The trouble with most of us isn’t active
or deliberate wickedness; it’s lethargy, absence of caring, lack of involvement
in life. To keep our bodies comfortable
and well-fed and entertained seems to be all that matters. But the more successful we are at this, the
more entombed the soul becomes in solid, immovable flesh. We no longer hear the distant trumpet and go
toward it; we listen to the pipes of Pan and fall asleep. How can I rouse my people and make them yearn
for something more than pleasant, socially acceptable ways of escaping from
life? How can I make them want to thrust
forward into the unknown, into the world of testing and trusting their own
spirit? Oh, how I wish I knew! Quoted by Arthur Gordon in Touched
by Wonder.
THE BIBLE
Oh Lord, our
Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what
are mortals that you are mindful of them, the children of mortals that you care
for them? Psalm 8, verses 1, 3-4.
As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a
woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. Ecclesiastes 11:5.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice
it have a good understanding. Psalm
111:10.
Think of us in
this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. I Corinthians 4:1.
BROWN , WILLIAM P.
Although Homo
sapiens (“wise human”) may be too self-congratulatory, there is no doubt that
we are Homo admirans, the “wondering human.” The
Seven Pillars of Creation, p. 4.
“Mystery,” of
course, can mean anything from the incomprehensible born of ignorance to the
surprising anomaly that invites explanation.
For me, mystery inspires awe and inquiry. Examples of mystery are the “unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics,” the remarkable intelligibility of nature,
something instead of nothing, the emergence of life, and God’s love for the
world. Mystery acknowledges that, while
we cannot know absolutely everything about say, a particular ecosystem, there
is nothing to stop us from knowing more about it, infinitely so. Mystery recognizes the provisional nature of
our explanations and the inexhaustibility of our investigations. The world will always be more than we
know. Mystery is being grasped by
something larger than ourselves, ever compelling us to stretch, rather than
limit, the horizons of our awareness.
Under the rubric of wonder, mystery has its place alongside
understanding. ibid. p. 5.
BUECHNER, FREDERICK
Religion as a word points essentially, I think, to that area of human
experience where in one way or another man happens upon mystery as a summons to
pilgrimage, a come-all-ye; where he is led to suspect the reality of splendors
that he cannot name; where he senses meanings no less overwhelming because they
can only be hinted at in myths and rituals, in foolish, left-handed games and
cloudy novels; where in great laughter perhaps and certain silences he glimpses
a destination that he can never know fully until he reaches it. The Alphabet of Grace, p. 75.
If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything
I was trying to say both as a novelist and a preacher, it would be something
like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it
is. In the boredom and pain of it no
less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the
holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key
moments, and life itself is grace. Listening to Your Life, p. 2.
There are mysteries which you can solve by taking thought. For instance, a murder
mystery whose mysteriousness must be dispelled in order for the truth to be
known.
There are other mysteries which do not conceal a truth to think your way
to but whose truth is itself the mystery.
The mystery of your self, for example. The more you try to fathom it, the more
fathomless it is revealed to be. No
matter how much of your self you are able to objectify and examine, the
quintessential, living part of yourself will always elude you, i.e., the part
that is conducting the examination. Thus
you do not solve the mystery, you live the mystery. And you do that not by fully knowing yourself
but by fully being yourself.
To say that God is a mystery is to say that you can never nail him
down. Even on Christ the nails proved
ultimately ineffective. Wishful
Thinking, p. 76.
CAPON, ROBERT FARRAR
But most of the preaching I hear in the
contemporary church is so bereft of the kind of astonishment – so shriveled
down to platitudes about life enhancement and moral uplift, so vapidly
“spiritual,” so un-earthy, so unlike the Jesus whose words leap like
grasshoppers and devour like fire – that it’s too tame to raise even a single
hair… We are in a war between dullness and astonishment. The Astonished
Heart, pp. 119-120.
CHESTERTON, G.
K.
This at least seems
to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of
this book. How can we contrive to be at
once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? … How can this world give us at once the
fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour
of being our own town? … We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of
wonder and an idea of welcome. We need
to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. Orthodoxy, pp. 4-5.
Mysticism keeps men
sane. As long as you have mystery you
have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.
ibid, p. 24.
Because children
have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore
they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and
the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people
are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to
exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to
the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic
necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy
separately, but has never got tired of making them.
ibid. p. 61
Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?
Evening
DEAN, KENDRA CREASY AND FOSTER, RON
The hypertext generation has made it excruciatingly clear that
evangelization must aim for Christian discernment, not simply Christian
information. Believing in God is not the
issue; believing God matters is the issue. The signature quality of adolescence is no
longer lawlessness, but awelessness. Inundated with options and the stress that
comes from having to choose among them, contemporary adolescents have lost
their compass to the stars, have forgotten the way
that points to transcendence. With so
much vying for young people’s finite attention, the responsibility of choosing
among endless alternatives is overwhelming, and the path to transcendence
disappears beneath a bramble of competing claims on the soul. So go ahead, youth say to the church, impress
me. When everything is true, nothing is
true. Whatever.
The Godbearing Life, p. 15.
If we cannot recover a sense of the numinous, of the sheer mystery of transendence-in-our-midst, our worship will satisfy other
needs perhaps, but not the spiritual hunger that makes authentic worship
unique. Quoted by C.
Kirk Hadaway and David Roozen
in Rerouting the Protestant Mainstream, p. 86.
GATES
OF PRAYER (A
Jewish Prayerbook)
HOW FILLED WITH AWE (a prayer)
Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among
miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with
seeing and our minds with knowing; let there be moments when Your Presence,
like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk.
Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that
the bush burns unconsumed.
And we, clay touched by God, will reach
out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder:
How filled with awe is this place, and
we did not know it!
Blessed is the Eternal One, the holy
God! p. 170.
MEDITATION
The universe was brought forth by an inexhaustible creative power. It pours out torrents of energy still. Awesome and wondrous and mysterious, it is
the source of our being.
Matter was formed out of chaos.
Time passed, time beyond imagining; matter crossed a boundary and became
life. Time passed, and life gave birth
to - us!
Our universe is being formed at every moment. We too are not yet grown to full height. But ours is a special gift, for a special
task: to help in our own shaping. For we
were made to be free: free to love or to hate, free to destroy or to create.
We are like mountain climbers on a perilous ascent. Often we stumble; sometimes it seems we may
dash ourselves on the rocks below. But
there is hope, for dimly we have seen a vision, and felt a presence, and
faintly heard a voice not ours.
The blazing stars, particles too small to see, the smile of children,
the eyes of lovers, melody filling the soul, a flood of joy surprising the
heart, mystery at the core of the plainest things - all tell us that we are not
alone. They open our eyes to the vision
that steadies and sustains us. p. 217.
TO SEE THE WORLD ANEW
Were the sun to rise but once a year, we
would all cry out:
How great are Your
works, O God, and how glorious! Our
hymns would rise up, our thanks would ascend.
O God, Your wonders are endless, yet we do not see!
Give us new eyes, O God; restore our
childhood sense of wonder.
Then we shall explore the richness of
our being: we shall taste ecstasy and sorrow, know mystery and revelation.
Give us, O God, vision to see the world
anew.
And we will give thanks; as we have been
blessed, so shall we give blessing.
Give us understanding, O God; help us to
know we are blessed.
pp. 361-362
HAMMARSKJOLD, DAG
God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our
lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder,
the source of which is beyond all reason. Markings
(Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1964) p. 56.
HEFNER, PHILIP
At stake here is what we usually call metaphysics or the construction of
myth. The human situation I have just
alluded to is one in which persons are challenged to put together frameworks of
meaning that can encompass what they know, what they believe they must do, what
they must obey, and what strikes awe in their hearts and minds. Zygon, June
1996, Vol. 31, Number 2.
HESCHEL, ABRAHAM JOSHUA
The surest way
to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of
worship is to take things for granted.
Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.
Abraham Joshua Heschel,
God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, New York, 1955) p. 43.
The profound and perpetual awareness of the wonder of being has become a
part of the religious consciousness of the Jew.
Three times a day we pray:
We
thank Thee...
For
Thy miracles which are daily with us,
For Thy continual marvels...
We are trained in maintaining our sense of wonder by uttering a prayer
before the enjoyment of food. Each time
we are about to drink a glass of water, we remind ourselves of the eternal
mystery of creation, "Blessed be Thou...by Whose word all things come into
being." A trivial act and a
reference to the supreme miracle....
