Faith Without Awe Is Dead
It was Sunday. I was surrounded by the passionate pleas of a hundred or so worshippers whose lifted hands and raised voices made my silence all the more obvious. I stood there, with arms folded, mouth clamped shut, and my eyes locked onto the face of my watch as it slowly ticked its way to the end of service. As I scanned the crowd, I started to wonder if I had ever looked the same. Was there ever a time when I, too, threw my arms apart to embrace the immensity of the moment? Did I ever leave a service hoarse because I refused to hold back the song stirring in my soul? Memories of a younger self flickered about in my mind's eye, brief glimpses of a young man, so in awe of what he was witnessing, he freely embraced it and gave himself wholly and entirely to it. I wasn't that young man anymore, and I began to wonder what happened to him? I was starting to miss him.
It is incredibly off-putting to be the stand-out in a crowd. Yet here I was, a lifeless statue amidst a cacophony of life and movement, and though I longed to join in, something kept me still. I left that day unsure what it was. But it persisted, and after a few years, I forgot all about that day and settled for the stoic silence. "This is the way it is meant to be," I repeated to myself like a mantra. I spiritualized it, excused it, and applauded it. But no matter what I did, I knew there was something wrong. I was missing something, but for the life of me, I count to figure out what. Something was broken inside me; a sense of awe had been stolen from me, now replaced by a new sensation, a cancerous force that had slowly permeated my soul.
Then one day, it dawned on me. I had lost my awe, my sense of wonder, and it had been replaced by a coolly calculated cynicism. I no longer felt anything because I no longer believed there was anything to feel. For whatever reason, the awe and wonder that marked my early Christian experience had vanished. I couldn't put the finger on when, but I knew it was gone, and unbeknownst to me, It had been replaced. My faith was atrophying, drained by the cynic within till I was but a shell of my former self.
"Eucharistic Adoration 1" by SteubySTL is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Faith without awe is dead. Faith that doesn't wonder, that is never taken aback, surprised, or inspired, is a faith that has lost its fire, its sense of purpose and direction. If I was going to save my faith, then I needed to reclaim my awe and at the same time snuff out the cynicism that for too long had run ablaze unchecked and unchallenged.
Cynicism, at its root, is disproportionate disbelief. It holds that all good things are indeed too good to be true. It takes comfort in disproving and disavowing the naïveté of our youth, believing that this is necessary for the noble pursuit of truth. Cynicism thus masquerades as a good; it offers itself as a guard against the supposed manipulation of the transcendent and promises to lead us beyond the simple beliefs of childhood into the full maturity of adulthood. Yet this is a false promise. Cynicism is a black hole. The questions never cease, it continues to devour until all we have left is disbelief and doubt. In the context of faith, cynicism often seeps in undetected. It often disguises itself as a genuine search for truth. But unlike honest doubt, cynicism allows no room to be surprised, changed, or transformed. It is so scared of facing anything beyond its scope of understanding it settles for endless questioning that leads nowhere. But cynicism can only grow in suitable soil; that is, cynicism is only present where awe is absent. The moment one loses their wonder, their capacity to be surprised and overwhelmed by the transcendent, they create a seedbed for cynicism to grow.
This left me with questions. Where did my awe and wonder go, and when did the veil of cynicism silently sweep over my eyes? The quickest way to kill curiosity is to inject it with the poison of overfamiliarity. Overfamiliarity develops when we cease to embrace the mystery of God and is fed by worship which deemphasizes the transcendence of God. In our efforts to make Christ relevant, we have exalted his immanence over his distinction. For many going to church is no different from going to the movies. The alienation of the ancient liturgies has been replaced by the lights and sounds of pop Christianity. Now I must add that I am not advocating for the reintroduction of Gregorian chants into worship. Nostalgia, for nostalgia's sake, is just as suffocating as the lights and sounds of pop Christianity. I am instead advocating for the reintroduction of the sublime into our worship. When we make worship casual, we approach God carelessly, and little by little, what little reverence we have left is slowly but surely chipped away. It is no wonder a generation of Christians has turned cynical. We made Christ so relevant he ceased to be interesting, otherworldly, and captivating.
