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<\/p>\n Twenty-two years ago, at the far edge of our solar system, the Voyager Two spacecraft took a picture of the earth. \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0At about 4 billion miles away, it was the most distant vantage point ever for an image of our planet.\u00a0 Since that date, cameras on the craft are not sensitive enough to take more pictures of the earth.\u00a0 Today, the Voyager is over 11 billion miles into its endless journey begun in 1977.\u00a0 It\u00a0 currently sails through the heliosphere which is the transition zone between our solar system and interstellar space.<\/p>\n What is remarkable about that one picture is that the earth is just a barely visible smudge of light in a field of total darkness.\u00a0 And yet, we experience earth as much more.\u00a0 This place, this womb of our existence, our history and our future, is all that we have and yet it is so frightfully<\/span><\/em><\/strong> small.<\/p>\n Our source of light, sustenance and life, the sun, is itself merely a cipher among the other billions of stars.\u00a0 While earth is relatively close to our sister planets, our distance from other worlds and other stars is so very, very great.\u00a0 The light we perceive from stars we see at night – most of it originated before the dinosaurs existed and, in some instances, before life itself began.\u00a0 The speed of light is nearly 700 million miles per hour and yet it has taken eons of time for the light from most stars to reach us.\u00a0 To travel to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, it will take the Voyager another 70,000 years, or 4.5 light years, to reach.\u00a0 As much as it is easy to get lost in the facts about the size of the universe, when we comprehend its vastness, we can only be humbled.\u00a0 And that, precisely, is the beginning of spirituality – to sense something bigger and greater than ourselves.\u00a0 To come face to face with a power, force or object immeasurably large and confront the reality of that, is to experience a sense of helplessness, smallness but most importantly wonder and awe.\u00a0 The human response is to observe such powers with mute reverence, sometimes accompanied by fear.\u00a0 Our inner spirits have been touched in a profound way.\u00a0 No longer are we fully rational beings when so confronted.\u00a0 We are in the presence of something beyond what we normally experience.\u00a0 In our minds and in our souls, we have touched the face of god and of eternity.<\/p>\n Sadly, world religions and their many followers have lost a sense of wonder and awe.\u00a0 As religions focus more on rules of behavior and doctrines of belief, humans have moved away from awestruck reverence for nature and the universe itself.\u00a0 Even further, many religions have reduced explanations for the universe and everything within it to one irreducible cause – god.\u00a0 In the face of great complexity and infinite possibility, many people have arrived at that one explanation, one truth, one ultimate force to explain everything.<\/p>\n But the reality of the universe, its size and its power ought to lead us to a different conclusion and thus to transcendent moments – times when we are removed from rational or fact based thinking.\u00a0 Our spirits ought to be touched and deeply moved.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We are shaken by the mystery and unimaginable size and power of such a force.\u00a0 The universe and nature cannot be simply attributed to a theistic being.\u00a0 That is a profound realization and ought to bring us to our knees in awe at what we behold and what we do not understand.<\/p>\n Over the next few Sundays, I want to explore ways in which our spirits are touched, ways in which our we are moved not by our minds but by our hearts and by our souls.\u00a0 And first and foremost in recapturing a spiritual sensitivity that is removed from mere thought, is to find again a sense of wonder and awe – our subject for today.<\/p>\n Imagine how the ancients must of have looked out into the cosmos.\u00a0 Their response was to stare in wonder, to revere and worship the forces that guided the sun, stars, planets and seasons of earth.\u00a0 Nature and the universe were fantastic realms that were worthy of their awe.\u00a0 Lacking the tools and knowledge to scientifically understand the cosmos, they relied on their spiritual selves – the part of the human soul that is touched by beauty, fear and amazement.\u00a0\u00a0 Nature became sacred to the ancients.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The pyramids, stonehenge and mythological gods and goddesses were ways for humanity to express their wonder and thus worship the great forces swirling all around.\u00a0 Religion and creation myths are direct outcomes of such wonder and awe.\u00a0 Sadly, religion has evolved to burden people with doctrine and rules, replacing the sense of amazement with ritual and blind faith.\u00a0 Indeed, such thinking is arrogant and eliminates any possibility to be in awe of god, the universe or nature.<\/p>\n For us, science might explain how these great forces operate and how the universe was created.\u00a0 \u00a0But the delicate beauty of nature, the size of the cosmos, and the supernatural realms of human emotion, love and courage are all wonders to behold.\u00a0 In order to be spiritual people, we must refuse to allow our minds to take control of our spirits.\u00a0 We must remain in touch with and, in awe of, the great wonders of nature and the universe.<\/p>\n Albert Einstein, a man certainly not known for his religion, was nevertheless a deeply spiritual man.\u00a0 He once said, \u201cThe most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.\u00a0 It is the source of all true art and all science.\u00a0 They to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, are as good as dead: their eyes are closed.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n According to the Oxford English dictionary, the word awe derives from an ancient norse word meaning fear and dread toward a divine force or being.\u00a0 As english evolved, \u201cawe\u201d also came to mean having reverential respect for a thing or power.\u00a0 Indeed, most philosophers on the subject of wonder and awe believe such feelings derive from a primordial core within us – that emotional center which perceives amazement and fear.\u00a0 Something instinctual within us is provoked by powers of greatness which theoretically threaten our very existence.\u00a0 We are in awe of the power, complexity and size of the universe compared with our smallness and insignificance. \u00a0\u00a0 Abraham Maslow, the great psychologist, wrote that human awe involves two distinct responses.\u00a0\u00a0 The first is to sense something as vast and greater than the self.\u00a0 The second is to sense disorientation<\/span><\/em><\/strong> and an inability to mentally assimilate things or forces of immense size and power.\u00a0 These feelings of greatness and disorientation are triggered by several things, Maslow wrote.\u00a0 Forces of power, beauty, threat or ability often overwhelm our minds and sense of self.