A Return to Wonder and Awe
With a new year on the horizon, where do we find wonder and awe again? What are we replacing a spiritual or religious life within the age of distraction?
As a species we are inclined toward religion. We have largely been a worshipping people across the globe for eons. Whether it was a tribal god grounded in place and tied to ancestors, or the polytheism of the ancient Greeks whose gods manifested as lust, anger, temperance, love, or revenge – we have spent more time as religious and worshipful than not.
It seems built into our genes. There have been some new studies that show some people are more predisposed to religion than others. However it manifests or wherever it comes from – divine inspiration or genetics – I think it is something that we cannot easily escape, despite this age of technology and science we live in. One expression of this religious tendency is experiencing a sense of wonder and awe.
When was the last time you felt awe? How would you describe such a feeling? For me, it feels like a sublime displacement of my ego, a setting aside and suspension of anything in that moment that may draw me away from a beatific awareness of the now. It’s a harmonious feeling, I once thought of it as golden being. It feels like living song, it feels like infinite peace and wholeness. I have felt that way only a few precious times in my life, and those times I was usually outside under a blue sky in the presence of an unnamable phenomenon. It’s important to note that these rare experiences of awe occurred without the help of any mind-altering substances of any kind. They were organic, they came upon me suddenly and two of three times I was walking outside alone.
Do we seek awe now? Do we treasure it? Has it absented itself from most of our lives? I think so, and I think it has to do with our attention and with the age and culture we are living in. We don’t have time to pay attention to the things that might evoke awe in us because we are too busy looking at TikTok or counting the likes on our Instagram posts or arguing with people on Facebook about what you can and cannot say. Our attention has been sucked up by the shallowest of technologies. Technologies that stroke our egos and encourage derision. Social media is today’s bread and circuses. The Great Distraction. Do we know the cost of putting so much of our lives and focus onto these platforms yet? Do we know what we will become if we forget what awe and wonder feel like? What are we trading for our distraction? What is taking place of connecting with something larger than us, something divine? We are beginning to find out.
If you peer down into the yawning hole left in the Western psyche following the spread of the Enlightenment age values after hundreds of years of Christianity dominating the space in the mind – what will you find? Reason and the Enlightenment has carried us far, brought great advancements in technology and science, and lead us into an age that has its benefits. Who doesn’t appreciate long life, health, access to clean water, education, and all the luxuries of the 21st century? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy all these things too, but I think when we abandoned our religious and spiritual sense and replaced it with science and reason as many in our secular society have, we have robbed ourselves of something significant. Something essential to our mental health and wellbeing – a spiritual life. The rise of mental illness in modernity is staggering. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI):
one in five U.S. adults experience mental illness each year
one in six U.S. youth aged 6-17 experience a mental health disorder each year
suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death among people aged 10-14
Why?
There are a lot of reasons, and these factors vary depending upon the individual, upbringing, family background, genetics, education, and other cultural and socioeconomic factors. Focusing just on young people though, social media has played a terrible role in exacerbating their mental health – especially young girls. Social psychologist, Johnathon Haidt, had been researching and documenting the decline in children and teens’ mental health and he states that, “. . .social media plus overprotection are the two major causes of the teen mental health crisis that began around 2012.” iGen is growing up to be a very anxious generation and it is deeply tied to where their attention goes: to a screen.
But it’s not just young people suffering, there is also a staggering rise in suicide rates, especially in men, and in more than half of the cases there was no known mental health issue. When you think of a “reason” for suicide – how do you explain it? The tragedy and agony of such a loss aside, the number one reason for suicide is depression. And what is depression? There is clinical depression and depression caused by circumstances such as illness or loss, but both often cause you to feel hopeless, worthless, guilty, sad, helpless, and pessimistic. Hopeless, without hope. Hope is a religiously charged word. Hope is to wish, trust, and pray for a better, brighter tomorrow. It's a surrendering of your will to the unknown. It’s putting faith in something other than yourself. When you hope, it is your religious sense crying out for comfort and grace.
When life is without meaning, hopeless, and your attention is grounded in something empty and purposeless, how can you be mentally fit and healthy?
Some people feed their spiritual appetite and seek meaning in politics and ideology. But this is misplaced and akin to having a diet of only starches and processed foods – it’s not good for you, it’s overly simplified, and it will cause you to have all sorts of health problems. If a diet rich in whole, complex foods makes you healthy in body imagine what a life rich in a whole, complex philosophical and spiritual inquiry might do. Wonders! It might even lead you to awe. But so many of us, do not walk down that path – it’s difficult. We ignore the call to adventure and turn away from a reckoning with ourselves. Instead, we take the easy route. We fill the longing inside us with something superficial, artificial, flimsy, and ultimately unfulfilling.
