Rare Emotions
by Birdie Anderson
On a summer day in Georgia, with peach-sticky fingers and wiry limbs strong from days on the trail, four kids set off on a final hike down Tallulah Gorge.
(Their parents and grandparents were with them as well, but that doesn’t sound quite as adventurous, does it).
A thousand steps, many slippery rocks, and a delightfully dangerous rope bridge later, they reached the holiest of holies: the sliding rock at the bottom of the gorge. Clothes flew off into the moss and mud, sunscreen abandoned in the presence of clouds and absence of patience, and shrieking and tumbling, they clambered to the top of the rock and slid down the grand, slick surface into the freezing pool of dark water at the bottom. They did this over and over, their parents joining in, their grandparents watching through phone screens videoing an archetypical family scene.
Sufficiently worn out, my grandmother wrapped our trembling grasshopper bodies in the brightly striped towels, vigorously rubbing the goosebumps from our arms, scrubbing my brothers’ heads and leaving their hair like dandelions, spiked and fluffy on heads still slightly too big for their little-boy bodies.
And as we started our return, we were barely fifteen steps back up the gorge when the heavens opened, fat raindrops whizzing down like millions of locusts. Somehow, in a whirl of Spanglish shouts and wobbly runs to various shelters, the family dispersed among the natural caves in the rocks to wait until the storm passed. Crouched beneath a cleft with my mother and brother, we watched as the walls of the gorge split into dozens of waterfalls, pouring thunderous streams of water onto the granite below. As the sky sounded ominous octaves above us, and the deep green trees shook, and rain and falls filled the depths below us, I pulled my towel as tightly as I could around my trembling shoulders, and felt my heart completely overwhelmed. Pressed against my mother, peering through the thick torrent, we were totally at the mercy of the waters that were rising below us. And at that age, I couldn’t understand much, but I was just aware enough to feel the hint of the notion that I was perhaps much, much smaller than I realized.
And this was one of the more significant experiences in my life with the feeling of reverence.
——
INTRODUCTION:
There are common emotions and rare ones. This frequency has nothing to do with importance: happiness and sorrow are experienced often over the course of the human life and they are certainly necessary to our growth as people. But we pay a lot of attention in writing and research to these common emotions, and I have recently been wondering: what are the emotions we might only feel a few times throughout our lives? There has been some recent thought about this; interestingly enough, mainly taking place in Internet forums as people around the world seek to define experiences that are less frequently acknowledged or defined in the common vernacular (see: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, Koenig, 2021). In thinking about this question, and conversing with other members of this publication about the themes of religion, the dawn, and commonalities between religious and non-religious people, the emotion of reverence emerged as a concept necessary to explore.
The term reverence comes from a Latin verb meaning “to stand in awe of,” but is defined by Oxford Dictionary as a “deep respect.” I am utterly dissatisfied with this definition both emotionally and scientifically, and here is why: it seems to me that the human experience of reverence is at the same time transcendent and existential, and the word “respect” does jack to convey this fact. And if there is something to reverence that does get at an intangible reality, not just admiration, then we have something to talk about. Indeed, we have something very important to talk about, as there are not many emotions that are universally experienced, rare, and that force us out of our selfish, narrow worlds.
But of course, my opinion alone doesn’t amount for much in commentary on a subjective emotion. And you, dear reader, don’t want a stuffy statistical survey, or a poem that tries to pull at the heartstrings to get you convinced. But both statistics and poems serve their purpose, so thus I present to you: a pilot study.
Reverence: How People Report Experiencing It, and What That Might Mean
A Semi-Scientific Approach
METHODS
Two groups: one group of intensely religious people ( 7 male, 7 female) and one group of non/vaguely religious people (7 male, 7 female) ages 18 - 80.
Participants were texted out of the blue or asked in person with no context besides “it’s for something I’m writing” or “for a photo project I’m working on.”
They were asked the question:
When/where have you felt the most reverent?
RESULTS:
Non/Vaguely religious:
Seeing the Madonna of Bruges, visiting the Henri-Chapelle American cemetery.
Anywhere in nature, watching sunsets from their apartment’s balcony.
Growing up and realizing the advice older people give you is proving true.
Caught in a rainstorm on the Appalachian Trail, seeing a bull moose in Glacier National Park.
Every time they think of their mom silently holding the weight of their entire family, reading anything by Zora Neale Hurston, watching a friend perform their own poetry.
At live music events, watching an artist enter a dissociative state as they completely merge their skill and performance.
When the winter storm in Texas happened, hearing their mother recite Goodnight Moon by heart, and thinking of how she had raised three kids with that book, and was still using it to soothe them as adults.
Has never felt the feeling of reverence.
Experiencing film and music, feeling reverence towards both the art and artists as they produced excellent work and just killed it.
