“The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of God brings understanding..” Proverbs 9: 10
When I was in my early teens, I remember standing outside on a summer night and looking up at the stars. The sky was crystal-clear, without any clouds, and the Milky Way seemed extra bright, points of light amassed from horizon to horizon. As I looked at them, struck by the scale of it all, I began to get anxious. The immensity of the universe felt like a weight pressing down from above, a heaviness I could physically feel. How could I stand up underneath all that? The problems that were so important to me didn’t matter to everything else out there. I was insignificant.
What made the night stranger was my sense of something behind the starry scene, looking back at me, a gaze hidden beneath the infinite expanse. All that came from something. There was more to the universe than I could see, and whatever it was, was focused on me. Going to church is one thing. It’s another to find yourself feeling vulnerable before the Source of the cosmos.
In a move I have used numerous times in my life, I decided to go inside.
That night was my first experience of genuine awe, and when my belief in God began. Not belief in God as an idea, but as a presence, completely other than me, beyond my comprehension, but aware of me.
When the Book of Proverbs refers to the fear of God as the beginning of wisdom, awe is what the author has in mind. When directly confronted with an overwhelming power that defies explanation, fear is an understandable response. But the fear is mixed with wonderment at encountering what is transcendent and beyond our ability to imagine. It’s the fear that results when our minds are unable to explain our experience, such as a chance meeting with God.
In the Gospel of Luke, a story is told about a widow from the village of Nain. Her only son has died, a personal tragedy that also threatens the widow with destitution, since her only legitimate sources of income were from a husband or son. As a funeral parade escorts the young man’s body through the village gates, they happen to pass by Jesus, who sees the widow and feels sorry for her. Telling her not to cry, he stops the procession, touches the bier carrying the body, and commands the widow’s son to get up. Immediately, the young man sits up and starts to talk. Helping the formerly dead son to his feet, Jesus returns him to his mother.
The initial reaction of the crowd is fear, a stunned silence, as they’re confronted with this supernatural, unexplainable thing that does not fit within their normal experience of the world, and yet stands in front of them. For that moment, they stood in awe. According to Proverbs, that moment of stunned silence is the beginning of wisdom, because it’s the recognition of God’s presence.
In a modern world, which purports to have an explanation for everything, and denies the reality of what can’t be explained, awe can be hard to come by. We live in a universe constructed of mathematics and mechanical systems and whirling balls whose speed and path we can calculate to a certitude. We live in a time when awesomeness is an earth-bound superlative, referring to nothing transcendent, and so never rises to the level of awe. We live in a space that lacks the miraculous. It’s no wonder that our world displays so little wisdom; the lessons taught by awe are largely missing.
To be struck by awe is to experience our place on the scale of things. We tend to think we weigh more than we do. The total collective mass of human beings on earth doesn’t affect it’s spin one iota, and our egos weigh nothing at all. Our successes and failures lack any reality outside of a tiny, momentary bubble of space-time. We think we’re more important than we are. I wish I’d known this in high school.
Our self-importance gives us an illusion of control. The Greek philosopher Protagoras proposed that humans are the measure of all things, and we largely agree with him, even though our measurements are done with a ridiculously small pair of calipers. In reality, we control little, with an accompanying diminishment of self-importance. I wish I’d known that in high school, too.
Another word for this is humility before the infinity of what we do not know and all we cannot do. We are dependent creatures, whose sense of independence is mostly in our heads. It is wise to recognize how little wisdom we possess.
The related lesson is the existence of something greater than ourselves. This can be hard to recognize when we’re consumed by the importance of being a human, and use our own problems as the measure for what importance means. As a result, we do not usually look beyond ourselves. But there is more to the universe than the 2 trillion galaxies that shine above our heads. There is more to the universe than can be seen or measured.
Awe describes our surprise when we become aware of a living presence that fills and surpasses the physical world around us, when we are confronted by what transcends all that, when we experience what is truly other. That experience is what causes stunned silence.
While we are contingent beings, there is One who is noncontingent. While we are born and die, there is One who is neither. While we cannot know the One, there is One who knows us. Whether or not life exists elsewhere in the universe, the fact remains that we’re not alone. An experience of awe opens our eyes to what we failed to see before.
The Catholic monk Thomas Merton once wrote, “We cannot know God, but we can know that we are known.” Wisdom begins with that truth.
Picture of Milky Way by Philippe Donn: https://www.pexels.com/photo/milky-way-illustration-1169754/
Picture of grieving woman by Michael Knoll from Pixabay
Picture of mushroom by Andreas from Pixabay
Picture of woman with bowed head by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-leaning-on-a-bench-6284260/
Picture of man on mountain by Photo by Miles Hardacre : https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-a-person-standing-in-mountain-2404371/
Leave a Reply