Soon I’ll be leaving Puerto Rico for home. Now I’m looking east for my last look across the Caribbean where I can see the Island of Vieques rise from the sea like a behemoth. I feel in a contemplative mood. The complexities of the cosmos always allure me, like my thoughts of God can.
I read that day in the New York Times that, “scientists say they heard the feint chirp of two black holes colliding a billion light years away, fulfilling Einstein’s general theory of relativity.” We are told that black holes collide, not with a bang but a chirp. Black holes sing at fifty-seven octaves below middle C. We can also say the music of black holes is hot since their temperatures far exceed that of the sun. Like teens, black holes have voracious appetites and consume anything in sight, even light. The enormity of the cosmos is breathtaking.
How did Einstein sense any of this? By another unfathomable mystery, that whimsical attribute we call imagination, ‘Gedankenexperiment,’ as Einstein called his mind exercises. At age sixteen he imagined riding alongside light beams. His successes, writes Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute, “had been based on his talent for sniffing out the underlying physical principles of nature.” He first could see them in his mind’ eye. Afterwards, he ran the numbers.
Tom Folger writing in Scientific American described Einstein’s space-time travel implications vividly.
If, during the entire year 2016, I traveled the speed of light in a round trip to Betelgeuse – one of our most distant stars, 520 light years away, when I returned I’d be only ten years older. That’s the good news. The trade off is that while I traveled, one thousand years on earth would have passed and it would be 3016 when I got back. There’d be nobody to pick me up. Anyone I knew would be dead.
Do you suppose that in the eternity of time, when we have traveled the whole distance the speed of light can carry us that we’ll be back to where we started, like going backwards? Maybe we keep moving forever, like the beams of lightless stars.
The word ‘awe’ has declined in usage since 1800 according to a chart I saw on Google. Both the word ‘awe’ and the exclamation ‘wow’ reached their low in 1960, but have been spiking ever since, due in no small measure, to the inclusion of the words ‘wow’ and ‘totally awesome’ into the regular vocabulary of teens.
Awe’s present usage obscures most of its original significance. I think of the present use of the word –awesome – as a kind of conversational amphetamine, used primarily by teens to generate a feeling of great energy and excitement about something that isn’t all that great, energizing, or exciting.
This is sad.
The word ‘awe’ historically attempts to identify what is probably the most profound emotion we humans are capable of having. Awe is the primary feeling in spiritual ecstasy as one might imagine in seeing the face of God. In fact, our ancient forbears thought the experience of awe so profound, that it was considered transformational. The declaration, “The awe of God (sometimes rendered the fear of God) is the beginning of wisdom,” appears in Biblical literature, in Proverbs and in the Psalms.
The classical definition of awe is: to be amazed, astonished, stricken by wonder, stunned by sheer extravagance while feeling a measure of dread.
There are spiritual moments when we feel astonishment. I believe everyone has been astonished at one time or another. Imagination plays significant role in embracing awe and astonishment.
These moments are momentary glimpses when we see beyond the veil, into the depth and unity of creation, an experience as profound as it is elusive. It just happens, and it frequently overtakes us, drawing our souls a notch deeper into the wonder of existence. I suspect Einstein’s childhood fancy of riding light beams excited his feeling of awe, which was the beginning of his wisdom.
In my experience, astonishing circumstances may, by their measure, be infinitesimally small, like a hazelnut, as mystic Julian of Norwich once wrote, or wholly immense like the sea, stars and universe. In the interpersonal arena, awe may be experienced between persons, when after surrendering our facades, we allow ourselves to become vulnerable, to be open and abundantly alive to another human being; to be fully known.
I hoped my last glimpses of this island’s tropical beauty might help me claim the same mystical feeling that its vastness inspired in me just days before. I wanted to reignite the fleeting astonishment I felt considering how our cosmos is expanding out into the fullness of emptiness at unimaginable speed. I treasure that feeling of awe.
The sky was pale blue, the wind light and sunlight dodged in and out of clouds. Waves rolled lazily toward the bluff. A pelican sat atop the stump of palm tree. She looked at me with total indifference, raised her wing, scratched under it, and then tucked her oversized bill down onto her breast. She returned to life’s universal preoccupation, just hanging out, watching and waiting. The pelican was watching for fish. I was waiting for God.
Nearby, an Iguana was half way up the trunk of a palm tree. He was easily five feet long and he looked scary, dragon-like. What did he eat, I wondered, uneasily? Vegetables, I hoped.
I looked around as though I was surveying the universe from its still point. I looked at the pelican, at the Iguana and then the rolling waves and the sky. I felt a rush of euphoria. I felt my universal connectedness and in a moment of ecstasy shouted to both the pelican and the Iguana: “ You know what? We all arrived here together on the Milky Way. Is that totally awesome or what?”
They didn’t bat an eye.
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