An awful or an awesome life?

The encounter between the finite human self and the ultimate of existence evokes the emotion of Sacred Anxiety. We much prefer to search for God than to actually meet God. As C.S. Lewis dryly observed, at the very moment we feel that we about to meet our Creator, we "suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that!" Emily Dickinson, no stranger to Sacred Anxiety, wrote:

"I do not know the man so bold He dare in lonely Place That awful stranger Consciousness Deliberately face -- "

In religious terms, Sacred Anxiety has been called the "fear of God." As a child, this phrase troubled me. Why should I be "scared" of a loving God? The only kind of God I could imagine being "afraid" of was a wrathful, punishing deity. I could never understand why having a "fear of God" was considered a good thing.

Only much later did I begin to understand that this phrase, like many others relating to anxiety, suffered from the use of the term fear. A much more accurate rendering would be "the awe of God." The word awe has a rich and complex bouquet of meanings. Awe refers to the uplifting, yet unsettling blend of reverence, dread, and wonder that is evoked by the mysterium tremendum -- the sublime apprehension of the vast universal intelligence that is beyond our understanding. This is the numinous dread-ecstasy that sends shivers up our spine when we stand in the presence of the ultimate reality.

Awe induces a bodily sensation of "spiritual shivering" that began with Adam and Eve's first encounter with God. This is the "quaking" of the Quakers and the "shaking" of the Shakers -- the vibratory sensations that accompany the inflowing of divine energy. Two thousand years ago Plato described the experience: "First a shudder runs through you, and then the old awe creeps over you."

Rudolf Otto, the German theologian, observed that this emotion "is something more than 'natural,' ordinary fear, It implies that the mysterious is already beginning to loom before the mind, to touch the feelings."

According to Otto, "The awe or 'dread' may indeed be so overwhelmingly great that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow," such as during a time of great crisis or ecstatic experience. "But it may also steal upon us almost unobserved as -- a mere fleeting shadow passing across our mood."

This gentler and more subtle shivering may occur while watching an especially vibrant sunset. Or it may overtake us during a tender moment while holding a sleeping infant. At these times the natural and ordinary human emotions become elevated into transcendent sensations of spiritual awe.

The awe of Sacred Anxiety includes a sense of the majestic, the inexorable, the overwhelmingly terrifying, the inexpressible. Though it frightens us, it also fascinates us. We want to turn away, and we do; yet a moment later we turn to it again.

The mystic Jacob Boehme confessed, "I can neither write nor tell of what sort of Exaltation the triumphing of the Spirit is. In the midst of death, life is reborn."

Our response when we are visited by Sacred Anxiety is crucial. Goethe wrote that "Awe is the best of man." Yet, its unfamiliarity triggers our fears and often prevents us from surrendering to it.

The Shakers symbolized the rigid ego whose prideful resistance prevents the infusion of divine grace as "Old Stiff." Rigidity and hardening of the ego were equated with death and alienation from God. If we resist the temporary dissolution of the ego during a spontaneous experience of awe, we may experience terrifying feelings of "falling apart" and "going crazy." We may feel attacked by a nameless dread that something horrible is about to happen.

Just look at what our fears have done to the word itself: The word "aweful," meaning full of awe, has, with the passage of centuries, become our word "awful," meaning something terribly bad. When we resist awe, we experience it as something awful. When God knocks on our door, our fear of the unknown makes us rush to lock the door.

Awe is a spiritual awareness that hums in the background of every moment of our existence. Awe is an angel who invites us into God's presence. If we learn to trust her, she has the power to transform the awful into the awesome and to lead us home to paradise.

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