A few years ago, I went to a concert and heard a song performed live that I never imagined I’d ever hear. It’s a song by a somewhat obscure British artist that, when I was in high school, I heard on the radio and came to love and listened to repeatedly on a cassette tape of his that I’d purchased. The song featured a full symphony orchestra as well as a rock band and choir in addition to him as the lead singer. The fusion of musical styles and instrumentation was so uncommon and unique to where I didn’t think it could ever be performed live. It was an exceptional blend that could only have been created in the controlled environment of a studio. But at this concert, they performed the work live. For about six minutes I was in absolute awe.
All of us have had situations that have created a sense of awe in us. Maybe it’s standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon … or watching a breathtaking sunrise … or sleeping under the stars while camping and looking up and reflecting on the vastness of the universe. Perhaps it’s driving through a community that has been ravaged by a wildfire or an F5 tornado … or being on an African safari and seeing a variety of wild beasts in their natural habitat. Regardless of what prompts it, the results of awe are the same. It causes us to think about the world and our place in it. Whenever we experience genuine awe, we tend feel smaller—not necessarily insignificant or inconsequential, but smaller.
I recently read about research where people who experience awe were asked to select a picture that represented themselves. By and large, they tended to select pictures that depicted them, in relationship to other objects in the picture, as smaller. Over the course of many of these types of experiments, researchers have come to understand that awe experiences make us feel small psychologically.
It’s this phenomenon of “being appropriately small” that creates the conditions for a variety of other positive emotions and behaviors. For instance shame, like awe, causes us to feel small. But there’s a key difference: People who experience awe feel small while remaining connected to others, while those who experience shame feel disconnected and isolated from others. The disgrace and sense of stigma associated with their shame causes them to feel alienated and estranged. But there’s something about awe that causes us to feel more linked and banded together with the people around us.
As a result, a sense of awe leads us to feel more generous and be more cooperative … to have more joy and be more humble … to be less narcissistic, or entitled, or materialistic. Awe is also linked to having a greater sense of direction and personal purpose.
Bottom line: I wonder if much of the reason why so many people who claim to be Christ-followers don’t take their faith more seriously, or live what appears to be a very skimmed and substandard version of it ,is because they’ve lost a sense of the awesomeness of God? I wonder if the lack of recognition of His transcendence has caused many of us to struggle with pride and/or feel disconnected and become somewhat stingy and ungenerous? If impressions of awe lead to an appropriate sense of smallness and feelings of connectedness and significance, what does the epidemic of pride and feelings of isolation and our compulsive quest for approval say about the perception and understanding we have of God?
In a very real sense, every insufficiency and imperfection of faith ultimately boils down to a misunderstanding and misapprehension of the nature and character of God. If the church could recapture a sense of His awesomeness, perhaps we’d more fully become the forceful and dynamic movement He wants us to be. Maybe we need to open ourselves up more fully to being loved by Someone so much bigger than we are that we are periodically frozen in wonder. Maybe we need to put ourselves in places where we can more fully sense the breathtaking and awesome nature of God.