This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience
commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom
of all things. ibid. pp. 48-49
Awe, in this sense, is more than an emotion; it is a way of
understanding. Awe is itself an act
of insight into meaning greater than ourselves. The meaning of awe is to realize that life
takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an
individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era. Awe enables us to perceive in the world
intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite
significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple. ibid. pp.74-75 (Emphasis added)
According to the Bible the principal religious virtue is yirah. What
is the nature of yirah? The word has two meanings: fear and awe. Fear is the anticipation and expectation of
evil or pain, as contrasted with hope which is the anticipation of good. Awe, on the other hand, is the sense of
wonder and humility inspired by the sublime or felt in the presence of
mystery. Awe, unlike fear, does not make
us shrink from the awe-inspiring object, but on the contrary, draws us near to
it. This is why awe is compatible with
both love and joy. ibid. pp.76-77
The sense of wonder and transcendence must not become "a cushion
for the lazy intellect." It must
not be a substitute for analysis where analysis is possible; it must not stifle
doubt where doubt is legitimate. It
must, however, remain a constant awareness if man is to remain true to the
dignity of God's creation, because such awareness is the spring of all creative
thinking. ibid.
p. 51.
To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the
mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the
inconceivable surprise of living. It is
all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Man’s Quest for God. p. 5.
In every mind there is an enormous store of not-knowing, of being
puzzled, of wonder, of radical amazement.
Man’s Quest for God, p. 139.
“The way to faith,” writes Abraham Heschel, “leads through acts of wonder and radical amazement. Awe precedes faith; it is the root of faith. We must grow in awe in order to reach faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith.” As we have seen, we are seriously impoverished in our longings, and because of this our capacity for awe and wonder is impaired. We live in a time when faith is thin, because our aching for what is above and beyond us has been anaesthetized and our capacity for wonder reduced to clever tricks. Passion for Pilgrimage, pp. 145-146.
KING, Dr. MARTIN LUTHER, Jr.
In
a real sense everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not
see. Plato was right: "The visible is a shadow cast by the
invisible." And so God is still around. All of our knowledge, all of our
developments, cannot diminish his being one iota. These new advances have
banished God neither from the microcosmic compass of the atom nor from the
vast, unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. The more we learn about this
universe, the more mysterious and awesome it becomes. God is still here. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "The Measure
of a Man" page 54.
KUSHNER, LAWRENCE
Jewish tradition
says that the splitting of the Red Sea was the greatest miracle ever
performed. It was so extraordinary that
on that day even a common servant beheld more than all the miracles
beheld by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel combined. And yet we have one midrash that mentions two Israelites, Reuven and Shimon, who had a different experience.
Apparently the bottom of the sea, though safe to walk on, was not
completely dry but a little muddy, like a beach at low tide. Reuven stepped into
it and curled his lip. “What is this
muck?”
Shimon
scowled, “There’s mud all over the place!”
“This
is just like the slime pits of Egypt!” replied Reuven.
“What’s
the difference?” Complained
Shimon. “Mud here, mud there;
it’s all the same.”
And so it went
for the two of them, grumbling all the way across the bottom of the sea. And, because they never once looked up, they
never understood why on the distant shore, everyone else was singing songs of
praise. For Reuven and Shimon the miracle never
happened. (Shemot Rabba
24.1)
Call it the difference between epistemology and piety. In epistemology if a tree falls in the forest
and no one is there to hear, it may or may not make a sound. In piety if a miracle happens and no one
notices, it did not happen. Each miracle
requires at least one person to experience the miracle, even if, like Jacob, only
in retrospect.
Now Jacob begins to ponder the events of his life in a new way. A dimension of what has come to be called
“the spiritual” now lies open. “If God
was here, and I didn’t know, then perhaps God has been other places also.”
Eyes Remade for Wonder, pp. 11 - 12.
L’ENGLE, MADELEINE
Probably the worst thing that has happened to our understanding of
reality has been our acceptance of ourselves as
consumers. Our greed is consuming the
planet, so that we may quite easily kill this beautiful earth by daily
pollution without ever having nuclear warfare.
Sex without love consumes, making another person an object, not a
subject. Can we change our
vocabulary and our thinking? To do so
may well be a matter of life and death.
Consumers do not understand that we must live not by greed and
self-indulgence but by observing and contemplating the wonder of God’s universe
as it is continually being revealed to us.
Glimpses of Grace, pp. 98-99.
A DOSE OF WONDER
We daily have to make choices between good and evil, and it is not
always easy, or even possible, to tell the difference between the two. Whenever we make a choice of action, the
first thing to ask ourselves is whether it is creative or destructive. Will it heal, or will it wound? Are we doing something to make ourselves look
big and brave, or because it is truly needed?
Do we know the answers to these questions? Not always, but we will never know unless we
ask them. And we will never dare to ask
them if we close ourselves off from wonder.