\u00a0 Our response is wonder, awe and often fear.\u00a0 Such sensations are not thought based but, as I noted earlier, core or spirit based.<\/p>\n And such responses are importantly different from sensing something is merely noteworthy or beautiful.\u00a0 Indeed, admiration of something is not to be confused with being in awe.\u00a0 To stand in wonder of something is to note its innate power to control us and ultimately destroy us. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Such is a transformative emotion which can also include feelings of great emotion like courage, love or compassion.\u00a0 As we all know, such innate powers can indeed bring us to our knees in submission to their force.<\/p>\n In the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita, the hero Arjuna must fight a cosmic battle of good against evil.\u00a0 He loses courage before the fight but the god Krishna gives him the desired third eye so that he can see as the divine sees – the totality of all truth, all existence and the great realms of the universe.\u00a0 Arjuna then experiences what can only be called a psychotic episode of seeing things beyond human comprehension – sights similar to what science sometimes offers us – views of worlds and stars eons away, The\u00a0 Jewish and Christian scriptures also describe awe and wonder experiences.\u00a0 The disciples are in awe and in fear of Jesus\u2019 ability to command a great storm to be still.\u00a0 The women who discover Jesus\u2019 empty tomb are described as being filled with fear and trembling.\u00a0 Those who worshipped the deceased Jesus were amazed as they were seemingly supernaturally filled with the Holy Spirit – a force enabling them to live according the ethics of their hero.\u00a0 One of the characters from Genesis, Jacob, was in awe of his vision of creatures ascending and descending a ladder reaching into the heavens.\u00a0 He was seeing the powers of birth and death all at once and he determined to consecrate the place as holy ground.\u00a0 When Jesus taught that \u201cunless you people see signs and wonders…you will not believe\u201d<\/strong>, he was echoing a spiritual truth.\u00a0 To find our meaning and our place in the great realm of creation, we must humble ourselves, our minds and our beliefs.\u00a0 While we might literally see signs and wonders, we must understand them with the third eye.\u00a0 We must perceive the mysterious greatness of things and forces.\u00a0 We must lose our own sense of superiority, arrogance and confidence in science, religion and knowledge.\u00a0 We must believe in the fantastic wonder of the universe in which we live and its many powers that can overwhelm us.<\/p>\n In our nothingness, we find that we are, instead, something.\u00a0 We too are a part of the fabric of existence – beautiful creatures that are awesomely made, creatures capable of great deeds and great perceptions. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em>To ponder how our brains work, ones comprised of millions of separate neurons capable of thought, emotion, memory and intuition, we are in awe. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em>When we consider the wonder of how we came to be, products of eons of ancestry, of the miraculous union of egg and sperm, of awesome complexity and function, how can we not be inspired? \u00a0 We need not fall into the trap of seeking easy answers or explanations for our existence.\u00a0 We exist simply because the universe also exists and we are a part of its vast, complex and diverse realm – at one with the stars, galaxies, atoms, cells and billions of other life forms.\u00a0 Nothing exists apart from the other and each has its place, its function and its meaning within the vast totality of all that is.\u00a0 From space dust we have come and to space dust we will return – one day, perhaps billions of years from now, to drift like the Voyager spacecraft past wonders and beautiful creations we can only dream.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>\u00a0In the totality of the universe, our earth, our sun and our solar system are totally inconspicuous, miniscule and insignificant.\u00a0 They are nothing.\u00a0\u00a0 The earth itself is but a speck, a dust mote, a grain of sand floating in an infinite vacuum.<\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0To travel to the nearest galaxy of stars, Andromeda, it will take the Voyager 38 trillion calendar years or 2.5 million light years to reach.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the face of such immense distances, the Voyager has merely begun its journey as it travels at a relative snail\u2019s pace – only 200,000 miles per hour.<\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0We can only gape in awe at the wonder of something so huge and so diverse in its various parts.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For our mortal minds, the size and dimensions of our universe might as well be infinite.\u00a0 It is so big, so vast, so limitless and so complex that it approaches the realm of the divine.\u00a0 Indeed, the universe itself might well be the god force many of us worship and hold in awe.\u00a0 We are so small within its vast size and yet we too are a part of its great wholeness.<\/p>\n<\/a>In a world without electricity, nights would have been inky black.\u00a0 The ancients would have perceived a realm of frightening wonder – millions of stars in the sky, the dust cloud of the Milky Way clearly discernable and a sky so black and so three dimensional, one would have felt a sense of vertigo – lost in an abyss of starry darkness.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/em>We are in awe of natural forces like tidal waves, earthquakes, lightning and storms<\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0 because they are beyond our control and can overwhelm us in their destructive potential.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>We stand in awe at the forces of creation which bring life into the world – natural phenomenon like conception, birth and evolution.\u00a0 Without them, we would not exist.\u00a0 <\/a>And, we are in awe of forces like human love, compassion and courage – forces which overwhelm even our own rational thinking and exert nearly supernatural strength, for good and bad, in us and through us.<\/p>\n<\/a>microscopic visions of creation, life and conception, visions of natural forces and their cause.\u00a0 Arjuna declares, \u201cThings never before seen, I have seen.\u00a0 Ecstatic is my joy and yet fear and trembling perturb my mind.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0 Such is an apt description of experiencing wonder and awe.\u00a0 It is spiritually transformative.\u00a0 It is an escape from this world and our experiential reality.\u00a0 Like the ancients, we gaze into the eye of eternity – into the depths of immense power – and we are lost in sheer terror and amazement.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/em>As Henry David Thoreau once wrote, \u201cI stand in awe of my body.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n