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.
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.
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.
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.