When I was a teenager I had the good fortune of playing with this wonderful youth orchestra in Madison, Wisconsin that got to perform in the concert hall at the university there. More than once while playing with that orchestra, I had the experience of feeling myself dissolve and expand out into the great harmonious body of sound that miraculously – it felt sometimes – was created through us together. In an orchestra most of the time you don’t play to stand out, you play to blend. When you really get into the music you’re playing, you can experience how each person through their instrument becomes like a living cell in a larger super-organism.
Now, we were a bunch of ambitious teenagers who could be competitive and self-conscious and vain and all the rest of it (on top of that, I was a violinist, and violinists have reputation – justified – of feeling particularly self-important). But when we worked together – wow, something astonishingly beautiful could come to life and sweep through.
I remember in particular feeling swept away into Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero.” The piece has this beautiful theme that starts with one voice, then is continued with another, and moves through the orchestra, and repeats and repeats and repeats, propelled forward by this steady, insistent rhythm, becoming a hypnotic whirl of dance which steadily builds and builds, gaining force and volume until it crests in this overwhelming wave of sound. In the climax of it all, my heart felt like it burst and I was lost in the midst of it, pouring myself through the violin to become one of the churning, frothing water molecules in the crashing waves. Afterwards I was stunned. It felt like what had happened was sacred.
Emile Durkheim calls these kinds of experiences, experiences of “collective effervescence.” They are one of the common ways that human beings experience Awe. Awe is the overall theme we are exploring the autumn, the role of awe in our lives of faith and service.
To a large degree, it is really good for us to find ways to experience the awe we feel through sharing “collective effervescence” together. It can be an important part of healthy religion and healthy community, opening us to shared spirit and connection and beauty and purpose.
Music is one of the common ways we experience collective awe, not only playing music, but experiencing music together at a concert. Other common means for collective awe are shared dance, movement, rhythm – which unfortunately are less common in our culture than most other cultures. Some big shared effort or labor can lead to a sense of, Wow, we are all in this together. Shared experiences of communal prayer and worship certainly are common ways folks experience collective awe, or of shared stillness in a sacred space, or also of more ecstatic expressions of praise before God, such as we heard in our scripture readings for today.
We can experience collective awe at sports games or parades or political rallies or fireworks displays or circus performances and on and on … across times and cultures, human beings have been seeking and finding ways of enjoying a sense of larger connection and unity together.
Modern science has found that, by and large, these kinds of experiences are good for health and well-being, they can even be helpful in healing from trauma. Research has also shown that being deprived of experiences of collective awe – as is very common in our culture of increased isolation – has negative consequences to health and well-being and pro-social behavior. Experiences of connection with each other are important for a vital, life-giving sense of purpose and belonging.
Yet … experiences of collective awe are not always healthy or good in-and-of-themselves. Like anything when it comes to human beings, it has a shadow side.
Think of bloody Roman colosseum games, with stadiums full of people delirious with shared delight over the desperate life-and-death struggles of the unfortunate souls thrown into the ring. Or think of the Nuremburg rallies of the Nazis: the people there were ecstatic with the sense of shared belonging, shared fate, shared purpose … These are particularly horrible examples but, unfortunately, these kinds of things are common across times and cultures, and the social dynamics exist with us. This shadow side is easier to see in other cultures and times than in our own; but we have the shadow side too. It is part of our fallen human nature that one way people want to come together to feel a shared awe before their collective unity is by banding together to attack a scapegoat, and to celebrate and revel in the power of their violence to destroy that enemy.
We have to be on guard against this dynamic, especially in a time of such vicious division, in a time when some in our society are even hungry to bring back grisly public executions.
We have to be on guard against this dynamic in our religious belonging. Our big and messy and beautiful Christian tradition contains within it both poison and medicine when it comes to collective effervescence, collective violence and collective healing. The passage from Psalm 149 we heard for our reading today is beautiful and uplifting, right?
Alleluia!
Sing to YHWH a new song!
Sing praise in the assembly of the faithful
Let Israel be glad in its Maker;
let the children of Zion rejoice in their God.
Let them praise God’s Name with festive dance;
let them sing praise with timbrel and harp.
For YHWH loves the people,
and crowns the lowly with salvation…
We stopped there in our reading this morning. But if you read the rest of the Psalm, this is what it goes on to say:
… Let the high praises of God be in their throats
and two-edged swords in their hands,
to execute vengeance on the nations
and punishment on the peoples,
to bind their kings with fetters
and their nobles with chains of iron,
to execute on them the judgment decreed.
This is glory for all his faithful ones.
Praise the Lord!
This is in our religious tradition, as it is in many others.
Yet, against these and other calls to sanctify violence, our tradition also contains the truly unifying and healing and peaceable vision of the Prophets. Jesus himself embodied in his very being God’s universal and unconditional Love as he taught peace. In this way, Jesus confronted collective sin-sickness with the healing power that comes through our greater belonging in the Realm of Heaven.
One example is the story in which Jesus came upon a mob of folks hungry for the terrible ecstasy of executing a woman they accused of moral impurity. Jesus managed to burst their bubble by showing them the sham and shame of their eagerness to scapegoat. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Jesus challenges us to disenthrall ourselves from the false and small ways we try to find belonging which lead to violence and death. Jesus invites us to the much greater belonging we can find together through the Spirit of the Living God and the ways that Spirit can lead us into the embrace of the mysterious presence of the Realm of Heaven on Earth.
This is what Jesus’ disciples experienced together when the Holy Spirit broke in upon them at Pentecost, that astonishing experience of collective effervescence, which led them to open their hearts, to open their closed, angry, and fearful hearts, and, with holy love and courage, seek to widen their embrace across all human boundaries. This set in motion the Spirit that has invited in and drawn together followers of Jesus, across space and time, to commune as one in the cosmic Body of Christ.
We can experience a taste of this together in whatever holy moments – big or small – that we share, when we come together around the intention of becoming open to the loving, healing, and uplifting Spirit of the living God.
Delivered Sunday, October 25, 2025, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge
