By Daniel Booth
Attention-getting title, now to deliver something useful.
Imagine, as I did on the floor of a yoga class last week, a spotlight above your head. You are now illuminated by a cone of light and not just ordinary light. Imagine further that it is God’s love shining down on you. Feel the light washing away your darkness: self-judgment, feeling unloved, helplessness in the face of the world’s pain… Bask in it and keep feeding your imaginary vision. Watch for a smile to play across your lips. Trust that smile as proof that you are experiencing divine healing and surrender to its power. Breathe slowly. Think gratitude. Smile some more.
It was an awesome experience for me. Best of all I was able to maintain it for nearly an hour. A week later I can still call up this image.
“Awe” is currently being studied by psychologists and biologists. All kinds of pre-post tests are being conducted around deliberate experiences, mostly in nature, with inner-kids who rarely spend time in forests and around lakes and oceans, veterans with PTSD and ordinary people. Their moods and vital signs all improve from these experiences. And once they experience awe, many continue to find opportunities for more and thus maintain their moods and vital signs.
Our need to have the experience of awe seems vital to our wellness. Just think of life before electric lights, especially in what we would call more primitive lands. People saw the sky as only we can at a planetarium. When we get a glimpse on a cloudless crisps night, we too are filled with awe. The trick is what Quaker theologian Richard Foster calls the “prayer of the ordinary.” When we train ourselves to see God not just in other people, but in all creation and even what humans have created, we will have “ordinary” opportunities to experience awe.
I think of this new exercise of imagination as a “shock absorber” for my soul. I still tend to be shocked by any headline that begins, “President Trump said (or did)_________.” Same for any of his appointees who IMHO are spreading toxic manure on the common green and trampling the flowers of democracy.
Last week’s Hidden Brain broadcast on NPR included an interview with Dasher Keltner, author of AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder And How It Can Transform Your Life. The broadcase or blog might be available on www.Hiddenbrain.org. Listen when you can and check out the book. But regardless, try the “spotlight of God’s healing Light” and see if it works for you.
And for the New Year of 2026, I have a postscript. It’s Henri Neuwen’s Dec. 31 entry in his day book.
“Remember you are held safe. You are loved. You are protected. You are in communion with God and with those whom God has sent you. What is of God will last. It belongs to the eternal life. Choose it; and it will be yours.”
The day book, You are the Beloved, is a collection of Nouwen’s works and the quote is from his The Inner Voice of Love.
Bless you, Dan Booth
