So we (H&H) make the transition from a month of focusing on practicing silence and simplicity to a month of practicing prayer. This transition should not be the least bit jarring as silence and simplicity are intimately related and indispensable to contemplative prayer. But let’s begin elsewhere. Given that we are just days from the turn from the season of Advent to the season of Christmas, let’s begin with wonder since these seasons, in addition to the feast of Epiphany, are perhaps best entered into by understanding prayer as the art and act of beholding.
As some of you know, my love for Rabbi Heschel and his work was partially fired by his attention to and eloquent articulation of wonder and awe, what he calls radical amazement. Plato maintained that “philosophy begins in wonder” and Heschel, like all mystics, knew that becoming human and holy begins there as well. The human person fully alive makes a regular practice of wonder which is an intentional responsive act of the will not simply a spontaneous reaction occasioned by rare moments of extraordinary spectacle. To be a pray-er is to be a man or woman or child of wonder.
Tragically, Rabbi Heschel observed that as civilization has advanced, wonder has waned. As wonder has declined indifference to the sublime nature of reality, to being itself has increased. Jesuit teacher and writer William O’Malley refers to this as “the death of wow!” Its sad contemporary mantra is “whatever.” Heschel lamented, humankind “will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. (Heschel, Who Is Man, 36)
In her book, The Silent Cry, Dorothee Soelle raises the question “can amazement, the radical wonderment of the child, be learned again?” It not only can but it must if humans are to attain full personhood, if we are to be the agents of cultural transformation, and if the earth is to survive let alone thrive. To pray is to keep the spirit of wonder alive. To pray is to participate in a revival of radical amazement (what Mary Oliver calls “learning to be astonished”). Prayer is not only the way of the mystic but also the way of the prophet who resists the temptation toward callousness and indifference by looking, noticing, and beholding.
This is a season of wonder, of star-gazing, of oohing and aahing, of looking at the familiar (a baby say) long enough that it becomes unfamiliar again, to borrow Chesterton’s insight, so that we can practice prayer by beholding — “for Christ plays in ten thousand places.”♦
REFLECTION:
The poet Mary Oliver writes, “If you notice anything/ it leads you to notice more and more” while the poet, essayist, and naturalist Dianne Ackerman, who is neither a proponent of organized religion nor a ruling God and identifies as an “earth ecstatic” nonetheless writes, “There is a form of beholding that is a kind of prayer.”
PRACTICE: Go! Behold!
© Daniel J. Miller
Excerpts from my dissertation: Radical Amazement and Deep Sympathy, 2007