Today is the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. We’re in the long season of Ordinary Time.
But the reading for today is not ordinary. It relates one of the most dramatic miracles of the New Testament — when Jesus wakes up from a nap on a boat and tells a violent storm to calm.
It is also the story that inspired Rembrandt to paint one of his most astonishing works — his only seascape — Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Sadly, this painting was stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 (I vividly remember seeing it there about five years before its theft) in the largest art theft in American history. It remains missing.
A digital image of the painting is at the bottom of today’s post.
Mark 4:35-41
When evening had come, Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him.
A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
When it comes to the story of Jesus stilling the sea, it is easy to fixate on the miracle. But, in recent days, as I thought about this passage, I found it difficult to get a single phrase at the end of the tale out of my mind: And they were filled with great awe….
Awe is the emotion of “vastness” that arises from the sense of wonder, an experience of mystery, or when we encounter something transcends our understanding.
Awe threads throughout the scriptures. It whispers with creation and thunders in God’s mighty works. It sings its psalms in the Hebrew Bible. It is vocalized by Lady Wisdom. In the New Testament, it is often the emotional response of the disciples or the crowds who follow Jesus. There are entire experiences of awe reported — like the Transfiguration, the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus, and the events attending the emergence of the new community of the Spirit in Acts.
The Bible is many things — poetry, wisdom, history, teachings, and law. And it is also an extended record of awe in relation to the long story of shalom and salvation and justice and generosity experienced by those who followed the God of Abraham and Jesus.
Given all of life’s ambiguities and the reality of impermanence and suffering,
our existence is remarkable, wondrous.
It evokes awe and amazement.
We need to pay attention. Really pay attention.
Lest we become blind to the awe and wonder that fills our days.
― Marcus J. Borg
Yes, awe is an aspect of the miraculous. It is mysterious. We understand that it somehow belongs in the realm of faith. But, in the last decade, science has discovered that it also has things to say about the remarkable emotion of vastness. Scientists are learning the importance of awe to human wellbeing and as a powerful force to create community and do good.
Faith and science have turned toward each other in a surprising new quest to explore awe.
Turns out that awe experiences are cultivated by silence, mindfulness, and meditation — and staring at the stars, walking in the woods, or listening to a great symphony — all these things enhance “prosocial tendencies.” In other words, people who are attuned to awe want to help others, assist those in danger, care for the suffering, share their resources, and collaborate and cooperate with others for the greater good.
That’s because when we encounter transcendent things — when we experience vastness — we gain perspective on ourselves. We seek out deeper connections with nature and our neighbors. Indeed, some theorists now suggest that awe helped ensure early human survival and inspired the development of communities and civilization.
When I was growing up in church, I often heard people minimize the experience of awe with comments like “navel-gazing is self-centered” or “some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.” As it happens, it is pretty much impossible to experience too much awe! The more awe, the more good. The more wonder, the more justice.
And so, today I’m sharing a science lecture on awe with you. Listen to Dacher Keltner, a professor at UC Berkeley, outlines the benefits of awe. (It is very good! You’ll be inspired!)
Then think about those disciples — they were filled with great awe. In Mark 6, just a few pages following this story, the gospel tells the story of Jesus walking on the water. The disciples are described as being “extremely awestruck” at that event.
Is Mark, the oldest of the gospels, a tale of awe and wonder?
And what does that mean for us? For our communities and congregations? For the challenges we face in these difficult days?
We need to get through this storm to the “other side.” Too often, I worry our boat is sinking mid-journey and we won’t make it. But perhaps we don’t need a miracle. Maybe we should nurture awe.
Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, 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.
— Abraham Heschel
INSPIRATION
It’s a shiver that climbs the trellis
of the spine, each tingle a bright white
morning glory breaking into blossom
beneath the skin. It can happen anywhere,
anytime, even finding this sleeve of ice
worn by a branch all morning, now fallen
on a bed of snow. You can choose to pause,
pick it up, hold the cold thing in your hand
or not. Few tell us that wonder and awe
are decisions we make daily, hourly,
minute by minute in the tiny offices
of the heart—tilting the head to look up
at every tree turned into a chandelier
by light striking ice in just the right way.
— James Crews, “Awe”
We stepped into cool autumnal air
ripe with the red scent of tiny crab apples
and charged with the darkling promise of storm.
We were well-armed with studies and stories
on why we might want to choose awe—
but awe chose us the way gold chooses aspen,
the way love chooses friends,
the way shorter days choose fall,
the way beauty chooses what will die.
And aspen leaves whirled all around us
and caught in our hair, and we knew ourselves
as small essential beings in a wide, astonishing world.
— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “After Attending the Conversation on Awe”
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
— Denise Levertov, “Primary Wonder”
I think that every discovery of the world plunges us into jubilation, a radical amazement that tears apart the veil of triviality.
— Dorothee Soelle
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It is totally true, awe depicted as "signs and wonders" is indeed still a constant theme in life, lest the dispensationalists take free reign in defining what is next, in their roll-outs of Biblical events. Given the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of God, our contextual understandings may need an overhaul. Can we really understand it all, regardless of epoch?
The Bible began with an ode to awe: the First Creation was a song of Mystical Revelation; THE ONE'S-CREATION, LOVE AND UNITY, that was shrink into banality with a name "God" and a casual, summary of a few days of nature-Forming -- seriously downplaying the background notes of the Universe's First-Days of Awe-Awakening..
The awe-Song of God continued in Moses's God-Naming -- the mountain Peak-Experience, cleverly hinted at with words that point without intellectualizing,, avoiding the trap of using namings that would flatten, trivial;ize, and dual-ize the Revelation's Transcendent non-duality, in all its mind-bending, shocking, eerie-beauty: "I AM THAT I AM." is THE Monotheistic roar of direct Encounter, the Song that lifts the rafters of the Universe and celebrates God's All-Creating Glory.
And again, a joyful Creation-Song that greets the hearers of John:: In the Beginning was the Word., and the Word (Logos/Christ) was WITH God. and WAS God. Through Him All things were made."".That's the Soul's happy-dance, giggling with celebration, standing with awe in the Love pouring from God,/Christ, testified from Direct Encounter as shared in this little piece of abbreviated Mystical Revelation and monotheistic Mystical theology. This little prologue is Love-poetry by mystics singing in carefully coded whispers while they.dance on rooftops.