There’s something about this time of year that turns my mind toward the people and places we come from. Maybe it’s the way that winter pares down of the world. As things around us retreat and slow down, everything becomes revealed in a certain way– when we can no longer take their presence for granted, there’s a way of seeing this world and all its interconnections more. Maybe it’s how the shorter, colder days make me feel a little more introspective, more prone to reflecting on the relationships I have. Certainly, the holidays so many people observe in this time of year tie us back to stories and traditions, both old and new. For these reasons and others, my thoughts are turning toward the profound relationship I have with the world we live in. Which brings us to the seed of the service I offer you today. At this cusp between autumn and winter our forbearers can instill us with awe by showing us how connected we are to the world – to everyone and everything that has gone before us. And similarly, I think this season can direct us to consider the awe we will leave behind.
I want to begin by talking about awe. Awe was an experience that the scholar of religion Rudolph Otto addressed almost a hundred years ago. In The Idea of the Holy1, he built on current ideas on the phenomena of religious experiences. In this work, he describes one of these core responses as the trembling awe that we feel in response to the holy or sublime. Awe, for Otto, was one of the fundamental ways humans experience the indescribable, the divine, the holy. And while not all of us here may connect to something greater than ourselves through these words, my guess is that we all know this feeling – of the sudden realization how deep and rich our world really is. For me personally, I experience this sense of awe when I realize how vast our world’s interconnections really are. Often, it comes from encounters with and reflection upon my Ancestors – who and where I come from.
Here again, I am using words that work for me, though not for everyone. However, I think many of us recognize that people, places, and beings have profoundly impacted who we are and how we move through the world. And this is what I mean when I say ancestors, for my own purposes and practices. In familiar ways, our immediate forebearers – parents, teachers, heroes – all shape us, and when they instill us with awe it seems well-placed. Telling the story I shared earlier of my grandmother is a germane example of this. She lived her life with a subtle power, the ability to share the stories and origins of her life with vivid recall. It is a power that I am honored to continue sharing, as well as one that hints at an interconnected vastness. Through the stories she shared with me, I am connected to so many people I have not and will never meet – and in a way now, so are you. And pondering those connections, known and unknowable, fills me with an incredible amount of awe: a trembling before something ineffable.
There are less obvious forces that shape us as well. For instance, what about the glacier that carved the lowland prairie, whose wetland plants enriched the soil, which would later draw settlers to inhabit this place that we came to call central Iowa? Or the primordial fish that grew to live between land and water, becoming the great-grandmother of every four-legged animal to follow? Their stories, their possibilities have amazed me since I was a little kid. Growing up, I poured over as many books as I could about dinosaurs and the other prehistoric creatures that lived in this world before us. I was so fascinated by the realization that their world and our world were different in so many ways, yet the same. Full of the same air, sunshine, rocks, and water. These things, these beings, these ancestors, all preceded us and created the world we live in. How awesome, how breathtaking!
This awe-inspiring power is something that all the things which come before us share, situated at the cross-roads between the familiar and foundational. All these connections and influences, some of which we can deeply know, others we can only ponder. And I think this points to something else we can find common in all our forebearers. Our existence is the result of so many occurrences that have come before us, that our forebearers continue their influence through us today. I find this powerfully articulated in the words of our opening hymn, and in our reading. In her hymn Breaths2, Ysaÿe Barnwell reveals that our ancestors are intimately present with us in memory and actuality. Their spirits and legacy can be seen and heard in the world around us. How, for instance, might we remember our grandparents in a park, or a cemetery, a sight or sound that brings them back? The trees, rocks, and all placeholders of memory are the ones who remind us of our ancestors. And when we remember, we exhibit their continued presence with us. Our forebearers can speak to us through the physical world – through the unassuming revelations, through the sights and sounds of human life all around us.
Similarly, Joy Harjo reminds us that all of our universal connections result in our tangible existence. Whether that speaks to our connections to the sun, the moon, the wind, or the nearness of our own parents, all of these forces coalesce into the people we are. Her poem is a reminder to find awe in the world around us, to pay attention to all the things we are connected to, which we emerge from and with. In remembering all of these things and the influence they have, we are remembering our ancestors – the stardust, the moonbeams, the sunshine. We remember our mothers and fathers, the earth we came from, the animals and plants and life all around us. I feel the importance of this point pivoting around her line toward the end: “you are the universe, and this universe is you2.” We are the embodiments of all the things that have gone before us, and go on around us. This speaks to ancestry as much as it does to interconnection. We are not divorced or separated from the world and all its components: past, present, or future.
This can be a lot to take in, because it is an experience of life we don’t often consider in our Anglo, Western culture. But I don’t want to end this sermon here, because the awe doesn’t end here. By considering how we are the manifestations of everything that has gone before us, we may also realize that one day we will also be ancestors. Just as we can find awe in our own forebearers, our descendants and successors might find awe in the inheritances we leave behind. They too will be the manifestations of everything that has come before them. So what is that awe, that inheritance, going to be? While we can’t control how our descendants may feel about the world we leave behind, we can at least consider what present actions might nurture a sense of awe. Perhaps as the year winds down, and we gather in with our loved ones, our memories and traditions, we might ponder what will lie ahead. What awe will we find in the connections to come?
1. Rudolf Otto, The idea of the holy: an inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational, (Mansfield Center, CT: Oxford University Press, 2010).
2. Ysaÿe Barnwell, “Breaths,” in Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition, ed. Unitarian Universalist Association (Boston, MA: Unitarian Universalist Association, 2005), #1001
3. Joy Harjo, “Remember,” in She Had Some Horses (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 35.