When I need a dose of wonder I wait for a clear night and go look for
the stars. In the city I see only a few,
but only a few are needed. In the
country the great river of the Milky Way streams across the sky, and I know
that our planet is a small part of that river of stars, and my pain of
separation is healed.
Dis-aster makes me think of dis-grace. Often the wonder of the stars is enough to
return me to God’s loving grace. ibid. pp. 65-66.
AWE FULL
Oh, I am in awe of the maker of galaxies and geese, stars and starfish,
mercury and men (male and female).
Sometimes it is rapturous awe; sometimes it is the numinous dread Jacob
felt. Sometimes it is the humble awe of
knowing that ultimately I belong to God, to the Maker whose thumb print is on
each one of us. And that is
blessing. ibid. P. 196.
LERNER, MICHAEL
At
the heart of our existence is a mystery—and various spiritual traditions have
come into existence as a response to this primary mystery—the mystery that
there is anything at all, the mystery that the universe seems to have a consciousness
and a meaning that transcends our daily experience.
It
is the reality of human experience that at our core we respond to the universe
with a sense of awe and wonder at creation. We are dazzled by the
incomprehensible fact of being itself. Through history, we have responded to
this sense of awe and wonder with song, with prayers, with dance, with
theology, with philosophy, with great art and architecture, with a sense of
humility and a recognition that there is something that is both part of us and
beyond us, something which we cannot name or control. It is from this sense of
awe that the most profound wisdom springs. Abraham Joshua Heschel
used to teach a very profound notion about wisdom: wisdom may not come from
accumulating facts or information about how things work or how things can be
made to work. This kind of information has its place—in Habermas'
terms it is knowledge that satisfies a particular kind of human interest: the
interest in control and domination. But there is an aspect of the world that
cannot be controlled or dominated—and that is where wisdom begins.
"Humanity," Heschel used to say, "will
not perish from want of information, but from a want of appreciation."
“The State of the Spirit” Tikkun, May/June
2002.
LEWIS. C.S.
In a way, I
quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk
to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, “I’ve no use for
all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a
religious man too. I know there’s
a God. I’ve felt him; out alone
in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery.
And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and
formulas about him. To anyone who’s met
the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!” Now in a sense I quite agreed with that
man. I think he had probably had a real
experience of God in the desert. And
when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really
was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at
the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic,
he is turning from something real to something less real: turning from real
waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to
remember about it. In the first place,
it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing
the real Atlantic. In that way it has
behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the
beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all
those different experiences together. In
the second place, if you want to go anywhere the map is absolutely
necessary. As long as you are content
with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a
map. But the map is going to be more use
than walks on the beach if you want to get to America. Mere Christianity, pp. 119-120.
LOUTH, ANDREW
Distinguish between the Mysterious and the Problematic. A problem is something met with which bars my
passage. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery, on the other hand, is something in
which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is therefore not to be before
me in its entirety. It is as though in
this province the distinction between in me and before me loses
its meaning.
A problem is a temporary hindrance, and a proper response to it is to
attempt to remove it. The mysterious is
quite different: it does not so much confront me, as envelop me, draw me into
itself; it is not a temporary barrier, but a permanent focus of my
attention. They do overlap, though, or
at least often appear to do so; for what confronts me as a puzzle, a riddle,
may be either a genuine mystery, or simply a problem. Sometimes we are presented with a problem,
the solution of which precipitates us into mystery...Marcel speaks of ‘the
transition from problem to mystery.
There is an ascending scale here; a problem conceals a mystery in so far
as it is capable of awakening ontological overtones (the problem of survival
for instance).
For it is not a matter of solving a mystery, but of participating in it.
Discerning the Mystery, (Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1983) pp. 68-69.
In recent years several theologians have actually returned to the idea
that the notion of mystery lies at the heart of Christian theology. Karl Barth in his Church Dogmatics sees the mystery of God’s self-revelation as
the heart of Christian theology. He
speaks of a God who reveals himself as mystery, who makes himself
known as the One who is Unknowable: ‘God himself veils Himself and in the very
process – which is why we should not dream of intruding into the mystery –
unveils himself.’
This unveiling through veiling takes place in the Incarnation: so the
section of the Church Dogmatics on the
Incarnation is called ‘The Mystery of Revelation’. Karl Rahner, too,
speaks in very similar terms. Theology
is not concerned with the elucidation of mysteries which will eventually be
revealed in the beatific vision – mysteries reduced to what one might call
eschatological problems. Rather,
theology is concerned with the mystery of God, the mystery of the triune God
who gives himself to us in love in the Incarnation of the Son. Rahner argues that
there are three fundamental mysteries which lie at the heart of Christian
theology; the mysteries of the Trinity, of the Incarnation, and of the
divinization of man in grace and glory.
