to explain how such people “raise their children, decide right from wrong, and build communities without the benefit of religion.”20 I’m not sure to whom he means to explain it. To religious people who perhaps assume the irreligious are without moral orientation? Or to more hardline secularists who reject any talk or thought of transcendence? I don’t know who his audience is, and perhaps he doesn’t either. This is a sort of scholarly memoir.
Whatever. According to Zuckerman, secularists might live and socialize and decide by this guiding experience, awe, which Winston summarizes, perhaps quoting Zuckerman, as a “nonreligious impulse you can’t explain.”
Frankly, this is a description I think so vague it’s nearly meaningless. A nonreligious impulse you can’t explain. But pressing the issue, I wonder what’s meant by “can’t.” Is it that you aren’t able to explain it or that you aren’t allowed to?
Remember, hardline ideologues come from all camps.
The editor of Free Inquiry, Tom Flynn, rejects awe almost altogether, criticizing Zuckerman’s project because awe has a referent, a source back to which awe is offered. “To the degree that reverence is understood transitively—as denoting awe, veneration, or respect toward something beyond”— to that same degree it must be rejected. “The domain of everyday experience can’t be transcended,” he claims. “There is nothing above it, nothing beyond or over it, nothing to revere . . . only reality.”21 Of course, what qualifies in his mind as reality he doesn’t say.
And again, I wonder what’s meant by “can’t” here, because of course everyday experience can be transcended. People do it all the time: in prayer and meditation; with music—listening to it, performing it; in relationships—marriages, parenthood, lifelong commitments come what may; in physical activity and challenges. A hiker reaches the top of Mount Washington: I doubt he’d merely explain the experience as a long series of footsteps, though that certainly is the “real” “everyday experience” just embarked upon. So, by saying that “everyday experience can’t be transcended,” our “freely inquiring” Flynn must mean that he won’t allow for such a thing.
So much for free inquiry.
I remember once a little boy at a playground took some woodchips and threw them toward other children playing. His mother, meaning to discipline him, told him, “You can’t do that.” Looking puzzled, he glanced down to the wood chips lining the playground, picked up another handful, threw them, and then looked at her as if to show, “Yes, I can! And you could, too, if you tried.”
“You can’t explain this impulse, awe.”
“Well, maybe you could if you tried.”
But back to Zuckerman. As for how he describes this impulse: it’s a “profound, overflowing feeling,” which he knows best in fleeting moments: “playing on the beach with his young daughter, eating grapes from his grandparents’ backyard, sledding in the dark of a January night, dancing with abandon at a favorite concert.”22
As for aweism, Zuckerman explains that this “is the belief that existence is ultimately a beautiful mystery” and has the capacity to “inspire deep feelings of joy, poignancy and sublime awe.” 23Our friend Trudy, homeless, hearing voices, wandering New York City, might say the same, and, since I go with her, I would agree.
Zuckerman continues, though, and now defensively, as if anticipating the attack from his harder-line secularists: “Aweism . . . though steeped in existential wonder and soulful appreciation, is still very much grounded in this world. It is akin to what philosopher Robert Solomon dubs a ‘naturalized’ spirituality: a non-religious, non-theological, non-doctrinal orientation that is right here, in our lives and in our world, not elsewhere.”24
As to aweism’s end, its goal, Zuckerman explains, “An aweist just feels awe from time to time, appreciates it, owns it, relishes it, and then carries on.”25
And concluding about aweism, Zuckerman assures any who would worry about a religious agenda being set upon them: “My awe stops there.”26 He’s not trying to do anything with his awe. He’s not trying to get anyone to join him in awe. He just feels it, notices it, keeps it to himself, stops there.
Huh.
Trudy might call it “Awe interruptus.”
Peter might say, “It is good for us to be here. Let us make three dwellings.”
Peter, Jesus’ near constant companion; Peter, the disciple who, only verses earlier, confessed that Jesus isn’t merely a reiteration of the ancient prophet Elijah or John the Baptizer redux, but is the Christ, something unique and one-time in the world, the anointed one of God; Peter, the rock on whom Jesus would establish his church, which is to say the foundation upon which would be built up a beloved community and community of belovedness: Peter, right here on this mountaintop, amidst this private, awesome experience, did in effect say, “Let’s stay here, build three little temples, and never go anywhere else, never go down the mountain, back to the people, back to work. It’s good for us to be here. Let’s stay here.”
And, why not? He’d been personally invited to this experience, after all. Jesus had taken him and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves; and Jesus was transfigured before them, his clothes becoming dazzling white like no laundress could make them; and there appeared also Elijah and Moses, which is to say representatives of the Prophets and the Law. Jesus had allowed these three disciples in and no others, as if Peter and James and John were special somehow, uniquely qualified to witness this.
What qualifications Peter had, he perhaps demonstrated, or even developed, six days prior to this, when Jesus was walking with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. On the way, Jesus asked them, “Who do people say that I am?” and they answered what they must have heard: “Elijah or John the Baptizer or one of the prophets.” Jesus then asked, “But who do you say that I am?” and Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”
Of course, what he might have meant by this is an open question. To say someone is the Messiah is to say that one is the anointed one of God. But what is meant by that is hardly more clear. Really, it just begs questions: Anointed for what? Anointed as what? Speaking very concretely, to be anointed is to have one’s head smeared with oil, which has the aim or effect of setting one apart from others, setting one to some special status and task. So, clearly, to be anointed is to be special; and so, clearly, to be the anointed one of God is to be super-special. But what does this specialness lead to? What does it mean?
Peter assumed it meant this: getting to stay on the mountaintop, getting to glimmer and glow, getting to pass time with the superstars of their tradition. It’s a vaulted position, this being the Messiah of God.
But God had something else in mind, which Jesus also had in mind, these two being of the same mind. This is what God said, following the Transfiguration and following Peter’s assertion that they should stay on that mountaintop: in effect, “No.”
“This is my Son the Beloved; listen to him.”
I have to say, I love this command: “Listen to him.” It’s something I’ve said to the children when they’re running roughshod over their father, and something he’s said when they’re running roughshod over me. “Listen to your mother!” “Listen to your father!” It’s by way of saying, we stand together. It’s by way of affirming someone’s authority by lending them yours. God saying of Jesus to Peter, “Listen to him,” calls Peter back from running roughshod over Jesus.
But what, we might wonder, was Peter exactly to listen to? What,
