Awe in Small and Seen

First off, I find that there are periods where it feels like there is so much that I am taking in from the world that I just want (need?) to share and then there are other times that it isn’t quite there.  A friend of mine would say that the muse speaks when she’s ready...This feels like one of those times.  Several posts over the last few days and several more still to come.  So my apologies in advance for a lot of posts recently.  It will slow down eventually.

So what do you see when you see this sunrise?  This was from last Thursday morning just about ½ mile from my house.  For me, initially it was simply a beautiful sunrise until I saw it on my computer screen.  When I saw it on the larger screen rather than the small LCD on my camera, I noticed the little white lights at the bottom of the image.  Those are headlights from cars heading up the hill.  As I took in this image, I couldn’t help but think about how small those headlights are in comparison to the size of the orange and yellow panorama above them.

It reminds me of Psalm 8:3-4 where we read...

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established,
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?

This Psalm gets to a deep experience of awe.  Awe at the power of God.  Awe that God cares enough to create us mortals.  Awe that God even cares.  How amazing is all of that even though to God we are like those headlights compared to the breadth of the horizon (and actually even smaller).  Yet God sees us.  God sees us.

Into this sense of awe, I also read these words from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel...

The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons.  Horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era.  Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine.  To sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple.  To feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.    (Man’s Quest for God (Santa Fe, NM: Aurora Press, 1998), 51–52.)

I see this moment, I read these words, I take it all in... I feel small.  Yet I feel seen fully by divine love.