vulnerability on a volcano

and how awe shows me God is love

I felt awe in Hawaii. It’s a feeling rare enough that even when you expect to feel it, it’s unexpected when you actually do.

We headed out to Volcano National Park at around 5AM, taking advantage of our 6 hour jet lag from New York. We were told the best time to see the volcano was at night, which means most people go visit the park during sunset and stay till evening. The last time this volcano erupted was decades ago and so for weeks the park’s been packed around that time. But during dawn to sunrise, not so much.

We drove along Crater Rim Drive, the road pitch black except our headlights and the taillights of the few cars ahead of us who had the same idea as us. About half a mile to the entrance of the park, Becky pointed out towards my window to an orange glow in the sky. Now theoretically we knew we were going to see a volcano, but it didn’t become real until we realized that the sky was orange from the glow of lava spewing up from the earth. A surge of awe coursed through my body. My mind went blank and did my best to keep us on the road while shouting, “Oh my God, you’ve got to be kidding me!”

We parked the car and walked the short distance the crater overlook. What we saw made my jaw slacken, my breath deepen, and left me speechless trying to understand what was happening. After a while I just stood there holding my wife’s hand realizing we were far, far away from Queens, NY.

Recently, I’ve been trying to understand how I can be more in tune with my body and emotions. I’ve always said my body is a blunt instrument. I’m healthy in that I don’t get sick often, but I also don’t feel relaxed and free. Being emotionally fluid or somatically sensitive are very foreign concepts to me. I was never taught what that meant or shown what that looked like. The mind was championed over the body or soul. My experience of myself, my community, and God centered around what I knew to be true theoretically or theologically, not what we experienced, felt, or sensed in my body.

But standing there at the crater watching an volcano erupt in front of me, my body and emotions relished and fully invited the moment while my mind short circuited trying to understand what it was seeing. Once I stopped trying to figure out or control what was happening and give into the experience, I felt really vulnerable. I felt myself open up, get out of my head, and welcome in joy and awe.

The one thing I could do was take photos. I pointed one of the best cameras money could buy at the scene in front of me, but quickly realized how futile it was to even try and capture anything close to what I was experiencing. I mean, how can it when my mind can’t even understand what it saw? Do I think a sensor can do any better? Photos never do justice to this kind of beauty, especially the beauty of Hawaii. When we came back to the house and I was editing these photos I realized the point of the photo isn’t to capture what happened.

No, the photos serve as evidence of when I was in those rare moments of awe and how awe helps me remember that there are many things I don’t understand and much of that is beautiful, not threatening.

These photos remind me that the universe is a fundamentally benevolent place and the God who created it is fundamentally loving, not petty or cruel. Awe puts me in my place, and from where I am I can trust that whatever is outside my control is for my good, and whatever is in my control I must steward to the best of my ability. I can open my heart and it will be accepted, not broken.

As the sun rose, the light from the lava dimmed and we decided to walk along the path around the crater. As I was just starting to process what I saw down in the crater, I looked up and I was dumbstruck with awe once again.