The Sense of Awe

July 27, 2010

Seeing an Internet film clip made by Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, of the ocean—blackened with oil and eerily bubbling like a chemistry experiment as it washed up on a wide beach in Pensacola, Florida—made me weep. (You can see what I describe at opednews.com/Podcast/Robert-Jensen-on-facing-a-by-Rob-Kall-100623-473.html.) The words that kept coming to my mind over and over were, “Don’t you know it is beautiful, so beautiful?�

The beauty of the ocean, its beaches, bays, marshes, rocks and tidal pools, is—in my mind’s eye—in the present tense, not the “was� it is becoming. I see with my mind’s eye the variety of life that teems in the ocean, also in the present, and think of the line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,� that states, “What I do is me: for that I came.� The oil-covered dying baby dolphin shown being carried onto shore in a man’s arms died shortly thereafter and didn’t get a chance to be its “me.�

One of our sons and his family live in Wilmington, North Carolina, ten minutes from the beach. In ordinary times, local people there organized volunteers to stand watch at night over the turtles that come up on the beach to lay their eggs, to make sure no harm came to them. Now, I carry in me the nightmare vision of the unstoppable oil pouring and pouring (I’ve read “hemorrhaging�) out of the underwater hole in the Gulf of Mexico, pouring out still as I write. How can we protect the turtles now?

Last summer, before the BP disaster, my husband and I rented a house for a week on the beach near Wilmington, with both sons and their families. The two girl cousins, seven and ten, both played hard, trying to learn to stand up on surfboards and ride the waves. We took as a benevolent omen the dolphin we spotted close by, seemingly wanting to join in, and felt the grace of porpoise play. Our four-year-old grandson was content to run in and out at the water’s edge like a sandpiper, as he chased the shallow waves and played in the clean sand.

This is not to deny the ocean’s fury either, for beauty is not only about a moving visual experience but about awe, which can be fearsome. I do not espouse a particular religion, but Psalm 111:10 says that “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.� One definition of “fear� is “reverential awe.� So we might say, “Reverential awe of life is the beginning of wisdom.� And that is what’s missing for so many of us—awe for the things of nature that we did not make. So many of us are un-amazed and see not life’s mystery, but only the money we might gain in milking nature.

Our inability to run life backwards and start over, to un-do the gunk gushing into the Gulf—whose currents could take it around the tip of Florida and up the East Coast, killing along the way beauty, livelihoods, ways of life, and life itself—fills me not only with anguish, but a profound sadness.