Spiritual Qualities for Resilience Part II: Awe

I was recently at a shivah minyan for a neighbor who is grieving a tragic loss.  He shared an insight that came to him at the cemetery, where he recited Tzidduk Hadin, a traditional prayer that affirms God’s righteousness and supreme power.  He said that it occurred to him that this prayer is not addressed to the “Daddy” parts of God, the warm, loving side of divinity.  Instead, this prayer affirms, this is what is.  This is the truth: my loved one has died and we will all die, early or late.  Let’s say it out loud and take it in.  My neighbor found it oddly comforting.

This is one way of understanding awe, the second spiritual stance that perhaps counterintuitively can support us in our resilience.  Awe (or yirah) is the capacity to face the truth of our smallness, our vulnerability, our ultimate powerlessness. 

Spiritual teachers often focus on the wonder side of awe, such as when we are aware of our smallness standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon.  But let’s be real: yirah also means “fear.”  Awe can be scary.  Staring at our powerlessness, culminating in our own mortality, is a hard sell.  And yet the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, wrote that love and awe are the two wings of a bird.  Without awe, we cannot fly. 

How can we understand that?  One way to look at it is to consider the difference between surrender and submission.  The psychologist, Emmanuel Ghent, proposed in his groundbreaking paper, Masochism, Submission, Surrender: Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender, that submission is when we are forced into powerlessness.  Submission is humiliating, making us smaller than we really are.  But surrender is freely chosen.  When we choose to bow down to something bigger than ourselves, we open ourselves up to being part of that something. 

For example, surrender might be choosing to renounce our absolute autonomy for the sake of a beloved or a child.  It might be literally bowing to the ground during the Great Aleinu on the Days of Awe, acknowledging a power that is greater than any human regime.  It might be standing in the cemetery, feeling the life force flowing through us and all other life forms and knowing that it will continue to flow and take on new forms long after we are no longer here.  Surrender is a natural response to yirah.  It opens us up to a broader perspective, even expanded consciousness.  It can be oddly comforting, as my grieving neighbor discovered in the face of his loss.

I see love and awe as two sides of the same coin.  Given this moment in time and how disconnected we are from each other and the world we live in, we have to start with love.  We need to know that we are seen and cared for and precious.  But in my experience, as I come more and more into love, I also see more and more clearly all the things that I truly have no control over.  This is true with my family, my community, my clients, my country and also with God. 

When I am able to respond to the things I cannot control by surrendering with yirah, what often happens is that my heart is able to open more.  I can connect in to where I do in fact have agency.  I can access my inner calm, strength and love, which can then guide me in doing what I can do.  As the prayer in memory of the martyred Salvadorean Archbishop Oscar Romero reminds us, “There is a sense of liberation in realizing [that we cannot do everything].  This enables us to do something and to do it well.”

How to practice awe?  One traditional way might be this:  First ground yourself in love.  Take a few slow breaths and with each breath, bring to mind an image of a person, animal or place that you love.   Then consider this meditation technique taught by the 16th century mystic, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero:

You wonder, astonished: Who am I? I am a mustard seed in the middle of the sphere of the moon; which is itself a mustard seed within the next sphere. So it is with that sphere and all it contains in relation to the next sphere. So it is with all the spheres - one inside the other - and all of them are a mustard seed within the further expanses. Your awe is invigorated, the love in your soul expands.  (from Daniel Matt, “The Essential Kabbalah)

Next time we will look at self-compassion.