He concludes his discussion by saying, ‘There are these three mysteries
in Christianity, no more and no fewer, and the three mysteries affirm the same
thing: that God has imparted himself to us through Jesus Christ in his Spirit
as he is in himself, so that the inexpressible nameless mystery which reigns in
us and over us should be in itself the immediate blessedness of the spirit
which knows, and transforms itself into love.’
The notion that Christian theology is to be seen as concerned with the
mystery of God, the trinitarian God who loved us in
Christ and calls us to participate in the mystery which he is, suggests to me
that the main concern of theology is not so much to elucidate anything, as to
prevent us, the Church, from dissolving the mystery that lies at the heart of
the faith – dissolving it, or missing it altogether, by failing truly to engage
with it. And this is what the heresies
have been seen to do, and why they have been condemned. ibid. pp. 70-71.
And as Josef Pieper remarks,’the unique and
original relation to being that Plato calls “theoria”
can only be realized in its pure state through the sense of wonder, in that
purely receptive attitude to reality, undisturbed and unsullied by the
interjection of the will’, and Pieper goes on to underline the place of wonder
in philosophy. It is wonder at the
mystery of being, at the fact that things are at all: wonder expressed in the
age-old cry that Heidegger calls the basic metaphysical question: ‘Why, after
all, should there be such a thing as being?
Why not just nothing?’ Such a capacity for wonder can be warped or
distorted in various ways. A dulled
sensibility will not feel wonder at the mystery of everyday being it will need
the unusual, the sensational, to arouse a sense of wonder. Wonder shakes a man, it disturbs him. And it is this negative, unsettling effect
which is all that philosophy since Descartes has noticed. Wonder becomes reduced to doubt, the doubt
that threatens a man’s intellectual being: if for Socrates wonder was the
beginning of philosophy, for Descartes and his followers it is doubt that is
the beginning of philosophy.
But, asks Pieper, ‘does the true sense of wonder really lie in uprooting
the mind and plunging it into doubt?
‘The innermost meaning of wonder is fulfilled in a deepened sense of
mystery.’ Doubt is the beginning of
philosophy which ends up as true knowledge when doubt has been left
behind. Pieper points out how different
this is from the traditional concept of philosophy, which was precisely philo-sophia.
The inner form of philosophizing is virtually
identical with the inner form of wonder.’ ibid. pp. 142-144.
McLAREN, BRIAN
If I were to sum up
what I have learned about evangelism from Alice and so many people like here in
the last ten years, here is what I would say: Postmodern people don’t want a God shrunken to fit
modern tastes. More Ready than You
Realize, p.52.
I simply tried to
help people imagine what it would be like to live in a world that really was
God’s creation. In such a world, I
suggested, there is nothing purely “objective” – meaning there is nothing that
does not have a personal value attached to it. Why? Because if God is Creator, and God has feelings
for everything God has made, then every atom in the universe is not a neutral
objective object; rather it is the artwork – beloved artwork – of a Creator who
values every square centimeter of space, every moment in time, every quark, muon, gluon, neutrino, and proton; every whale, sparrow,
chipmunk, and child. In other words, aw
we wander through the universe, we are not just encountering meaningless stuff;
rather we are walking through an art gallery, filled with objects full of
meaning, expressiveness, revelation of the Creator’s heart, intelligence,
compassion and whimsy. Ibid. p. 94.
The beauty of “In
the beginning God created” should make us should make us giddy with joy and
speechless with wonder for decades, leaving us little time to argue over … over
stuff I don’t even want to dignify by mentioning here. Ibid. p.95.
Gregory of Nyssa of
the fourth century once said, “Concepts create idols. Only wonder
understands.” Martin Luther reputedly
reflected this realization: “If I could understand one grain of wheat, I would
die of wonder.” Ibid. p. 146.
MOLTMAN, JURGEN
The Greek philosophers therefore
called the deepest ground of knowing wonder. In wonder the senses are opened for the
immediate impression of the world. In
wonder the things perceived penetrate the sense fresh and unfiltered. They impose themselves on us. They make and impression on us and we are
impressed. In wonder, things are perceived for what they are for the first time. God
for a Secular Society, p.150.
