Awe’s Power to Diminish Us (and That’s a Good Thing)

While Colorado is known for having 50 mountains that exceed 14,000 feet, my home state of Washington boasts its own mountainous claims, with nearly 100 reaching mile-high peaks. Yet one among them stands out. At 14,409 feet and 60 miles southeast of Seattle, Mt. Rainier is simply known as “the mountain.” In a city that is cloudy 225 days a year, spotting it in all its glory is regarded as a “good mountain day.” On a clear day, Rainier can be seen from 200 miles away to the east and north beyond the border of British Columbia. After living here for over 30 years, seeing its snow-covered peak against a blue sky still takes my breath away. It inspires awe.

Awe appears throughout the Bible, but it is not a virtue or fruit of the spirit. Rather, it is an emotional response to unexpected encounters that transport us from the regularity of our daily lives. Awe gets us out of our heads and takes us down a peg, reminding us that we are not the center of our universe but that we worship a God who is awesome in his majesty (Job 37:22), holiness (Psalms 99:3), glory (Exodus 15:11), and sanctuary (Psalms 68:35).

Awe is not a prominent topic in psychology due to its unpredictable nature. Nevertheless, several studies have sought to delineate its properties and capture its effects. Dacher Keltner is the best-known social psychologist studying awe, defining it as “being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.”¹ Both aspects of this definition are important to the experience of awe. First, there is the awareness of vastness. Awe doesn’t reside so much in the event as it does in our hearts. Mt. Rainier may be awe-inspiring, but I’m the one experiencing the emotion. Moreover, the vastness of awe doesn’t necessarily refer to the physical size of its object; rather, it is the feeling that something has occurred outside our ordinary experiences. For me, watching bumblebees amidst summer rhododendrons can also elicit a feeling of vastness.

Awe may be unpredictable, but its impact is not necessarily fleeting. It alters our worldview, creating the need to accommodate how we understand and move through the world. The vastness of awe reduces our self-centeredness, a phenomenon psychologists refer to as self-diminishment, resulting in a smaller sense of self. This second attribute of awe enhances the perception that true greatness is more likely to reside outside of ourselves, fostering greater humility and a more balanced view of our personal strengths and weaknesses, boosting generosity, and minimizing our sense of entitlement.²

What inspires awe? When other psychologists present Keltner’s definition to research participants, they often mention nature, art, music, religious experiences, and ideas. However, none of these were the most frequently cited occurrences in his own research. Keltner found that it was the magnanimity of others—their courage, kindness, strength, or their history of overcoming tragedy—that most commonly evoked awe. He observes,

“Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty. . . Exceptional virtue, character, and ability – moral beauty – operate according to a different aesthetic, one marked by a purity and goodness of intention and action and moves us to awe. One kind of moral beauty is the courage that others show when encountering suffering.”³

The beauty of Mt. Rainier never ceases to enthrall me. Catching a glimpse of it as I drive south on the often congested I-5 sparks a jolt of gratitude for the immensity of God’s creation. Those sightings remind me that we worship a God who in creating something so majestic, also delighted in creating and redeeming me. Yet, its vastness hasn’t profoundly challenged my worldview or how I live. However, there is a place and people whose courage and resilience in the face of unspeakable suffering have inspired a type of awe that has transformed my self-identity and self-worth.

The state of Turkana is located in the northwest corner of Kenya. It is hot and arid, with temperatures frequently reaching the high nineties throughout the year. The semi-nomadic Turkana tribal people primarily herd camels, cattle, and goats that graze on the sparse desert scrub brush. This pastoral land might not have been thrust upon the global stage if it didn’t share a border with Sudan. Between 1983 and 1991, 20,000 young boys fleeing the civil war in that country walked over a thousand miles to reach the safety of the Kenyan border, arriving at the small Turkana village of Kakuma. Along the way, it is estimated that half of them perished. After reaching Kakuma, they were provided with temporary shelter overseen by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and supported by USAID. A decade later, approximately 3,800 of these refugees, known as the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” were resettled in the U.S.

