My dreams fell apart in Hollywood—and not in the usual Hollywood way, but during a church internship.
The move from Michigan to Los Angeles to take the job was the epitome of culture shock. I went from the endless open spaces of Big Rapids to a mattress in a 500-square-foot apartment shared with two other people. I was lucky if I could find a parking spot within six blocks, and I had to wake up before 6 a.m. and retread those six blocks to make sure the car didn’t get towed.
My internship was unpaid. But it was ministry, so I raised support. Unfortunately, I didn’t raise enough support, so my food budget was a constant stressor.
To top it all off, I strained my vocal cords. And no matter how many doctors I saw, none of them could help me. “There’s nothing that can be ‘fixed,’” one particularly discouraging doctor observed. “They just look like the vocal cords of an 80-year-old, not a 22-year-old.” It had been my plan to become a worship leader, and now I could not sing.
With no job prospects or savings, tired of my absurd schedule and crowded apartment, I went home to Michigan after five months. I didn’t feel melancholy or depressed on the drive back. Mostly I felt an apoplectic emptiness, and I sat in it through hours and hours of sand, rock, and lonely foliage.
The first night I spent near San Francisco; then I woke up early to get as far as Oklahoma. Some morose folk song came on as I approached Yosemite—and maybe it was just the introspective chord progression, or the fact that this mountain pass was unlike anything I’d ever seen off a computer screen, or the way the rising sun superimposed itself on everything. But one way or another, it was exactly at that spot that I finally felt I could exhale.
The limitations of language are never more apparent than when I try to articulate what that moment was like. It was mystical, ineffable, as if an immediate, inescapable wonder shrunk all my self-concern into nothingness. I was so overwhelmed by God’s presence that I pulled over and shook in my seat. It felt as if fireflies were swirling around in my forehead. I stepped out of the car and breathed. Most of all what I felt was divine assurance: that God exists, that he is with me, that he would make it all worthwhile.
More succinctly, I think what I felt was awe—though I didn’t find that word for it until years later. I came across some work from research psychologist Dacher Keltner that described awe as more than a feel-good dose of wonder: as the sense of being in the presence of something vast, powerful, or beautiful that transcends our understanding of reality. It’s an emotional phenomenon that can transform our lives and grow our faith.
That’s not to say awe is something we can manufacture. But it is something we can pursue, even in more everyday experiences than my roadside moment near Yosemite. In fact, awe is something like Immanuel Kant’s idea of “the sublime”: a mixture of joyous wonder and shock that can overshadow our day-to-day anxieties.
According to Keltner, awe has two main elements. One is vastness (being in the presence of something that makes us feel small) and the other is accommodation (encountering something that forces us to alter our understanding of reality).
In a study Keltner published with other researchers on how awe functions in groups or cultures, participants drew self-portraits depicting themselves next to the sun. One group of participants was in San Francisco; the other was, in coincidence with my story, at Yosemite. Fascinatingly, the Yosemite group drew themselves markedly smaller, in proportion to the sun, than the San Francisco group did. The awe they experienced encountering the vastness of Yosemite altered their perception of themselves. It made them—quite literally—feel small.
Feeling small isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in the modern West, we tend to link it to powerlessness and loss of agency. Indeed, Keltner has argued that psychological researchers have generally ignored awe in their work because this branch of research arose in a Zeitgeist born of a “hyperindividualistic, materialistic, survival-of-the-selfish-genes view of human nature.” Because awe forces us to “devote ourselves to things outside of our individual selves,” he contends, it was considered less interesting or important as a subject of study than more individualistic feelings and pursuits.
That’s a sad and hollow view, but still a common one, and not only among research psychologists. We live in a post-Enlightenment era of disenchantment, and awe can be hard to come by. We aren’t educated to see mystery or wonder in the world. We aren’t trained to think of ourselves as small, though—considered in relation not to the sun but to God—that is exactly what we are.
Finding awe, then, may require a sort of reeducation. We may have to learn to pause long enough to see the intricacies of a newly fallen leaf, to take in a nephew’s euphoria over assembling some Legos, to put down our phones to go outside and talk to each other and hear from God. The phones are a real obstacle because perhaps the most challenging part of pursuing awe is paying attention long enough. Our lives are frenetic and our attention spans short, and awe requires intentional focus beyond the daily to-do list. We must cultivate the discipline of notice.
That’s not a life hack for self-help’s sake. Yes, awe will make you feel good (and perhaps also unsettled, disoriented, or reoriented in life). But psychological research also suggests that pursuing awe can help us draw near to God—as any reader of the Psalms might have guessed.
What scientific lingo calls vastness and accommodation, Christians might describe as creation and mystery—the way the visible universe proclaims God’s handiwork (Ps. 19; Ps. 8:3–4) and reveals his nature (Rom. 1:20), a revelation that demands our response (2 Cor. 6:2). “The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders,” says Psalm 65:8. “Where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.” Creation is not an object of our worship, but it is a “proper object of wonder,” as the Christian philosopher Ross Inman has written, “precisely because every facet of it communicates and reflects the marvelous truth, goodness, and beauty of its triune Creator.”
Meditation on God’s mystery is a practice littered throughout church history and the Orthodox church to this day. In the New Testament, mystery involves divine revelation: God’s nature as revealed through Christ or his unfolding plan of salvation (1 Cor. 2:7; Eph. 1:9; Rev. 10:7). These things—sometimes referred to as mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the “awe-inspiring mystery” of God—are “too wonderful” for us (Ps. 139:6), and contemplating them reshapes our understanding of reality. It reminds us we are small and God is infinite.
The experience I had in Yosemite was a collision of creation and mystery. The intricacy of the Yosemite mountainside forced into me the truth that if God cared enough to shape these rocks into something so beautiful, he desires even more to see beauty bloom through the intricacies of my life.
But that experience did not change everything about me forever. I still find it difficult to slow down. Some days I get busy, or I get head-foggy from too much screen time, or I let daily anxieties choke out my patience and attention to God. I miss out on awe—and what God has to say through that experience—all the time. But I say a prayer, breathe, and reel myself in.
The Ministry of Absence
I try to remind myself of the wisdom of the diplomat and part-time theologian Dag Hammarskjöld: “God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.” God does not die on the day when our dreams fall apart. He always remains. But we die on the day we stop noticing the awe scattered in every corner of our God-given lives.
Griffin Gooch is a writer, speaker, and professor currently working on his doctorate at University of Aberdeen. He writes most frequently on Substack.