In a tiny, rundown chapel in Jamaica, where it was evident how much the people did to take care of the building and their community.
The first house show they ever put on, seeing their community show up and pitch in to an event that was months in the making, going to a Dead and Company show in Boulder, CO and experiencing the entire audience completely locked in and attentive to the performance, transforming the atmosphere of the stadium into that of a dive bar.
Visiting their grandparents’ tomb with their brother, cleaning it, and thinking of the life the two Lithuanian immigrants had built for them and their family.
Using conditioner for the first time after only having used three-in-one their whole life.
On the edge of the Sahara desert under the stars and thinking: are there more stars in the sky or grains of sand in the desert?
Intensely religious:
Any time in a building that is designed to have a lot of people in it is empty and you are in it alone.
Walking into St. Peter’s Basilica, hiking Zion National Park.
Looking at the stars while singing and playing guitar with friends.
Watching Les Miserables on Broadway, the moment when Jean Valjean sees Fantine in her heavenly glory with a great chorus of others who have passed before him gathered to honor his passing with beautiful singing.
On the Llano RIver, in a basilica in Ravenna.
Reading through Revelations and thinking of the holiness of God, being with their baby niece and considering Jesus as a baby, looking at the mountains.
The Duomo in Florence and feeling the need to be quiet and careful and allow your eyes to be drawn upwards to the heavens, in the presence of someone sick and dying being a holy moment and feeling a sense of reverence both for a passing soul and for the others grieving in the room, their wedding day and standing before the officiant and listening to the words that sealed their union.
A stranger offering to renovate their family’s home for free.
Outside where skies are vast.
A moment of communal worship when they felt the Holy Spirit moving everyone to praise the Lord.
Alone in nature (mostly the mountains), studying alone.
Seeing the Pieta in Rome.
The moment during the 5am daily communal prayer held by Korean churches when they shout the name of Jesus in unison before starting the service and thinking of Jesus as a King who deserves facedown worship from all peoples.
Driving towards the bay and witnessing an enormous lightning storm in the darkness, and it was crazy and powerful and violent, and awestruck by the idea that the same god who directs the path of the lighting directs their life.
DISCUSSION:
So, what do we have here? Lists that you can certainly peruse for similarities and differences, and there are some potentially noteworthy ones. We could talk about statistical significance and percentages and implications for a larger sample size. But that isn’t quite the point. And we don’t want to beat the mystery and splendor of reverence into the ground by over-explaining it. So I will share my thoughts after considering the responses I received, and attempting to see the threads that weave them together. Then I will leave you with a couple poems that I think pertain to the current state of reverence; but that’s a topic for your personal consideration, or perhaps another article altogether.
CONCLUSION:
In almost every case, the feeling of reverence is triggered by the realization that you are seeing or experiencing or understanding an inkling of something incomprehensibly vast. And this is where I think reverence must collide with the ineffable, or the transcendent, or whatever that mystical missing piece is: you maybe be able to articulate your own positionality and emotion in front of mountains or by the bed of a passing loved one, but you certainly can’t articulate or understand how large El Capitan is, even if you’ve free-soloed it. You certainly can’t articulate what it means for your mother to carry the weight of the knowledge of the generations before, and of the ones here, and of the ones to come. Reverence is an epiphany that transitions the human mind from the moment in front of you to the consideration of questions such as: what is my value? Where do I fit in the great schema of things? Is this all purely chance? And to the discovery of meaning such as: the strength of a mother’s love, the power of art, and the eminence of death.
Writing this article has been an incredible experience because I discovered that asking the question:
When/where have you felt the most reverence?
Is perhaps one of the best questions I have asked the people in my life. It took them to the moments where they had revelations about their identity, their relationships, and their beliefs. To moments when they felt the most peace, awe, or sorrow. It helped me understand them better, and opened conversations it may have otherwise taken us years to stumble across. Everyone I asked was a friend in some capacity, but a dozen of the responses were from people I barely know at all. The “so what” of this piece is that asking about reverence is just an amazing question to ask. And I think it is a valuable catalyst for initiating conversations about spiritual life (which is, in my opinion, a reality for every human) in a way that isn’t automatically reduced to religion.
So I strongly exhort you, dear reader, whether it's the seeds of a strawberry or the burning, breaking dawn over the Grand Canyon, seek experiences of reverence that force your mind and heart to consider the meaning and wonder of your life. And ask your friends, ask your family, ask your grandparents especially, ask your peers and coworkers about when they’ve felt the most reverent. See where it takes you. And report back.
——
“Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control.”
— Paul Woodruff
“It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
God's Grandeur
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
The World Is Too Much With Us
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
HYPERLINK "https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-wordsworth" The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.