We can now add awe to diet and exercise in our pursuit of a healthy lifestyle. So writes Hope Reese in her article “How a Bit of Awe Can Improve Your Health.” Reese quotes Dr. Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkely, who defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.”

It’s also accessible to everyone and part of everyday life as Keltner writes in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Keltner says that awe “is its own thing,” and not one of the six basic emotions—anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear and sadness—that were identified in 1972.

I don’t know how we coped prior to 1972 with these emotions and awe, but Keltner and other experts are currently awed by awe and its impact on our health and well-being. A professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University points out that “intentional awe experiences, like walks in nature, collective movement, like dance or ceremony” improve our psychological well-being.

Awe hasn’t always meant nature walks or well-being. The archaic definition of awe is dread or terror, to fear greatly or to feel a great reluctance to meet or face, which underscores the audacity of Moses’s request of God in Exodus 33:18, “Please show me your glory.” (At least Moses said please.) God turned down Moses because of awe. God knew that no one could see his face and live. Instead, God showed Moses his heart—his goodness, his grace and his mercy.

Like Moses, David had a sense of this archaic awe in Psalm 51, but instead of asking to see God’s face, David asked God to hide his face from David’s sin. Like he did with Moses, God showed David his mercy, unfailing love and great compassion. Even Dr. Keltner would have to agree that this is awe, something so vast that it transcends our understanding of the world, especially in a world that finds retribution easier to understand than mercy and compassion. But God, who is rich in mercy, unfailing in his love and abounding in compassion, brings healing in his wings and light to people sitting in darkness.

This is the awe of Advent—vast transcendent visits of angels to a young girl, a carpenter and senior saints one minute and the night sky the next, proclaiming great news of great joy of a newborn baby who chose to enter the very world he created, full of grace and truth, unfailing love and great compassion, to save his people from their sins.

May we all be awed by awe this Advent.