A reflection among the Storydwelling community on December 1, 2024
Luke 1: 46-55
And Mary said:
“My soul proclaims your greatness, O God,
and my spirit rejoices in you, my Savior.
For you have looked with favor
upon your lowly servant,
and from this day forward all generations will call me blessed.
For you, the Almighty, have done great things for me,
and holy is your Name.
Your mercy reaches from age to age
for those who fear you.
You have shown strength with your arm;
you have scattered the proud in their conceit;
you have deposed the mighty from their thrones
and raised the lowly to high places.
You have filled the hungry with good things,
while you have sent the rich away empty.
You have come to the aid of Israel your servant,
mindful for your mercy–
the promise you made to our ancestors–
to Sarah and Abraham
and their descendants forever.”
There is a book that Theo loves right now about a community of insects who live in a garden
whose lives are turned upside when they find a marble that a child has dropped—
Could it be a planet, a star? A magical chrysalis?
They call it the “Wonder from the Sky.”
They are thinking, throughout the whole book, just WOW.
And I asked Theo, what makes you say “wow”?
And he thought about it, and he said, even this four-year-old said,
“I guess I don’t say that very often.”
His wow and my wow and maybe our collective wow is obscured, hidden,
underneath layers of small pressures like schedules and commitments
and larger pressures like the weight of climate crisis and wondering whether we will know
how to show up when we need to show up to exist as neighbors and friends in what could be an era of mass deportation and bathroom bills.
What room could there possibly be for WOW in all of that?
Awe, I feel, in my life, in these days, is all but suffocated. Or packed away in favor of “more important” impulses.
And yet, Mary turns to it first– it is her first impulse– as she sings of God’s greatness.
We might imagine her singing this song as she reunites with her cousin Elizabeth,
both of them pregnant with impossible babies—
Elizabeth, because she is old, and long ago gave up hope of having a child;
and Mary, because she is young, and the circumstances of this baby’s conception
are mysterious at best; we’ll remember this is not a longed-for child, but a disruption in her peace and in her life.
These two impossible pregnancies, reuniting,
and as Mary sings, summoning every fiber of her courage, we might imagine
her looking to the southeast of her cousin’s home, and there she would see
a huge resort, a palace—built by King Herod, the ruler of that region,
an homage to his power, and so of course he named it for himself: Herodium.
But before he built the palace—which was the largest palatial complex in the Roman Empire at the time—
he built a 2500-foot mountain on which to place it.
This thing was lit up in a time when things did not light up, and its light obscured the stars in the sky.
It was meant, towering above everyone and everything else, to inspire… awe.
To make the people together… feel something.
This is what awe does, yes?
Makes us feel something.
One particular scientist–Dacher Keltner– out of Berkeley has made it his life’s work to study the science of awe,
and what we know so far is that experiences of awe and wonder
activate our vagus nerve, which some people call the soul nerve—
which starts in the base of our spinal cord, connected to our brains,
and goes to our hearts our lungs our guts—
and so experiences of awe, they change us, physically.
If the power brokers of history were writing a textbook about awe,
they might conjure up examples like…
The 7 wonders of the world.
Like.. St. Peters’ Basilica
Like…churches singing Our God is an awesome God.
Like… every attempt patriarchy and domination systems have made to make the people together feel…small and powerless.
The list could go on and on: The Washington Monument. Trump Tower, for god’s sakes.
But those attempts at making the people feel small and powerless…they didn’t work, did they.
Maybe this is why this song of Mary’s has been banned in three different countries
at different points in time– to try and prevent the people from rising up–
the big buildings, the impressive monuments; didn’t inspire awe.
Because the wonders of the world are more like the marble in the garden—
they are small, they are intimate.
And the research plays this out.
We feel the most awe…not in nature, not in the presence of great monuments,
either natural or human-made,
but when we bear witness to small acts of “moral beauty.”
Like… when my older child gives my younger child one of his m & m’s.
Or when a stranger lets you merge in front of them, on the highway,
That’s when our vagus nerve gets activated– that’s when our souls are alive.
The second best source of awe? Something research calls “collective effervescence”—
When we are moving our bodies together, doing the same thing at the same time,
feeling that high of being in a dance class or counting down to the new year,
or singing one of our favorite hymns.
Communion.
When our vagus nerves are activated when we are alone,
our immune systems are strengthened and our brains have heightened clarity.
We are healthier, we are smarter.
And when our vagus nerves are activated when we are together,
our serotonin levels, our hormone levels, our heart rates are all aligned:
we are building community, we are healing our bodies and The Body of the world.
The wonders of the world are less like monuments and more like marbles—
more like embryos, and Mary knows this deep inside of her.
The awe of the people will not take them to their knees in front of Herodium,
it will take them to their knees by the ways we are connected;
by birth and new life;
by the reunion of beloved cousins;
by the helping and healing and small repairs we participate in every day;
by God in the flesh, all around us.
“Once I traveled far above the earth. This beloved planet we call home was covered with an elastic web of light. I watched in awe as it shimmered, stretched, dimmed, and shined, shaped by the collective effort of all life within it. Dissonance attracted more dissonance. Harmony attracted harmony. I saw revolutions, droughts, famines, and the births of new nations. The most humble kindnesses made the brightest lights. Nothing was wasted.”
― Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave
Our spiritual ancestor–Mary, God-bearer–
is telling us that awe is a vital part of what it is to be human,
of what it is to survive and to thrive,
so it is not pollyannish for me to suggest that perhaps awe could be our salvation.
Another thing awe does is remind us that we are not God.
And in a time when we wonder if we can survive, we wonder who will survive,
we wonder how we might be called in to show up in solidarity so that more of us can
survive and thrive—
it feels quite important, actually, to lean a little harder on the theological reality
that we are not God, that there is actually something both within and beyond us—
as close and fleshy and intimate as our womb places, and as distant and mysterious and cosmic as the stars—
and some of us feebly call that God.
So while we do not get to abdicate our responsibilities to one another—
and, thank God, awe will not let us—
neither is the repair of the world all up to any one of us individually.
Because we are a part of something much bigger than us,
and the awe of that brings me to my knees.
And reminds that I must rest, that we can rest.
For it is the gift of a gracious awe that tells us that each of us is a star in the map in the sky
but no one of us alone holds up the sky.
Thanks be to God, none of us alone has to.
Our ancestor Mary is no Pollyanna—
she falls to her knees in awe,
and this is the salvation—
the salve, the balm, the repairing impulse—
we inherit from her.
We proclaim the beauty and wonder of the Loving Force for Life and Justice
that surpasses all of our understanding—
and do we do it like our lives depend on it.
May it be so.
Recent Comments