Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

by Marcus J. Borg

Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) called them experiences of “the numinous,” that which is behind and sometimes shines through our experience of phenomena. Abraham Heschel (1907–72) called them moments of “radical amazement,” when our domestication of reality with language falls away and we experience “what is.” Martin Buber (1878–1965) spoke of them as “I-Thou” or “I-You” moments in which we encounter “what is” as a “you” rather than as an “it,” or an object. Abraham Maslow (1908–70) called them “peak experiences” that involve “cognition of being”—knowing the way things are. Mircea Eliade (1907–86), one of the most influential twentieth-century scholars of comparative religions, called them experiences of “the golden world,” referring to their luminosity. Others have referred to them as moments of “unitive consciousness” and “cosmic consciousness.”