Some encounters with the sacred soothe us. Others undo us.

Mysterium tremendum names the mystery, awe, terror, and fascination we can feel in the presence of something far greater than ourselves.

Sometimes that arrives through beauty. Sometimes through grief. Sometimes through a landscape so vast it reminds us how small we are.

And sometimes awe has teeth.

I sat in a room with a man who’s been placed on hospice care. He’s mobile. He gets around with a walker. He feeds himself, crunches on ice for half an hour straight, and watches Fox News like it’s oxygen. He's not actively dying — at least not in any way I’ve come to recognize in my years of holding space for the sacred, painful, beautiful process of death.

But he’s “eligible.”