How I Wonder

I am cultivating a new theme in my life. Well, not new, exactly, but transitioning from the background to the foreground, perhaps. The clarity of focus is mostly an external force applied to my soul, like someone is twisting my lens to and fro, painfully at times, until the picture sharpens. After the blurring lines resolve, what I'm confronted with is WONDER. By that, I don't mean the sense of questioning or uncertainty. That's the sort of wonder whose fuzzy margin seems to fade, whether by finding answers or being prioritized to a place that allows the mystery to remain. Rather, the wonder I experience far too infrequently is amazement, marvel, and astonishment. I'm reading Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel for the first time. It has already begun weaving itself into the fabric of my evolving paradigm. His fifth chapter, titled "Cormorants and Kittiwakes," is largely devoted to the subject of wonder, and he identifies the problem I have discovered inside of me.

By and large, our world has lost its sense of wonder. We have grown up. We no longer catch our breath at the sight of a rainbow or the scent of a rose, as we once did. We have grown bigger and everything else smaller, less impressive. We get blase and worldly-wise and sophisticated.

 We get so preoccupied with ourselves, the words we speak, the plans and projects we conceive, that we become immune to the glory of creation. We barely notice the cloud passing over the moon or the dewdrops clinging to the rose petals. The ice on the pond comes and goes. The wild blackberries ripen and wither. The blackbird nests outside our bedroom window, but we don't see her. We avoid the cold and the heat. We refrigerate ourselves in summer and entomb ourselves in plastic in winter. We rake up every leaf as fast as it falls. ... We miss the experience of awe, reverence, and wonder.

There are times that I remember to experience wonder. When I open myself to the sensual beauty I'm missing, life slows down for a moment, my mind quiets, and I can absorb input from the world around me. But the key is not in my becoming slow and quite, only open and spongy. Yesterday, I walked/hiked through Radnor Lake State Natural Area, my favorite unexpected outdoor oasis in Nashville. I felt the moderate air on my skin, listened to the crunch of earth under my feet, observed the utter stillness of the green fuzzy blanket over the water, twirled an acorn in my fingers with awareness of the alternation between smooth and bumpy textures. The dusky sun shone warmly on my face, with enough strength still in her to squint my eyes closed at each peek through the trees. The energy was magical, and I understood what Manning wrote:

Our world is saturated with grace, and the lurking presence of God is revealed not only in spirit but in matter--in deer leaping across a meadow, in the flight of an eagle, in fire and water, in a rainbow after a summer storm...in a woman with windblown hair. God intended for us to discover His loving presence in the world around us.

Jesus' words in Matthew 11:28 are so often quoted that they threaten to become trite: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." The cliche looms even larger when we attempt to define the rest he offers in terms we find comfortable. Both theologically and experientially speaking, it seems the promise is not always of lightness or resolution. When heaviness persists, and weariness is unrelenting, where is the rest? I came. I'm here. Hand it over. I don't know a lick of Greek, but I wonder how my expectation would shift if my translation were to replace "rest" with "perspective" or "wonder." If given those gifts as alternate versions of rest, could my soul buoy up in the midst of tiring burdens? Perhaps I might echo the words of Rabbi Joshua Abraham Heschel: "I do not ask to see the reason for it all; I ask only to share the wonder of it all."