I remember it was a nice day and we decided to go fishing with my older brother and his friend of the same age, back then I was seventeen years old and my brother was almost twenty. We got plastic string that our neighbor let us borrow but with high regard so we take care of it. We went to San Pedro de la Paz, I do not remember if it was the big or small lagoon, the line got stuck meters into the lagoon. Our friend jumped into the water to free the nylon and started sinking so started yelling for help, my brother despite not being a good swimmer he jumped in to save him. The moment my friend felt my brother’s body, he clung to him by his waist so both of them started drowning by disappearing from the surface. I was freaking out yelling my brother’s name, Mariooo, Mariooo, Mariooo, but my voice will choke because I felt like crying. Out of nowhere, a man in a bathing suit came running, jumped into the water and saved both of them. It was a miracle that the person was there, he was a God-sent angel that saved my brother and my friend. We all finally returned home.
God so often appears in extraordinary stories of awe; we invoke the Divine to explain the sublime.
Others’ kindness was evocative of awe around the world: having car repairs paid for by a restaurant owner; being given money by friends when broke; seeing citizens assist strangers in the streets; reading about moral exemplars, most frequently the Dalai Lama. This story from the United States combines courage with compassion:
1973 at my cousin’s restaurant. My father worked there as a bartender. I was there and my best friend from high school walked in. He is Black and I am white and I had not seen him in five years. I stood and embraced him and we began to talk. A guy at the bar said to my father, “How can you allow your son to have a N as his friend?” My father looked at this guy and loudly told him to get out of his bar and never come back. I have never been more proud of my father, who was fifty-nine years old at that time.
Overcoming obstacles was a universal as welclass="underline" People thriving despite profound racism and poverty. Jews who had survived the concentration camps. People who transcend mental and physical challenges, as in this story from South Africa:
When watching my daughter, who was born with bilateral club foot, dance in a ballet recital for the first time I was filled with awe. I was in the audience with my mother and my little girl was dancing onstage. I had been backstage with her before and had been getting her ready for the performance. While watching I felt the beginning of tears in my eyes and my heart felt like it was going to burst with pride. I had flashbacks of the time when she was born with her feet upside down and I felt awestruck by how far she has come since that day years ago.
We often turn to literature, to poetry, to film, to art, and, on occasion, to the news for inspiring stories of overcoming, allowing goodness its own speech. Here is such an example from Norway:
When I read an article in the paper about an eight-year-old girl in Yemen who had run away from a forced marriage and taken up the fight against her parents in the judicial system. It hit me how much courage and fighting spirit that can live in a person, and that you can fight for your cause and actually make a change. I was an adult when I read this article. I was alone, but had to tell several people about it later. I didn’t do anything special with my own life afterwards, but had an aha-experience.
Finally, others’ rare talents brought people awe around the world. For a young man from Mexico, it was the trapeze artist and contortionist in the Cirque du Soleil. For a woman in Sweden, her husband’s strength in moving large household objects around the home. For an Australian, watching swimmer Sun Yang’s last 100 meters in a 1,500-meter world-record swim. For another Australian, watching surfers ride 50-foot waves. For a student in Japan, listening to a talk by a Fields Medal–winning mathematician. Here is a story about rare talents from Indonesia:
There was an autistic boy named Andre. Andre’s parents are poor, such that he doesn’t go to school at all. Andre tends to leave home without saying goodbye, and once he left home only to be found two years later. Andre has a rare talent, he can know precisely on what day does a certain date fall whenever that is. Me along with five other friends who visited him, he could tell precisely our birth dates. He could also do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division without any calculating tool whatsoever.
Parents’ stories about their children were also common—listening to a fetus’s heartbeat, hearing a one-year-old’s first word, seeing a two-year-old gallop, being in the audience at a grammar school dance performance. Children are small, but their development is vast, and a source of awe for parents on their better days.
Everyday moral beauty can transform lives. Steven Czifra grew up in a home that was so violent that one night one parent threw boiling water on the other; he doesn’t remember who it was. He dropped out of school at ten, got into drugs, shaved his head, and ran with a Mexican gang. One day he broke into a parked Mercedes to steal its stereo the very moment the owner, who happened to be an LAPD officer, arrived. His first night in jail, he told me, he was chained to a chair for eight hours alone in a cold room—some of the longest hours of his life.
It was everyday moral beauty that transformed him. In solitary confinement in prison, he encountered a knowing librarian who fed Steven’s hunger for reading; Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and its archiving of courage—“I love the name of honor more than I fear death”—was an epiphany for him. Upon his release from prison, at a halfway house, Steven tells me, a biker got him off drugs and a job clearing brush for seventy dollars a day. More moral beauty. Later, at a community college, a Shakespeare teacher named Larry taught Steven to read Milton like a literary critic, and that the self-loathing in his mind was just that, thoughts, fleeting notions from parents who could have done better. Steven, now in graduate school, would cofound the Underground Scholars Initiative (USI) at UC Berkeley. This is a network of formerly incarcerated students guiding people in prison and just out to make their way to college. USI allows these unlikely college students to find opportunities to allow their goodness its own speech.
Within the study of morality it has long been the view that we find our moral compass in the teaching of abstract principles, the study of great texts, or the leadership of charismatic gurus and great sages. In fact, we are just as likely to find our “moral law within” in the awe we feel for the wonders of others nearby.
Illumination
About 4,000 of the 700,000 unhoused people in the United States live on the streets of Oakland, California. Dr. Leif Hass devotes much of his day to caring for their health problems—mental illness, diabetes, hypertension, festering wounds, poor nutrition, drug addictions, and the deterioration of the brain that the cold nights and hard pavement of homelessness bring.
Many health professionals get burned out from this work. Leif Hass stays resilient and close to the Hippocratic oath—to reduce harm—through the moral beauty of the people he cares for. Here is a story of awe he sent me called “A Ray of Light,” about a patient who was born with cerebral palsy and lost the use of his hands due to a surgery. The following exchange moved Hass to awe.