Exploring the Themes of our Lives Exploration des thématiques October/octobre 2014 Resources

Awe – Émerveillement

What Does It Mean To Seek A Life Of Awe? Que signifie chercher à vivre une vie d’émerveillement?

What is awe, really? Is it the feeling of being mesmerized by something new and unexpected? Is it the breathless feeling you can have when the full moon emerges from the clouds? Is it the small hand of a newborn in your own large hand? Is it laughter with a friend or the miracle of finding your way through a fight to forgiveness? Or is it fear and respect for something unknown or greater than yourself?

Maybe we lose touch with our ability to experience awe as our lives get overloaded. Busyness can lead to repetition, repetition can lead to numbness. Numbness can make it hard for awe to break in. What if we gave ourselves permission to reconnect with awe this month? From a Unitarian Universalist perspective, the “good news” of life is not that our sins can be redeemed but that our vision can be renewed. Forget about those calls to acknowledge our sinful littleness; let us open our eyes to life’s stunning largeness. This is certainly what the great Unitarian transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau urged us to do. This may be our faith’s most enduring mantra. The question is: are we letting that mantra guide our days?

In this month’s packet (see below), we have some engaging questions about awe to wrestle with, as well as some intriguing spiritual exercises that I encourage you to try. The Exploration Groups/groupes d’exploration will be sharing their reactions and experiences when they gather.

Even if you haven’t joined a group, I recommend taking the time to explore your own sense of awe. You might be surprised by what you find. (And if you do want to join a group, there’s still time. Contact Prue Rains at [email protected].)

Namasté (the light in me sees the light in you – with awe),

Rev. Diane Rollert Our Spiritual Exercises for October Chose one option to share with your Exploration Group.

OPTION A: Capturing Awe Over the next few weeks before your group meeting, try to capture a handful of moments of awe in action. If you have a camera, take pictures. Or write down what you see. Or draw a picture. Capture whatever defines awe for you in the moment: A tree’s leaves just starting to change colour, a friend’s smile, a picture of your leg and hip walking again, your child asleep (finally!), you name it.

After you’ve collected your 5 or 6 favorite moments, spend sometime before your group looking for commonalities. Why do they reflect your unique definition of awe? Come ready to share your moments of awe and what they’ve taught you.

OPTION B: Take A Walk Until the World Lights Up You might want to start early in the morning or in the evening right after dinner. You could also set aside a Saturday afternoon. But whenever you start, your one rule is that you can’t stop until awe has crossed your path. In a sense, this exercise is an act of faith or trust – trust that awe is scattered all over the place waiting for us to notice it rather than believing that awe is this one rare thing that only shows up a precious few times in our lives.

Come to your group prepared to talk not only about how long a walk you had to go on, but also about how you got yourself into a space to see and notice what was waiting for you.

OPTION C: Watch (a Video) and Do Something in Response This exercise involves a few steps (you may want to do some or all of the steps):

Step 1: Watch these four videos and choose the one that most affects you:

The Most Astounding Fact (3:30 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU Existential Bummer: (2:54 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb-OYmHVchQ Awe (2:49 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QyVZrV3d3o Murmuration (2 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRNqhi2ka9k

Step 2: Set aside a half hour and watch the one that you chose a few times Watch it in the spirit of meditation and reflection. First watch it with openness, turning off your analytical brain. Then watch again with the intention of identifying a phrase or word that sticks out to you. Spend some time trying to figure out why that phrase or word captured your attention. Ask yourself what it might be trying to say to you. Finally, watch it again with the question “What must I do?” in the forefront of your mind.

Step 3: Perform an action or make a change in your life based on your experience of step two. Questions To Live With: As always, don’t treat these questions like “homework.” You do not need to engage every single one. Instead, simply look them over and find the one that “hooks” you most. Then let it take you on a ride. Live with it for a while. Allow it to regularly break into-- and break open-- your ordinary thoughts. And then come to your Exploration Group meeting prepared to share that journey with your group.

1. Are you a collector, appreciator, seeker, integrator or ignorer of moments of awe? Do you seek them out or just notice them when they come along? Do they seem to pass you by? Or when they do cross your path, do they slip through your fingers and evaporate into the air? Are you ready to rethink your relationship to awe?

2. De quelle façon l'émerveillement est-il présent dans votre vie? Est-ce que cela prend la forme de l'étonnement, de la transcendance, du mystère?

3. Does living a life of awe take more work than you have been willing to put in? When was the last time you allowed yourself to be altered by awe? John Milton writes about “encounters and transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.” Has this been true for you? Have your moments of awe really “changed forever” how you experience life in the world? If so, how? If not, do you see that as a problem or spiritual challenge?

4. Does noticing awe require the “eyes and mind of a child”? Many religious traditions claim this to be the case. Has this been true for you?

5. Does awe require age? Is innocence or experience the best doorway into awe? How has your relationship to awe changed with time, age and experience? Is there something you know now about awe that you didn’t know when you were 18 years old?

6. What is the relationship between love and awe? Is it that love gives us access to something larger than ourselves? Poets talk about love as offering us the “promise of forever and eternity.” Is awe a part of your intimate relationships? If not, do you wish it were?

7. What’s the deal with fear and awe? Religious traditions often define awe as being one part wonder mixed with one part terror. How has this been true for you?

8. When was the last time you were “wholly dissolved”? Is this what awe feels like to you?

9. Does a life without awe count? Do you believe that human beings are in some sense “created for awe?” Do we have a “responsibility to awe”?

10. Other? As always, if none of the above questions connect with you, identify your own. Recommended Resources: As always, this is not required reading. We will not analyze or dissect these pieces in our group. They are simply meant to get your thinking started, and maybe to open you to new ways of thinking about what it means to “seek a life of awe.”

