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.
LAMOTT,
ANNE
When we are stunned to the place beyond
words, we’re finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable
to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs
together. When we are stunned to a place beyond words, when an aspect of life
takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it’s down to a
manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response
is “Wow,” that’s a prayer. Help Thanks
Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. p.
73.
What can we say beyond Wow, in the
presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can’t have originated
solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for
new breath. That’s why they call it breathtaking. We’re individuals in time and
space who are often gravely lost, and then
miraculously, in art, found. ibid. pp.
81-82.
As a tiny little control freak, I want
to understand the power of Wow, so I can organize and control it, and up its
rate and frequency. But I can’t. I can only feel it and acknowledge that it is
here once again. Wow. ibid. p.
84.
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.