Awe

In a compelling study in this vein, participants watched one of three videos. The first was a short clip from the television show 60 Minutes about Amy Biehl, a white American college student who was murdered by Black youths in South Africa. In their grief, her parents created the Amy Biehl Foundation (now called the Amy Foundation), funding youth programs that help underprivileged Black South Africans to better their lives. Or participants watched a feature about Joel Sonnenberg, who, at twenty-two months old, was badly burned when Reginald Dort slammed his truck into Sonnenberg’s family car while trying to crash into a woman he knew. Joel needed forty-five surgeries to survive. At Dort’s sentencing, which occurred years after the incident, Joel was the last to speak:

This is my prayer for you—that you may know that grace has no limits. We will not consume our lives with hatred because hatred brings only misery. We will surround our lives with love.

After watching one of these videos or a control video, the participants—white college students in the United States—could give money to the United Negro College Fund. The twist was that some of these white students had reported high levels of “social dominance orientation,” or SDO, an attitude that predicts increased prejudice toward Black people. Hearing the stories of Amy Biehl and Joel Sonnenberg, though, led participants to give more money to the United Negro College Fund, including white participants with strong SDO attitudes. The awe felt in encountering humanity’s better angels can counter toxic tribal tendencies.

Witnessing others’ acts of courage, kindness, strength, and overcoming activates different regions of the brain than those activated by physical beauty, namely cortical regions where our emotions translate to ethical action. These encounters lead to the release of oxytocin and activation of the vagus nerve. We often sense tears and goose bumps, our body’s signals that we are part of a community appreciating what unites us. When moved by the wonders of others, the soul in our bodies is awakened, and acts of reverence often quickly follow.

Reverence

As a child in Xalapa, Mexico—the “City of Flowers”—Yuyi Morales passed the days wondering about extraterrestrials, sometimes hoping they would take her away. Years later, when her son was two months old, her partner learned that his grandfather in San Francisco was very ill. They worried that Grandpa Ernie wouldn’t get to meet his only grandchild, so they left in a rush, saying goodbye only to Yuyi’s mother.

Once in San Francisco, Yuyi was prevented by immigration law from returning to Mexico. Lonely and isolated, speaking only a few words of English, she struggled. Caring for the new baby exhausted her. She knew no one. Every day, she cried.

So she took to walking.

She wandered the streets of San Francisco with her son in a stroller. One day, she discovered a public library and ventured in. There, in the quiet of a public space, a librarian transformed Yuyi’s life. She introduced Yuyi to books. Awestruck, Yuyi would learn to read English. She began sketching scenes from her imagination, which would become her own children’s books, including two about people of moral beauty to her—Frida Kahlo and Cesar Chavez—that have won international awards, most notably the Caldecott Medal. Yuyi’s most recent book, Dreamers, has an unusual hero—a librarian, archiving the wonders of moral beauty, and allowing goodness its own speech

for the people checking out books.

When I spoke with Yuyi, she shared a letter of gratitude she sent to the librarian who inspired the story, whose name is Nancy:

Hola Nancy,

Do you remember me? I could never forget you. True, at first I might have been scared of you, guardian at your desk, and too close to the basket of baby books that my son always walked towards when we entered this unbelievable place. The children’s book section of the Western Addition public library.