellent”. Old school teachers are stingy like that.
Reverence for Life
The German word for awe, Ehrfurcht – now that one carriers the proper gravitas. Among the definitions of Ehrfurcht according to the Langensheidt dictionary are “respect, reverence, veneration, fear, dread”. To me this captures the entire range of emotions that awe evokes.
Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben, a concept that was popularized by German-French humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer, translates as “reverence for life” and refers to a deep awe, wonder and respect for all living things. The phrase came to Schweitzer in the early 1900s at sunset on a boat trip in West Africa where they had encountered a hippopotamus herd. Not surprisingly, countless numinous experiences have been inspired in Africa, where primordial Mother Nature shows all her awesome faces, from the the wild and dangerous to the sublime and transcendent. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had a similar experience in the 1920s in Kenya on a train trip through the vast savanna, which he wrote about in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
When the first ray of sunlight announced the onset of day, I awoke. The train, swathed in a red cloud of dust, was just making a turn around a steep red cliff. On a jagged rock above us a slim, brownish-black figure stood motionless, leaning on a long spear, looking down at the train. Beside him towered a gigantic candelabrum cactus.
I was enchanted by this sight – it was a picture of something utterly alien and outside my experience, but on the other hand a most intense sentiment du déjà vu. I had the feeling that I had already experienced this moment and had always known this world which was separated from me only by distance in time.
“Reverence for Life” is also the first of Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s Five Mindfulness Trainings, which invites mindfulness practitioners to commit to “cultivating the insight of interbeing and compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals.” A healing message during this intense time of war and conflict.
I end with another awe-inspiring Nobel Prize recipient and humanitarian, Albert Einstein. After fleeing Nazi Germany and arriving in the US as a refugee, Einstein collaborated with others in 1933 to form what we now know as the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the global humanitarian organization dedicated to supporting refugees all around the planet. In his 1931 book, Living Philosophies, Einstein writes:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Today the autumn light of the setting sun fell across a pot of flowers outside the building at work, making me stop and smile on my way to the car park.
What awesome thing have you experienced today?
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash