“And awe came upon everyone.”
Wonderings:
When you have something hard to do, I wonder what your self-talk is like? I wonder how you motivate yourself to do something hard?
I wonder when you have felt awestruck.
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the Fourth Sunday of Easter in Year A of our Lectionary.
Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; John 10:1-10
Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
There’s some stuff that I struggle with in this reading from the Gospel according to John—some us vs. them stuff. The good shepherd VS. thieves and bandits.
If you want to talk about that stuff, by all means, let’s talk during coffee hour. But for now, I want to talk instead about abundant life: I want to talk about the kind of life where “awe comes upon everyone.”
One of my heroes, the Jesuit priest Fr. Greg Boyle, has written that this line about awe always stops him in his tracks. Fr. Greg is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the largest gang-intervention and prison-reentry program in the country. I’ve met Fr. Greg, and he is the real deal. And Homeboy Industries is, I believe, one of the clearest contemporary examples of what Jesus was talking about when he talked about “the kingdom of God.”
People come to Homeboy because they’ve just gotten out of jail, or they are trying to get out of a gang, and they are trying to find a less destructive way of being in the world. They’re looking for job training. They’re looking for healing. They’re looking for a new horizon.
The people who find that new horizon at Homeboy—Fr. Greg calls them “homies”—many of them have done incredibly violent things. But Fr. Greg and his team are deeply aware that most of these homies were also, first, the victims of horrific violence and abuse; were drawn into gang life for lack of any other options for meaningful belonging. And the whole program at Homeboy is built on awe at the courage that takes for these homies to escape that cycle of violence—the courage it takes to grieve and to heal.
Fr. Greg writes that “the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment of how they carry it” (51).
In his book Barking to the Choir, Fr. Greg talks about this homie named Sergio. This story is pretty heavy, and I want to warn people that there’s some physical abuse in this story. I’ve sanded off some of the sharpest parts for our intergenerational community here, but here is Fr. Greg talking about bringing Sergio with him to help lead a day-long in-service training for 600 social-workers in Richmond, VA.
Sergio was in his mid-twenties, a tattooed gang member who had served considerable time in prison. He also had been homeless for a stretch and an active heroin addict for a longer one. I knew patches of his backstory: drinking and sniffing glue at eight, which eventually led to crack, PCP, and finally heroin. He had been first arrested at nine for assault and breaking and entering, jumped into a gang at twelve, and did two and a half years for stabbing his mom's boyfriend, who tried to abuse him. Sergio began at Homeboy in what we call "the humble place"—the janitorial crew—but in time he became a valued member of our substance abuse team, now solid in his own recovery and helping younger homies try sobriety on for size.
As he stood before the audience in Richmond, Sergio began his story in an offhanded way. "I guess you could say my mom and me, well, we didn't get along so good. I think I was six when she looked at me and said, “Why don'tcha just kill yourself? You're such a burden to me.'"
Six hundred social workers gasped in unison. Sergio fanned his hands like he was trying to put out a fire. "It sounds way worser in Spanish," he said reassuringly. Everyone laughed. We all got whiplash moving from gasp to laugh. He's one sentence into his story and we all need a laugh.
"I think I was, like, nine years old," Sergio continued, "when she drove me to the deepest part of Baja California, walked me up to the door of this orphanage and said, 'I found this kid?" He paused, his voice beginning to quietly buckle. "I was there ninety days before my grandmother could get out of my mom where she had dumped me, and my grandmother came and rescued me." He searched for what to say next. "My mom beat me every single day of my elementary school years, with things you could imagine and a lotta things you couldn't. Every day my back was bloodied and scarred. In fact, I had to wear three T-shirts to school each day. The first one cuz the blood would seep through. The second cuz you could still see it. Finally, with the third T-shirt, you couldn't see no blood. Kids at school would make fun of me. 'Hey, fool.... it's a hundred degrees … Why ya wearin' three T-shirts?" He paused again so his emotions could catch up to him, momentarily knocking the wind out of his speech. For a time he seemed to be staring at a piece of his story that only he could see.
"I wore three T-shirts," he finally said, swallowing back his tears, "well into my adult years, cuz I was ashamed of my wounds.
I didn't want no one to see 'em." Then he suddenly found a higher perch upon which to rest. "But now I welcome my wounds. I run my fingers over my scars. My wounds are my friends.
"After all," he continued, barely getting out the words, "how can I help others to heal if I don't welcome my own wounds?"
And awe came upon everyone.
I can’t help thinking of our reading from 2 weeks ago, about the Risen Jesus appearing to Thomas and the other disciples, with the wounds of the cross still upon him.
“How can I help others to heal if I don't welcome my own wounds?" Was that what Jesus was saying to the disciples in that upper room? Was he showing us that the only way for us to truly heal—and to help others heal—is to welcome our wounds?
And awe came upon everyone.
When I think about my own experiences of awe [and the ones you’ve shared], I think of feeling small in the presence of something vast. I think of feeling out of my depth—foolish, as we were talking about last week—in the presence of something that surpasses my understanding. I think of feeling speechless in the presence of beauty—maybe the vastness and complexity of nature, maybe the power of art. I think of the awareness of my fragility amidst the forces of life and death. And in all these experiences, I feel my body loosen and let down. I feel my body simultaneously excited and grounded—at rest. Experiencing awe, I feel…like I’m in the right place; like I am standing on holy ground.
The psychologist Dacher Kaltner has studied awe, and he writes that awe can serve as a kind of reset button for our nervous systems. Awe can lift us out of our tunnel vision, out of mental doom loops, out of our ego’s insistence on comprehensibility and control.
We might be going through a tough time, working harder than ever to power through it, to overcome it. And even there, in the shadow of the valley of death, in the moment of our deepest hunger, we find a table spread just for us.
And maybe, later, when recalling that valley, we will recall the feeling of fear, and being lost, and yet those feelings will be transformed by that moment of blessing, when we met the one who anointed our head with oil, and she filled our cup to overflowing.
I wonder if the apostles and those around them in our first reading got themselves into a feedback loop of awe.
These are chaotic days after the Risen Jesus has ascended into heaven, as the story goes: the disciples have been left, again—and yet amazing things keep happening around them. And they feel small, and foolish, and fragile and almost unbearably alive. And from that experience of awe, all who trusted in the presence of the Holy Spirit “had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
They are empowered to share everything they have with the people around them—who in turn share their own stories of transformation, which renews the awe that everyone feels to be a part of this…
It’s easy in our own chaotic times to surrender to the idea that fear and anxiety are the only reliable energy sources. That the only way through is to knuckle down, to power through, to grind.
But look at what awe can do. These followers of Jesus are scared, they’re in unknown territory, and yet as they do amazing things, they are paradoxically at ease.
Because Sergio is there, and he’s only wearing one t-shirt. And his mom is there, and she’s gotten into treatment for her own stuff, and the two of them have tentatively reconnected, and are finding some healing in showing each other their wounds, and there’s hope for reconciliation.
And awe has come upon everyone.
Look at what we can do when we stand in awe of what others carry; when inward joys arise, and burst into a song.
Amen.
