What makes something sacred? According to actor and author Rainn Wilson, it depends on how we look at it. 

At A Night of Awe and Wonder, hosted by Freethink Media and the John Templeton Foundation, Rainn Wilson recalls the most holy night of his life: when his wife and newborn survived a near-fatal birth. Looking into his son’s eyes for the first time, he describes feeling God, the universe, and life in a way he never had before, or since. 

This brought him to a greater conclusion, that true sacred experience can be found beyond religion and ritual. In fact, it is our ability to experience awe and wonder that can unite us. It lives in acts of courage and kindness, and it’s our shared capacity for awe in the face of that beauty, Wilson suggests, that can bring us closer together.

RAINN WILSON: Hi everyone. I have not traveled to Mariana Trench. I've not spoken to whales. I haven't drank yak butter on the roof of the world. And my name is not Robot. But I did shoot a mayonnaise commercial in this space in 2011.

A hundred percent true. I have also a confession to make. Yes, I am an actor and I should be doing a, a brave and authentic and incredible off the cuff performance. But I actually, I wrote out my speech. I'm gonna be reading it. Okay, don't judge.

We're here to talk about awe and wonder. These are two of my favorite words. They're kind of like Hi and five, Simon and Garfunkel, free Sushi, Dwight Yoakum.

But I wanna talk about two other words that for me intersect with the same majesty and transcendence of awe and wonder, sacred and beauty. These two words, sacred and beauty. They're not just platitudes, they're not just nice ideas that feel good as the world unravels. And we are more divided than ever, and we want to undertake a spiritual revolution. All wonder, beauty and the sacred may be superpowers that we can utilize to unite us and inspire us forward.

So let's start with sacred. What is sacred? How do we define it? The most sacred place that I can conceive of is a drab hallway lit by flickering fluorescent lights lined by folding chairs in the back of a crappy hospital in Van Nuys, California. Why? Because that is where my wife and son almost died during childbirth after the 2:00 AM hemorrhaging and the ambulance and even more bleeding and no available rooms, and the nurse being unable to find my son's heartbeat and my wife being placed on a bed in the hallway and the staff being unable to reach our doctor on his pager. And five units of blood lost and the cord wrapped around our baby's little neck and the panic and the prayers, one. Dr. Farha burst into the delivery room at 4:00 AM bellowing for a C-section, and successfully cut young Walter McKenzie Wilson out of his traumatized mother's womb holiday Rhine Horn.

My wife overcame pain and terror with a power that was greater than that of any Marvel superhero when she was thankfully pronounced stable. And three minute old, Walter was brought to my trembling arms in that same hallway, and I gazed into his bright blue eyes. I felt God, the universe meaning hope, life and energy in a way I never have before or since.

You see sacred doesn't mean a church or a shrine or a holy relic or a monument. Sacred can mean linoleum and aluminum chairs and chipped paint, and the smell of Lysol at four in the morning.

Sacred can also be an action, not just a place, it can be a sacrifice. Notice the root word, sacker from Latin meaning holy in both words. The sacrifice that women like holiday make to carry the children of planet earth and bring them painfully dramatically, and with a miraculous explosion of love and guts into the world, holy is what we make it. It's how we experience it. And like I said, at the top, it can heal our society too.

The concept of preserving and honoring something sacred is a force that can unite folks on all sides of any political, ideological, or religious spectrum. For some nature is sacred. For some it might be an altar to part of the population, the awe and miracle of the cosmos and dark matter evoke a holy magic. For others, it might be a battlefield where many brave men lost their lives. For some, it's the right of self-expression. For others, it's the right to worship.

That is the most revered in my 2023 book, soul Boom. Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. I wrote at great length about my pilgrimage to Haifa and AKA Israel, and visiting the most holy sights in the world of my faith tradition, the Bahai faith. I sought to evoke the profound feelings that blossomed in my heart and the profound meaning that the prayerful trip brought up in me. And I explored how and why it's so difficult to tap into what is consecrated in our mundane lives.

But the thing is, you don't need to visit holy shrines to create a pilgrimage. You see those two words, they go together, sacred and pilgrimage. I took 12-year-old Walter to visit my childhood homes and schools and trees and playgrounds in Olympia and shoreline Washington. And that too was a kind of divinely inspired journey. The swing set at West Side Elementary School where I lost my last tooth, the parking lot at Shore Crest High School, where I made out with my first girlfriend on a date. And trust me, Walter's reaction was pure disgust. These were sacred sites for me in their way. And sharing them on this pilgrimage with my son had a kind of mysterious power.

