Reverend Jen’s composting metaphor suggests that mystical awe follows a pattern of decay, distilling, and growth. This would seem to fit her own life story, of breaking down the sexist and colonialist strains of Christianity, distilling a spirit she found in the faith of African American women, and growing mystical feeling with others in her ministry. Perhaps our own experiences of mystical awe, or spiritual experience, if you like, follow this pattern of the decay of the default self’s preconceptions about the world, which results in the distilling of some essential feeling that gives rise to the growth of our own spiritual beliefs and practices. Perhaps the 4,200 religions active today are doing much the same, transforming in a process of decaying, distilling, and growing as cultures and humans evolve.
Spiritual Humus
When Malcolm Clemens Young was in sixth grade, he and his classmates traveled to Ashland, Oregon, to attend a few Shakespeare plays. At night, they camped. At four o’clock one morning, Malcolm awoke and wandered outside his tent. In the quiet of this moment, he was awestruck by the patterns of moonlight on a nearby lake. In recalling this event, Malcolm told me what he wondered about in that moment of natural awe: “What could create such beauty?” A beauty that he could “feel at any time.” It felt like an “extraordinary gift from God.”
In his teens, Malcolm read the Bhagavad Gita, the Sutras of Buddhism, Thoreau and Emerson, and the Bible many times. After graduating from college, he had an unfulfilling stint as a financial consultant, so he enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. There, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he tells me, he lived a few houses away from where Ralph Waldo Emerson gave his historic Harvard Divinity School address on July 15, 1838. To only a handful of faculty members assembled, Emerson exhorted people to let religious dogma decay and go in search of their own distilled experiences of mystical awe:
The perception of this law of laws [for Emerson, that a benevolent life force unifies all living forms] awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that the Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy
For Emerson, mystical awe is intertwined with nature—mountain air, the scent of rosemary, hills, the song of stars. It heals like myrrh (a resin extracted from trees used as incense and medicine). It is the provenance of virtue, more so than cold thought or science. It is a pathway to our highest happiness—of feeling integrated into something larger than the self.
Malcolm would make his way to becoming dean of Grace Cathedral, which sits augustly atop Russian Hill in San Francisco. Over lunch, I ask Malcolm about his earliest experiences of awe, hoping to catch a glimpse of a spiritually inspired child and hear of visions, perhaps, or callings, or premonitions in dreams of a young mystic. After describing his experience by the lake, he smiles broadly and tells me about . . . the first time he dunked in a pickup basketball game.
And then it pours out: Walking around the countryside of Davis, California, where he grew up. Roads at night under expansive skies. Storm systems coming in over that flat Central Valley farmland. Emerson’s Harvard Divinity School speech. And moments of awe that day: in prayer, surfing, riding his bike to Grace Cathedral, passages from the Bible, the form-shifting fog that embraces San Francisco in ever-changing geometries.
I ask Malcolm what it is like to work in a career whose bottom line is mystical awe. He has no real interest, he answers, in proof, dogma, definition, or debate over the semantics of terms—“Is there a God?” “Is there a soul?” “What is sin?” “What is the afterlife?” He points his finger outward to some sense of space around us:
I get to be with people in the most intimate moments in their lives. When someone dies. Or a baby is born. Or I am standing next to two people at the altar. I say this is God, right here, around us. . . .
My last sermon was on decolonizing the mind, in honor of the Kenyan writer Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o. We have histories of colonialism and slavery. Those histories are rooted in our minds. Gays have felt this self-condemnation for decades. Such shame. But there are no good or evil people. That is what history has given to us.
This Sunday after my talk, an eighty-year-old man came up to me and was crying. He hugged me.
That is awe.
