Awe

God so often appears in extraordinary stories of awe; we invoke the Divine to explain the sublime.

Others’ kindness was evocative of awe around the world: having car repairs paid for by a restaurant owner; being given money by friends when broke; seeing citizens assist strangers in the streets; reading about moral exemplars, most frequently the Dalai Lama. This story from the United States combines courage with compassion:

1973 at my cousin’s restaurant. My father worked there as a bartender. I was there and my best friend from high school walked in. He is Black and I am white and I had not seen him in five years. I stood and embraced him and we began to talk. A guy at the bar said to my father, “How can you allow your son to have a N as his friend?” My father looked at this guy and loudly told him to get out of his bar and never come back. I have never been more proud of my father, who was fifty-nine years old at that time.

Overcoming obstacles was a universal as well: People thriving despite profound racism and poverty. Jews who had survived the concentration camps. People who transcend mental and physical challenges, as in this story from South Africa:

When watching my daughter, who was born with bilateral club foot, dance in a ballet recital for the first time I was filled with awe. I was in the audience with my mother and my little girl was dancing onstage. I had been backstage with her before and had been getting her ready for the performance. While watching I felt the beginning of tears in my eyes and my heart felt like it was going to burst with pride. I had flashbacks of the time when she was born with her feet upside down and I felt awestruck by how far she has come since that day years ago.

We often turn to literature, to poetry, to film, to art, and, on occasion, to the news for inspiring stories of overcoming, allowing goodness its own speech. Here is such an example from Norway:

When I read an article in the paper about an eight-year-old girl in Yemen who had run away from a forced marriage and taken up the fight against her parents in the judicial system. It hit me how much courage and fighting spirit that can live in a person, and that you can fight for your cause and actually make a change. I was an adult when I read this article. I was alone, but had to tell several people about it later. I didn’t do anything special with my own life afterwards, but had an aha-experience.

Finally, others’ rare talents brought people awe around the world. For a young man from Mexico, it was the trapeze artist and contortionist in the Cirque du Soleil. For a woman in Sweden, her husband’s strength in moving large household objects around the home. For an Australian, watching swimmer Sun Yang’s last 100 meters in a 1,500-meter world-record swim. For another Australian, watching surfers ride 50-foot waves. For a student in Japan, listening to a talk by a Fields Medal–winning mathematician. Here is a story about rare talents from Indonesia:

There was an autistic boy named Andre. Andre’s parents are poor, such that he doesn’t go to school at all. Andre tends to leave home without saying goodbye, and once he left home only to be found two years later. Andre has a rare talent, he can know precisely on what day does a certain date fall whenever that is. Me along with five other friends who visited him, he could tell precisely our birth dates. He could also do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division without any calculating tool whatsoever.

Parents’ stories about their children were also common—listening to a fetus’s heartbeat, hearing a one-year-old’s first word, seeing a two-year-old gallop, being in the audience at a grammar school dance performance. Children are small, but their development is vast, and a source of awe for parents on their better days.

Everyday moral beauty can transform lives. Steven Czifra grew up in a home that was so violent that one night one parent threw boiling water on the other; he doesn’t remember who it was. He dropped out of school at ten, got into drugs, shaved his head, and ran with a Mexican gang. One day he broke into a parked Mercedes to steal its stereo the very moment the owner, who happened to be an LAPD officer, arrived. His first night in jail, he told me, he was chained to a chair for eight hours alone in a cold room—some of the longest hours of his life.