Awe

Last night I returned from a mini-vacation to Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. It was lovely, but not relaxing - at least, not on the whole. We did too much running around on the 4-day trip, plus having to return to work the day after driving over 6 hours to get home (after having been up before 5:30 am) was not my idea of kicking-back. But it was a collection of great experiences.

I went on the trip with Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz in my hand, and a recent [wonderful] conversation about worship on my mind. I guess I'm saying I was in a contemplative mood all through the trip, and so my take on what I saw and felt kept coming back to that theme - worship, what I know it to be and what I want it to be.

The falls are . . . Incredible. Amazing. Breathtaking. Achingly beautiful. Powerful. And more. I got to stand above them, beside them, behind them, and nearly underneath them. I saw them during the day, and lit up at night. I watched the falls in the middle of a hot, sweaty crowd buzzing with excitement, and nearly by myself in a garden. I took pictures of the falls, I talked about the falls, I breathed in the mist of the falls, and I got drenched by the falls. The only thing I could have done to get closer to the falls was to jump in and go plunging over the cliff with the water.

As for that, taking a headlong dive would be difficult. It appears the Niagara Parks Commission was a little nervous on my behalf and erected fences and rails and other obstructions. So, while I was close to the falls, I was held back. Kept safe. No becoming one with nature for me.

Standing behind the falls in the tunnels, with the constant thunder of enough water to fill a million bathtubs every hour pouring over my head, and then beside the falls getting soaked on the observation deck while trying to take pictures without ruining my camera, I felt worshipful. Well, sometimes. It was distracting, what with all the other people in the way, trying to take pictures while getting soaked. In fact, the only thing that marred my trip was other people. Some people were just plain rude. But it was always annoying having to share space with other people wanting the same experience. Tourists getting in the way of my tour.

At the same time, I longed for one moment when everyone would have that individual ah-ha moment of silence, in awe of the spectacle we were all witnessing - but at the same time. The kind of moment when, together, we each transcend both the sameness and the differences of ourselves and are unified by the experience to which we were all drawn.

The closest I got to this was while I was on the Maid of the Mist, at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls. It got to the point where it was too wet for most of us to use our cameras, when we had to put away the devices by which we felt justified to step in front of others in order to get the perfect shot (which, for the most part, gets printed and put into a book at which we rarely ever look). We stopped looking through our various lenses and saw with our own eyes. We were at the foot of the falls, in the middle of the column of mist made as water pounded into water, looking up at a sight that had rendered us nearly unable to control our own experience.

It was then that the water in my eyes wasn't all mist. I was overcome - we were overcome - and we were together in awe.