Awe

At first I might have been afraid of you. What if I made a mistake? Or broke the library rules? Would you tell us to leave the library because we didn’t belong? Instead one day, you talk to me, in English I didn’t quite understand, and before we knew it, you were giving Kelly a library card. I was puzzled. Kelly was barely two years old. How could he have anything?

Today, Kelly is a 24-year-old lover of books. He also writes. And he often helps me review and correct my still imperfect English when I write the children’s books I create. Books like the ones you put in my hands. Nancy, ever since the library became my home, and books became my path for growth, you have been an amazing guardian. Thank you.

Yuyi’s letter of gratitude is one of many acts of reverence in which we appreciate moral beauty, and, more generally, mark the wonders of life as sacred. Subtle is everyday reverence—how we shift our speech with compliments, solicitous questions, and indirectness to show respect for others. Like many mammals, we momentarily shrink the size of our bodies in a subtle head bow or slouch of the shoulders to convey reverential deference. With a simple warm clasp of another person’s arm, we can express gratitude and appreciation, activating oxytocin release and the vagus nerve in the recipient of our touch.

We ritualize these ancient and simple acts of reverence into cultural practices. We create symbolic gestures, like the Anjali Mudra greeting gesture in India of palms pressed together and the bowing of head and body, to express respect and shared humanity. We find sacred objects to touch as physical reminders of the wonders that have given us awe—a deceased father’s tie, a rock from a backpacking trip, the menu from an engagement dinner, T-shirts from a favorite show. In many hunter-gatherer cultures, people carried around bones and skulls of deceased family members to appreciate their place in their lives. I still regularly touch a wristband Rolf gave me on one of my last visits to him and feel his presence somehow. Acts of everyday reverence, expressed in bowing and touch, for example, can be seen in religious ceremony, funerary rites, and christenings.

So powerful is our tendency to revere, to mark as sacred what brings us awe, that when we witness others expressing gratitude—the simplest act of reverence—we ourselves are moved to kindness. In one study on this, participants were tasked with editing a movie review that was authored by a writer. Before doing their own editing work, participants first looked at a past editor’s efforts. In one condition, participants viewed the writer expressing appreciation to that editor with a “thank you.” Witnessing this simple act of reverence led participants to be more willing to assist the writer they were responsible for editing. Others’ acts of reverence stir us to likeminded actions. We find ourselves joined with others in interconnected webs of reverence.

Moral Beauty Inside and Out

If we are lucky, when we are children our lives are surrounded by everyday moral beauty.

This was not the childhood Louis Scott was born into. When he was six years old, he saw his father murder a man. His mother was a sex worker, and her business filled the days of his childhood, he says, more so than Little League baseball or playing with Tonka trucks. It was only a matter of time before Louis was pimping—and doing very well at it—which led to a host of pimping and pandering convictions and a prison sentence of 229 years. Here is a story of awe he shared with me: