The Discipline of Reverence, Worship and Awe

This afternoon my wife and I walked with some friends in the woodlands above our home. We live on a protected moraine, vital to the re-charge of groundwater for our area. The past few weeks have been extraordinarily warm, so the snow is long gone, and the ponds are now a raucous chorus of frog songs. Moss on stones and rotted stumps virtually were glowing in the shafts of sun beaming into the still drab-brown woods waiting for spring.

Strolling in the splendor of a world in transition from death to life stirs the blood and fires the imagination. For those with a poetic bent it triggers all kinds of analogies. We are creatures of anticipation. But we live in the here-and-now where even  today's beauty is a gift beyond words.

So here is the first of my disciplines for living joyfully and responsively in our 'downstream-from-Eden' world:

The discipline of reverence, worship and awe.

Rivers, waterfalls, rain and the night sky – in fact, the entire creation reveals to us magnificence and power beyond our comprehension. Every feature of the created world from glaciers to hummingbirds, from geysers to gemstones is a lens in which we glimpse the wisdom, power and beauty of God. There’s a mystery in nature that humbles us, a grandeur and majesty that ennobles us with the sheer privilege of sharing the world with them.

Surrounded by such richness, we can grow so accustomed to it that we forget its significance. It takes discipline not to lose the wonder, and double discipline to turn wonder into worship and adoration towards God as the source and creator of our radiant world. Worship, reverence and awe reorient us to the world and to God. I do not worship nature, but I love her and cherish her; I want to learn from her and treat her with deepest respect.

American Rabbi Abraham Heschel laments that our culture has lost its awe of God, our wonder before creation and our radical amazement at life. The natural world, he says, gives us a hint, a faint hint, of God’s own grandeur, and Heschel invites us to stand in wonder before God’s creation. We need to cultivate a sense of embarrassment, he says. Our lack of embarrassment before God and God’s creation is at the heart of our indifference and cruelty. Recovering a healthy ‘embarrassment’ will lead us back to “gratitude, true appreciation and awe” and a stronger sense of community.

That’s what a quiet mid-march walk in the woods can do for you. That’s what my study of water has done for me the past few years: opened my eyes, enlarged my world and deepened my appreciation and awe of God for the profuse and marvelous gifts of water, earth and sky – and so much more.