Their resettlement is a joyful account of rescue and new beginnings—yet it’s not the conclusion of the story. The camp continues to take in newcomers, currently accommodating 300,000 refugees, primarily women and children, who have fled war-torn political and tribal conflicts in South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Burundi, and Rwanda. The oldest section of the camp still reflects the chaos of those early years, with “streets” winding into smaller alleyways and dead ends, flanked by one- or two-room homes constructed from cut-up USAID tin food cans.

The refugees may be in Kenya, but it’s more like they are staying at the Hotel California; once registered, they are unlikely to leave. Many in the camp have called it home for over 20 years, with thousands of children born without registered citizenship because they are not legally Kenyans. They all continue to hold on to the hope that one day, after years of vetting, they might be among the lucky few who make it to cities such as Minneapolis or Toronto or Berlin.

While waiting, they navigate their lives as best as they can, organizing their days, homes, and communities. Although unemployment is widespread, staying alive with dignity is almost a full-time job. Once a week, women stand in line, sometimes for hours under the unrelenting sun, to receive cooking oil, flour, and other basic necessities while collecting water daily from communal spigots in ubiquitous 20-liter yellow jerry cans. Nevertheless, the camp functions like a city in its own right, with schools, small factories, tiny shops, motorcycle ride services, and many, many churches.

One hundred sixty Protestant churches have joined together to form a group called “The United Refugee and Host Churches” (URHC), which focuses on church planting, youth ministries, and establishing a church leadership training school. The International Association for Refugees (IAFR), an American Christian ministry, has partnered with URHC for decades, providing financial assistance and educational support as determined by the URHC leadership. Twice a year, IAFR staff, along with one or two guests, travel to Kakuma to listen to the leaders, assess their material needs, alleviate their sense of isolation from the world, and provide training.

This is where my story intersects with theirs. In 2020 and 2023, my husband and I traveled to Kakuma with IAFR, where I taught pedagogy and trauma-informed counseling. On Sundays, our small group split up to preach in URHC churches. During both visits, I went to a mud-brick Episcopal church in the older part of the camp. The church is located in a walled compound that is devoid of grass but features a large Acacia tree whose shade serves as a gathering place for children’s Sunday school. As their guest in 2023, I was asked to bring a greeting from home and preach for 30 minutes with an interpreter. Before my turn, the congregation had been dancing and singing for nearly an hour, and they were eager for me to share a good story. I undoubtedly disappointed them in my retelling of the parable of the prodigal son, but they were happy to have me there, nonetheless.

After the service, I wait an hour for my turn to be picked up. During this time, I have a life-changing moment of awe. Maryam, a 30-year-old English-speaking deacon and mother, sits with me in the shade of a church wall. We drink tea, talk, and laugh about nothing in particular, mainly discussing our hopes for our children. This mundane conversation transports Maryam and me from the camp to the foot of the cross, where the extraordinary becomes ordinary, and we encounter Jesus and each other in our shared joy, brokenness, and humanity. Our differing earthly identities as a Sudanese refugee and an American professor fade away as sisterhood and friendship take hold. In that moment of awe, our identities become merely, and most importantly, beloved in Christ. Because of that precious hour, when my husband and I return to the U.S., our commitment to refugees resettling in the Seattle area grows even stronger as we volunteer with World Relief Western Washington to come alongside weary newcomers.

Awe nurtures a smaller self, directing our focus toward things vaster than we can imagine. It also invites us to embrace a more collective identity, diminishing our individual commitments, attachments, concerns, and goals.⁴ Just as it did for me that Sunday afternoon, awe offers us a glimpse into God’s paradoxical promise that dying to self is nothing but gain.

1. Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (Penguin Books, 2024), 11-12.
2. Michelle N. Shiota, Dacher Keltner, and Amanda Mossman. “The nature of awe: elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept,” Cognition and Emotion, 21, no. 5 (2007): 944–63.
3. Keltner, 12.
4. Paul K. Piff, Pia Dietze, Matthew Feinberg, Daniel M. Stancato, Dacher Keltner, and Kerry Kawakami. “Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108, no. 6 (2015): 884.