But my loss of wonder cannot solely be blamed on lazy liturgy. There was something else festering, something far more sinister and deadly stirring deep within me. It was a desire to apprehend the divine. My willingness to embrace the totally other was replaced by a desire to control God, to figure him out, and in doing so, remake God in my image. I turned him into a god that suited my needs and wants. I made him manageable, like Orual. I crafted a god that fit my tastes because I too was afraid to stare into the immensity of Ungit's otherness. Like Israel, we make golden calves because we are scared to embrace the cloud and thunder. We know instinctively that God is an all-consuming fire, and to save our skin, we make for ourselves new saviors, saviors we can easily manage and control. Cynicism calls into question anything it can't explain, and so it looks for a god it can coerce and manipulate. God's mystery enrages the cynic. Mystery presupposes a limit to our knowledge. It humbles us and declares that while God can be known, he cannot be controlled. Thus the cynic desires to make the holy common with endless questions, turning blood and body into bread and wine, an unholy transfiguration that robs the sacred of its power to change. We use reason to put God in a box (or so we think), and by doing so, we claim victory and proceed down the endless spiral of unbelief and unknowing, a half-life not worth living.
As a result, my faith was rotting away. Like Jormungandr of Norse lore, I was stuck in an endless cycle eating away at myself, gnawing at my own tail, unable to raise my hands in worship or preach with conviction. I was spiraling, and deep down, I knew what lay at the end; a dead, lifeless faith not worth keeping. But grace wasn't done with me. I knew enough something needed to be done. But breaking the bonds of cynicism would require more than just escaping the lazy liturgy of my youth. It would require a step of faith, a new way of seeing the world, it would require a new vision, it would require resurrection.
With this realization, I set myself to work. I was determined to recapture whatever sense of wonderment I had left. If I was going to wonder again, I needed to retrain my senses. They had been dulled by cynicism, their ability to sense the transcendent was all but gone. I needed to confront the monster of pure mechanical reason, the deadly kind of reason that sucked at the soul and drained imagination dry. I needed to cultivate a sacramental vision and regain my ability to perceive heaven in the ordinary. The rehabilitation began when I again took up my pen and opened my soul to the healing balm of poetry. Poetry is the liturgy of the soul. It orients us towards the transcendent, the beauty just beneath the surface. Cynics make terrible poets, and if I wanted to feel again, I would need to become a poet.
I devoured Heaney and Yeats, Keats and Byron. I poured my soul into the blank pages of a dusty Moleskine, letting meter and rhyme restore the dead spaces and barren wastes within me. I turned my prayers into sonnets, and I "read poems as prayers" (Heaney). I sought after meaning like a thirsty man after drink. I was desperate to feel, desperate to recapture that long-lost sense of wonder that occurred when I stood before God and saw that bread and wine indeed was also body and blood. The poetry gave me a sense of sight, a sacramental vision through which I could look at the world anew. It re-enchanted creation, and as a result, re-enchanted my worship, my imagination was baptized by the poets, and by learning to speak their language, I was learning again to pray. All of a sudden, the simplest things wowed me; blue skies became an endless expanse, trees became living breathing things, and my fellow man, an image of the invisible God. Poetry dared me to speak of a world I could not comprehend, a world whose air was poison to the cynic and life for the faithful.
"Wonder..." by In Memoriam: VernsPics is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
But it wasn't poetry itself that awakened my long-lost sense of awe and wonder. It was the renewed sense of sight present in the poetic imagination. Poetic vision allows one to see beyond the horizon, the rich subtext that gives all things their meaning. Poetry trained me to see and to ask better questions. The questions of the cynic are overly simplistic. They are, in a sense, not even questions at all. They are more so hardened opinions in the guise of "thoughtful" exploration. The cynic doesn't ask real questions because he already has his answer. The poetic imagination opens us to genuine questions because the poetic imagination is open to surprising answers that confound our reason. It colors the world for us and gives us the courage to believe again.
If the church is going to reengage a generation of cynics, it needs to cultivate spaces where the poetic imagination can flourish. It needs to dispense with its lazy liturgies and pop-friendly worship; it needs to embrace awe and wonder and transcendent mystery. Jesus needs to once again be the GOD-MAN, wholly present to us and yet entirely other. The church needs more poets and not just poets in the professional sense, but pastors and bishops who know what it is to see poetically and aren't afraid to preach sermons that leave one with more questions and answers. The church needs to dispense with the trite and cute and remembrance the weightiness of the holy. IN creating these spaces, the church can help rehabilitate the cynics and doubters present in their pews.
The responsibility doesn't lie with the church alone. If, by reading this, you see within yourself the same atrophied faith that was present in me, then you to are being summoned to sanctify your imagination. Faith without awe is dead. So learn to marvel again. Take yourself to school and sit at the feet of those masters that light a fire in your belly. Learn to ask better questions. Seek out meaning wherever you can find it and watch as faith's dying embers learn to roar and rage again. God is just beyond the horizon. He's in the subtext, in the things unseen. If we are to indeed seek him, then we must do so eyes and ears ready to see and hear, lest we miss the time of his visitation because we were too cynical to see that he was present in our midst. And maybe, just maybe, when all is said and done, we can lift up our hands again in genuine awe and worship aloud with sincere wonder.