People who can no
loner be astonished, people who have got used to everything, people who
perceive only as a matter of routine and react accordingly: people who live like this let reality pass
them by. Every chance is singular and
unique. That is its nature….The people who
have kept their original capacity for wonder sense the uniqueness of the
moment. Ibid. p.150.
Reality is always
more surprising than we are capable of imagining. “Concepts create idols, only wonder
understands,” said the wise Gregory of Nyssa.
People whose unique character we respect continue to astonish us, and
our wonder opens up the freedom for new future possibilities in our community
with them. The wonders of nature too
still astonish us, if in our busyness we can pause and sink into contemplation
of a flower or a tree or a sunset. But
the most astonishing thing of all seems to me to be the ground of the “being-there”
of all things, the ground whom we have to thank for
there being anything there at all. The
One we call God eludes our ideas, which nail him down, and our concepts which
try to bring him within our grasp; and yet he is closer to us than ourselves – interior intimo
meo, as Augustine
knew. For “in him we live and move and
have our being”. In “the darkness of the
lived moment” we become aware of God’s presence. Wonder is the inexhaustible foundation of our
community with each other, with nature, with God. Wonder is the beginning of every new
experience and the ground of our creative expectation of the new day. Ibid. pp. 151-152.
SCALIA, ELIZABETH
We have allowed
silence to become a gift forgotten, one we only consent to unwrap when all of
our alternative bows and strings have been unraveled, and our diversions have
been utterly played out. Our inability to be silent puts our minds and our
souls at a disadvantage, because it robs us of the ability to wonder, and if we
are not wondering at the impossible perfection of the world in its creation—if
we are not wondering at spinning atoms and Incarnations—then we are lost to
humility, and to experiencing gratitude.
And, without gratitude, we cannot develop a reasoned capacity for joy.
One of the most attractive things about G.K. Chesterton was the unending sense
of surprised delight he had for all creation, the world and everything in it.
He found newspaper ink to be as wonderful as beach glass, which—it went without
saying—was as marvelous to him as any good cigar. He was as awe-struck and
grateful for the world as a teenager in love, and he wondered about the
unconditional gift of days that God had given him. He asked with astonishment,
“Why am I allowed two?”—a great question in an age where we expect unending,
medically-engineered days.
Chesterton was joyful, because he was grateful; he was grateful because even
within his busy life, he was allowed the leisure of silence, with which gift,
he was able to wonder. And, as St. Gregory of Nyssa is
credited with saying, “only wonder leads to knowing.”
If we cannot wonder, how can we presume to know the Timeless and Eternal God?
Without wonder, how may we know ourselves?
Unwrap the Silence, First
Things, December 28, 2010.
SHAW, ROBERT
The absolute minimum
conditions for worship are a sense of mystery and an admission of pain. Quoted by Peter Marty in The Lutheran, January 2011, p.3.
TOZER, A. W.
We cover our
deep ignorance with words, but we are ashamed to wonder, we are afraid to
whisper “mystery.” The Knowledge of
the Holy, p. 26.
TYRRELL, GEORGE
If [human] craving for the mysterious, the wonderful, the supernatural,
be not fed on true religion, it will feed itself on the garbage of any
superstition that is offered to it. Quoted by Madeleine L’Engle in A Circle of Quiet, p. 111.
YACONELLI, MICHAEL
The most critical issue facings Christians is not abortion, pornography, the disintegration of family, moral absolutes, MTV, drugs, racism, sexuality, or school prayer. The critical issue today is dullness. We have lost our astonishment. Dangerous Wonder, p. 23.
Immorality is more than adultery and dishonesty; it is living drab, colorless, dreary, stale, unimaginative lives. The greatest enemy of Christianity may be people who say they believe in Jesus but who are no longer astonished and amazed. Jesus Christ came to rescue us from listlessness as well as lostness; He came to save us from flat souls as well as corrupted souls. ibid. p. 24.
Tameness is not an option. Take surprise out of faith and all that is left is dry and dead religion. Take away mystery from the gospel and all that is left is frozen and petrified dogma. Lose your awe of God and you are left with an impotent deity. Abandon astonishment and you are left with meaningless piety. ibid. p. 28
Alan Jones says that priests “are not so much people with answers as ones who guard the important questions and keep them alive.” The church exists to guard the important questions! Keep them alive! When the questions are kept alive, our souls have a chance of staying alive. The church should be full of Christians who seek questions rather than answers, mystery instead of solutions, wonder instead of explanations. ibid. p. 42.