First Thoughts “In a glorious historic cathedral or in an ancient magnificent mosque I feel awe - not because of the particular religious creed it was built to glorify but because it somehow transcends that and honours the gauzy white web and delicately chasing moths who came too close – a tiny, hairy, graceful monster magnified to terrifying!”

Wise Words “Awe: An experience of such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world to assimilate it” -Nicholas Humphrey

“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.” -John Milton

“I think over again my small adventures, my fears, these small ones that seemed so big. For all the things I had to get and to reach. And yet there is only one great thing. The only thing. To live to see the great day that dawns. And the light that fills the world.” - Inuit song

"I'll tell you a secret. Something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again." - Achilles

“There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.” - Albert Einstein

“I was struck by the fact that I hadn't been awed in a while. Did that mean awesome things had disappeared from my life? No. What it did mean was that I'd gotten too caught up in distractions and mind mucking to recognize anything as awe-inspiring. . . . I hadn't been paying attention to the beauty around me.” - Sue Patton Thoele Videos “The Most Outstanding Fact” By Neil de Grasse Tyson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU

“Camille Seaman: Photos from a Storm Chaser” Storms as “lovely monsters.” http://www.ted.com/talks/camille_seaman_photos_from_a_storm_chaser.html?utm_source =newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=image__2013- 06-21

“Shots of Awe” By Jason Silva A YouTube channel in which Jason Silva chases his inspiration addiction as he explores topics surrounding the idea of “awe.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb-OYmHVchQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QyVZrV3d3o http://www.youtube.com/user/ShotsOfAwe

Murmuration A short film that follows the journey of two girls in a canoe on the River Shannon and how they stumble across an incredible phenomenon of nature; a murmuration of starlings. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRNqhi2ka9k

Peter Mayer "Holy Now" (with lyrics in captions) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiypaURysz4

Books Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience, James Carse Combining everything from the teachings of the Buddha to the poetry of Frost, Carse revisits those ordinary moments in which we see the wondrous and the terrible to reveal the mystical at work in American life.

The Spell of the Sensuous: and Language in a More-Than-Human World David Abram Abram, an eloquent and original ecologist, philosopher, and sleight-of-hand magician, explores the of perception. He believes that if we, industrialized Westerners, could recognize ourselves as sensuous beings inextricably connected to all of life, a knowledge the people of indigenous oral cultures have grasped for millennia, we would stop destroying the environment and experience the world around us a “alive.”

Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality, Robert C. Fuller Wonder opens us to an unseen world beyond ourselves, Fuller asks us to think of wonder more as a religious sensibility than an emotion. Fuller offers stories of John Muir, and Rachel Carson to show how these three saw the world around them as an ineffable mystery whose organic unity calls for an experience of wonder rather than a cold scientific explanation.

The Wondering Brain: Thinking about Religion With and Beyond , Kelly Bulkeley A masterwork of integration with a fascinating theory of wonder as a source of spiritual growth

I Asked For Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology, Abraham Joshua Heschel "Life passes on in proximity to the sacred, and it is this proximity that endows existence with ultimate significance. In our relation to the immediate we touch upon the most distant. Perhaps the essential message of Judaism is that in doing the finite we may perceive the infinite."

When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist Chet Raymo Raymo invites readers to explore "the beautiful and terrible mystery that soaks creation. As a "religious naturalist," he never ceases his pursuit of "the beautiful and terrible mystery that soaks creation.

Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day, Diane Ackerman In an eye-opening sequence of personal meditations through the cycle of seasons, Diane Ackerman awakens us to the world at dawn—drawing on sources as diverse as meteorology, world religion, etymology, art history, poetry, organic farming, and beekeeping.

October Worship Calendar This month’s theme: What does it mean to seek a life of awe?

October 5 Our Eleventh Emotion: Awe, Our Changing Climate, and the People's March Nicoline Guerrier, Candidate for Unitarian Universalist Ministry Music by Sandra Hunt

The neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall has called awe "our eleventh emotion." What role does awe play, both in our changing climate and in the groundswell of voices calling for a dramatic change in the way we inhabit this planet? Parts in Peace will sing a short benediction by the Toronto Neighbouhood UU church's music director, Susanne Maziarz.

October 12 Awestruck Rev. Diane Rollert Music by Louise Halperin Awe has its ancient and modern meanings. If we seek to live a life of awe do we allow for reverence or humility or do we simply rejoice in what delights and amazes us?

October 19 The Story of Two French Resistance Fighters Special guests Nelly Trocmé Hewett and Henri Aubin, with Rev. Diane Rollert Music by Jean Séguin and Denis Barsalo

Nelly Trocmé Hewett is the daughter of two heroes of the Second World War. Nelly now lives in Minnesota, but as a teenager in the early 1940s she saw and experienced first-hand the amazing work of her parents, Rev. André and Magda Trocmé, who led a network of Christian pacifists in the Massif Central of southern France. This network saved the lives of thousands of French Jews. In later years André and Magda Trocmé were officially honoured as “Righteous Among the Nations” by the state of Israel. At 1 p.m., Nelly will present a short film and speak more about her parents’ efforts during the war.

October 26 Tabla and Tagore Rev. Diane Rollert Tabla music by Shawn Mativetsky, service music by Sandra Hunt

Diwali, the Indian festival of lights and the New Year begins on October 23. This Sunday we’ll celebrate the awe-filled poetry of Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore accompanied by the heartbeat drumming of internationally renowned table player, educator and composer Shawn Mativetsky. Our service includes the child dedication of Émilie Rose Régimbal, daughter of Kristin McKeown and Jean-Michel Régimbal