It's challenging to find what is sacred in the modern world I live in, in suburban Los Angeles. There's a lot of dumpsters and freeway on ramps and donut shops and so many auto glass stores, endless power lines decorating the horizon. Can any of those things really be holy or considered beautiful even? Because isn't there an inherent beauty in the sacred?

And that brings me to the second word of the evening beauty. I literally have the most beautiful uncle in the world. His name is Dr. Rhett Diener. I know he's not a model. He's not even a beautician or a social media influencer or even particularly handsome. In fact, he's, he's, he looks like a ghoul. He's a specialist in beauty and a retired psychology professor. Specifically, he studied the psychology of beauty and how it affects the ways we see the world, how we see each other, art, nature, and even the choices that we make. And it turns out that beauty is a lot more important than we think and get this, it may be the exact superpower that we humans need to make the world a better place.

Because contrary to contemporary western society, beauty is not about glamor makeup, Kardashian fashions and TikTok hacks. It's also not synonymous with sexual desire. Plato said, beauty is the splendor of truth. It is what is good, harmonious, pleasing, and sublime in art, nature and the acts we undertake. And most importantly, it's something we need to witness and appreciate in other people.

Uncle Rhet says things like this all the time. One of the most consistent findings of appreciating artistic beauty is that it causes us to be open-minded. The beauty appreciation trait in the current political climate, being open-minded is an important cure for stopping the demonizing of political parties that we do not belong to. This can also help bring about the unity that we might need to save the world. So wait, wait. You're saying wait. Beauty is what can save us from toxic partisan politics. Nonsense actor.

One of the areas he studies is something I had no idea existed. Moral beauty, internal beauty, beauty in action. Aristotle summed this up as the admiration of the inner qualities of another and how they present in their deeds, as well as in your own actions that are not done for gain or glory. But because of someone's excellence of character. Think Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat or a firefighter running into a burning building to save someone.

And what happens when you see and admire someone behaving with moral beauty? You feel awe uplift. And most importantly, the emotion of elevation. Elevation as named by the great social scientist, Jonathan Het, is what you feel in your heart when you experience beautiful human action. It elicits a flood of positive hormones like oxytocin that actually prompt one to engage in morally beautiful ways. Oneself. That's right. Beauty can call you to action. And isn't that the most sacred thing of all good deeds? Inspired by beauty, having what is called the beauty appreciation trait, as my uncle calls it, is also a positive indicator of wanting to improve oneself and become a better person. And according to the data, a love of moral beauty can also predict how much time you take out of your own life to be of service to others.

Similar things happen when you engage with and appreciate artistic or natural beauty. And this is across all cultures in the world. So perhaps one of the key missing ingredients needed for a spiritual revolution is beauty itself. Educating our children to appreciate and love beauty, training them and ourselves to see sacred beauty in all things, to engage in beautiful actions, to witness the moral beauty of others that propels us to praise worthy action. Perhaps beauty is really all we need to transform ourselves and our planet.

As we're hearing from many of the speakers here, it is impossible to separate awe and wonder, sacred and the beautiful from nature. It was actually at a Baha faith religious youth camp in Seabeck, Washington, where we sang for hours around a campfire and collected shells at the beach and prayed and meditated under a cathedral of Douglas Fs that I first discovered. Blissful interconnectedness with nature. Its inherent holiness, sacred and wonder. Without respect for nature, our hearts stiffen.

As the Lakota leader and author Luther Standing Bear wrote in 1933, the old Lakota was wise. He knew that a man's heart away from nature becomes hard. He knew that lack of respect for growing living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. And around the same time, black Elk, the O Lakota Holy Man wrote, let every step you take upon the earth be as a prayer.

Encouraging more people to make a spiritual connection with the sacred beauty of nature may sound ambitious, but in these disunified times, it is something that the political left and right could both potentially embrace. The left may find a sacred in science and in the beauty and interconnectedness of life. The right might find resonance in God's creation and the stewardship of agriculture and in the conservation of land and water.

For me, a visit to that sacred Van Nuys Hospital hallway may now be impossible, but holiday, my wife and I hold it's terrifying holiness in our hearts, and we will until the day we die. And for us, that crappy old hallway is the most beautiful, awe filled place in the entire world. Thank you.