What we are seeing now, in place of a religious or spiritual life are people passionate about politics, spouting post-modern diatribes, and belting out ideologies rooted in the bloody tides of Marxism spread by a remote intellectual elite who could not be more disconnected from reality because they do not believe in a common reality. People have tried to fill a God-shaped hole inside them with a shadow religion (ideology acted out in “activism”) or succored themselves with self-indulgent tendencies (the narcissistic drive to “be seen” or shape one’s identity based on how they feel). These shallow pursuits have made so many people spiritually and psychologically impoverished. It is not serving anyone well, and so many good intentions that are taken up in the name of many of these ideologies are misplaced and turn into witch hunts (i.e. deplatforming, cancelling, etc.).
When I hear people talk about Whites as all being racist oppressors who must “do the work” of anit-racism (but can never really reach some unattainable critical point of being anti-racist simply because they are White), I cringe. This is the Kendian and DiAngelonian take on racism and it is anti-human and it is everywhere. Something is wrong with their line of thinking despite them, and the individuals who have absorbed their credo, believing to their core that what they’re saying is right, just, and true. It has enamored the leftist woke and created a modern-day crusade. John McWhorter identified this wokeism as a religion in his recent book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. In his book, McWhorter supports his argument by identifying the new original sin, “White privilege” and states that cancel culture has been weaponized to identify, punish, and ban heretics. It’s justified censorship and is applied to anyone who deviates or questions the gospel of the woke.
He describes the woke as having an evangelical fervor and states that this new religion, while claiming to be a crusade to “dismantle racist structures” is in fact, harming his fellow Black Americans. He believes this movement does not help Black people but infantilizes them. In his view antiracism is not, in fact, not racist but involves what he says is, “… a racial essentialism that's barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past.” Not only is the Kendian DiAngelonian approach dehumanizing but it upholds racism. It is a toxic approach that pushes people apart rather than bringing them together.
There are better approaches to address racism and bias. More compassionate, humanizing ways that look at our commonality rather than our differences. I recommend looking at the pro-human work done by the Foundation for Racism and Intolerance (FAIR) and Cholé Valdary’s Theory of Enchantment.
There is a growing desire to atone for something in the Western psyche at this moment and many are misdirecting their energies. I cannot help but call to mind the often misinterpreted and misunderstood statement by Nietzsche, “God is dead” in which he keenly identified the growing malady within the human mind. We killed God, we abandoned religion, we walked away from faith in something larger than us. We are seeing it play out today.
We have been misled. We are trudging down a path of nihilism. Where nothing matters, everything is relative, and there is no absolute truth. How can a mind survive let alone thrive when there is no agreed upon reality within society? It cannot. Things will fall apart. There is a chill in the air, a tempest is rising in the West and it calls to mind, W. B. Yeat’s famous poem The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I read this and revisit it and shudder in horror. I see a lot of the 21st century reflected here, especially in the line, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” The best minds among us remain silent during this unravelling we are facing, while those full of fiery passions, the worst among us, have their voices raised and their skewing of reality and truth pushed forward. And if we continue into this unraveling, what terrible beast will we awaken? Yeats knew something of the horror’s humanity was capable of, having lived during WWI, and here we are just over a century later and there are rumors of war in the West. The media has speculated about cultural wars, ideological wars, and civil wars, and all the while we wonder if it’s possible as we watch the war in Ukraine unfold on our phones.
How can we bring ourselves back from the brink, back from the collapsing center? How can we readjust our trajectory and turn our energies and minds to something productive and good, hear the falconer once more? In the new year ahead, perhaps we should return to wonder and awe.
If you want to do the “hard work” so many woke people of late have talked about, and you are perhaps unsure of how to approach religion, start by taking the advice of sage and preeminent clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and, “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” What does it mean to set ourselves in perfect order? Orderliness, routine, discipline, rigor. It means to look at ourselves, our intentions honestly and determine where and how we can be better.
I cannot see a way forward without the illuminating wisdom of religion. I have tried to live without it, and have for 12 years, but now I find myself being unable to shake the sense of the need of some good sense. This came with the realization that I am not infallible and that living by my will alone is folly. It’s hubris. Pride has ever been something that hovered over me, and I have cleaved to for far too long. A recent death in my family brought to bear a disquieting realization of the eventuality of death of everyone I love. What will I do, where will I turn if I am left behind while everyone has gone before me? Of late, I find myself as reluctant as C. S. Lewis and Paul Kingsnorth have described themselves as in their own journey. I cannot believe I have been led here and I am not alone in that wonder. Which leads me back to the return to awe.
If you want to find meaning and have a purposeful life, feel hope again, start by getting your life together. Try something as simple as cultivating a new interest that doesn’t involve a screen and try something difficult such as exploring a religious or spiritual path. To bring back meaning, wonder, and awe, dwell in a place of curiosity, seek out difficult disciplines, ask hard questions of the world, of culture, and especially yourself. And for God’s sake – GO OUTSIDE. Instead of trying to fix the world (activism) or get the world’s attention (social media), look inward, and see what you can do to repair yourself. I think many of us are wounded and searching for something. That’s where I find myself now – searching – and I hope I will clear a path that allows some light in so that awe might return where I have found it in the past, shouldered up against beauty.