Awe. Every. Day.

on cultivating freedom from fretting--it's as easy as doing your kegels ;)

On the short list of Bad News assaulting my brain this morning as soon as I woke up: climate chaos is going to get even worse, even faster, starting soon. Before that even happens, Congressional terrorists are going to wreck the global economy. Florida is practicing fascism on a grand scale against LGBTQ+ people (not to mention people of color, immigrants, women and children). And if we survive all of those things over the next 18 months, serial rapist, coup-doer and generally terrible human being Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of becoming president. Again. 

All the more reason to go hard at my new/old spiritual practice of Awe. Every. Day. I’ve been reading UC Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner’s new book, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder. He reminds us, with beautiful stories and lots of well-digested science, that cultivating awe unlocks a lot of good feelings and makes us healthier mentally and physically. 

Keltner lifts up what he calls the 8 Wonders of Life, things that reliably produce awe and that we can do for free! Like kegels! You could be doing awe *right now* and no one would even notice! Except from the smile on your face!

I preached about these 8 wonders a few weeks ago and asked my congregation to guess what they were. First answer was: Nature. Yup! Second answer was: “Babies?” I said “let’s file that under ‘Nature.’” Third answer was: “Puppies!” “Also Nature.” 

Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash

Keltner and some other researchers did studies all over the world, across many different cultures, religions and income levels, to find out what made people experience awe. From thousands of interviews he generated this list of the 8 Wonders: 

Nature

Music

Visual art

Spirituality

Religion (or more broadly and inclusively: the “collective effervescence” that happens not just in religious settings but at concerts, sporting events and *gulp* at both Trump rallies and leftie street protests…which are definitely some people’s religions)

ALSO on the list!

Facing our mortality

Sudden epiphanies 

and finally,

Moral beauty

…which he defines as: “witnessing other people’s courage, kindness, strength or overcoming.”

Which one of the 8 do you think is the single biggest awe-generator? 

Wrong. Wrong, wrong and wrong (don’t worry, I got it wrong too. Babies are sooooo cute!). 

It’s (drum roll please)... 

MORAL BEAUTY! Witnessing other people’s courage, kindness, strength and overcoming. 

Photo by Andrew Thornebrooke on Unsplash

I have had a lot of firsthand experience with moral beauty lately.

You see, my church is having a capital campaign. We have to do it because we are finally rebuilding after the fire destroyed a whole bunch of our campus 6 years ago, and insurance issues/inflation/supply chain issues blah blah blah meant that even though we planned so carefully, we still found ourselves a couple of million dollars short. 

My church people, like church people everywhere, mostly went incognito during the pandemic. Our attendance numbers have been creeping back up, and the money is OK, which is to say: not as good as last year or the year before or 2 decades ago, but not falling off a cliff.

But a capital campaign was a BIG ask: would people show up? Would they give? Or would we end up with a big empty stucco box for a building and various wires sticking out of the walls with nothing to plug into? 

Photo by eleonora on Unsplash

Part of the capital campaign strategy called for telling personal stories. Something that is surprisingly uncomfortable for a lot of people in my congregation given my influence outright peer-pressure.

To make matters worse: they were supposed to tell money stories. Worse yet: money stories where they had to tell the actual dollar amount they were planning to give to the campaign. To a jury of their peers.

Becky, a brilliant recently retired Wall Street Journal reporter and regular on Rachel Maddow, was just diagnosed with liver cancer and sent in her prerecorded testimony from the Mayo Clinic. She said, 

“I worry I’ll need that money for retirement or medical bills. But I also know that money does more good when it’s shared with others than when we clutch it and hold tight to it. At the end of my life I want to believe that I was not a pew warmer. I was someone who stepped up and did as much as I could for the church. The church is more than a building. It’s a place where people gather to make their lives better. It’s a place where we honor, respect and amplify what I still think is the greatest message ever, the message of Jesus.”

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Then Sara, our campaign chair, told us that her father had written her and her sister out of the will months after her mother and both maternal grandparents died, at his new wife’s behest. She is single, a social worker in the foster care/juvenile justice system, with no financial safety net. But she told us has a spiritual inheritance and a family in us. More tears (and laughter! Sara is very funny). 

Two of our 7-year-olds, twins, love their church so much they are each giving $1/month each out of their allowance! With no pressure at all from their parents. For real!

One of our 16-year-olds stood up in front of all of us and said,

“Even though I will be going off to college soon after the new building is completed and won’t get to enjoy it much myself, (unless I go to Cal), I want to contribute to this building as a gift to all the members and youth that come after me, as I have benefited from this sanctuary that our ancestors in faith built so long ago.”

And one of our 8th graders, nervous but beautifully fierce, preached this in front of 200 people at our all church gala last week: 

“My family spent time 

in many churches throughout my life. 

We would go to church every Sunday. 

I would sit in those pews 

and I would listen   

and try –

but generally fail 

to feel a strong connection to God. 

And then I would go throughout my life 

trying to make sure none of my peers found out that I was Christian. 

But that all changed when we came to First Church. 

…I now look forward to Sundays. 

I sit in the pews and I take the sermons 

and the prayers into my heart 

and let them affect me. 

I am proud to be Christian. 

This church has made me a happier and better person.” 

(you can read her whole testimony here! It’s amazing!)

8th-grade Rachel, testifying.

~

Every week for the last month has been an absolute 10-course feast of moral beauty. Each person who spoke was inspired and given courage by the ones who spoke before them. Holy seeds, profligately scattered, bearing new crop after new crop of moral beauty and AWE. Awe. Infectious awe.

These are provisionally money stories, but money stories are never *just* about money. Money is the outward and visible sign of inward and invisible events: loss, grief, hope, longing, fear, desire, dreams, projection, self- and other-protection, and so much more. And the money stories my people have been telling are really stories about how God has touched them, how they are healed and still healing, and how they want their lives to matter, when all is said and done.

Maybe our time here is short. Well honestly, it is. I don’t know if the party is over (remember the laundry list of doom from the beginning of this message?), or if there’s a little more joy and ease and madcap fun to glean from human civilization.

A whole lot of things are hard right now, but honestly: that’s just an opportunity to witness more moral beauty (courage, kindness, generosity + overcoming), and be the cause of it ourselves. 

Get out there people! There’s awe to be had.

A few of my favorite things right now + a free gift:

Summer preachers and worship leaders: I’ve written up a Summer-or-Anytime Sermon Series guide with scripture quotes and prompts, based on How to Begin, called A Spiritual Field Guide to Joy. Use all or just a bit of it! 

My friend wrote a beautiful book called Dear Mama God, with *all female pronouns for God*!!! This is rarer than you might think. Buy it for your grandkid or church library or yourself because you need reminding that girls and women are made in the image of God too! Available anywhere you buy books.

My friend Ken Samuel, who is cut from the cloth of some of the great African-American preachers, preached this epic sermon at my other pal’s church in Atlanta, Georgia. You’re welcome!

When you get discouraged about all the terrifying, death-dealing legislation happening in purple and red states right now, gaze upon at this picture of Zooey Zephyr standing up for free speech, and gird your loins for the fight ahead. Rep. Zephyr is the first openly trans legislator in Montana.  If she can do it, we can keep hope alive, and we can help.

~

Oh hey! next time I write, I’ll have exciting news! About a new thing I’m working on! Stay tuned. 

I take that back: tune out! Go outside and find some babies or puppies or trees or stars to stare at! And set your small self free – setting down worries and fear and despair for the moment – to belong to the Everything again. 

Lovelove,

Molly