Wonder [wuhn-der]
This week our word is WONDER.
This year in The Human & the Holy community (H&H), we are eavesdropping on and then joining in an imagined conversation between four wise guides. One of those sages is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972). I found my way to the life and works of Rabbi Heschel almost forty years ago. I was drawn to him largely because he so eloquently articulated and embodied what I had sensed from my early twenties, perhaps first evoked by my Jesuit teachers. Namely, that there is a necessary and dynamic relationship between wonder and compassion, between awe and deep sympathy that leads to the works of mercy and justice and are two of the essential underpinnings of an authentic spirituality.
Heschel, the tzaddik from Poland who, unlike many in his family, barely escaped the desecrating furnaces of the Nazis, and who marched in the front row with Dr. Martin Luther King to Selma, stands out for many reasons. One thing that sets him apart from almost all other classic and modern spiritual sages is that he has a theology of wonder or what he calls radical amazement. Plato recounts Socrates say that “philosophy begins in wonder.” Aristotle agrees. All great mystics know from experience that the spiritual life begins there as well.
It is impossible to conceive of an authentic spirituality that is absent of wonder let alone that fails to consider it indispensable to a way of life, Christian or otherwise, that is deep and wide, incarnate and holistic, contemplative and compassionate, life-giving while being fully aware of the reality of dying and death, and responsible as well as joyful. The wise ones tell us, where wonder is absent, life is AWOL as well. Albert Einstein wrote “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. . . . [The person] who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead.” Rabbi Heschel concurs saying “the beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”
Before there was religion, there was wonder. Before there were doctrines or creeds or customs, there was awe. Before there was the articulation of faith, there was the “inarticulate speech of the heart,”* the sudden catch of breath, the immediate, intuitive understanding of the soul-body, wide-eyed as it is wide-mouthed, sometimes still and hushed, other times giving way to an “oooh” or an “aaah.” Before there was ritual, there was radical amazement, the subterranean knowing that begins prior to conceptual awareness, deeper than cognition, antecedent to symbol-making or the formulation of any theology and rises on its own up the body’s shaft to behind the eyes where, when the doors of perception open, what exits, at least for me, often does so as tears.
Wonder is born from the sense of the ineffable, the sublime and the holy dimension of all reality that can be sensed but not fully grasped. Often the ineffable grasps and takes hold of us and delight and radial amazement are the human heart’s indigenous response. Wonder is the intuitive recognition of the incalculable preciousness of being itself and the antiphonal nature of all reality. Unfortunately, today there are many distractions and the nemeses of wonder are legion. Some educators suggest that, unless supported, the innate inclination for wonder dissipates by the time our children are seven. As Rabbi Heschel insists, wonder must be kept alive.
As a spiritual guide and teacher, as a “pilgrim of the Absolute,” I have spent the better part of my adult life cultivating in myself and encouraging in others what I call “a spirituality of oohing and aahing.” Our capacity for wonder says something profound about what it means to be human. Like a seed divinely thumbed into our very being before we were born, wonder is at once a sacred gift, an innate characteristic, a human potential, a conscious way of being in the world, and an intentional practice.
My years of studying Heschel have convinced me that if we want our children and our children’s children and their children to be people of compassion, if we want not only for them and for ourselves and our wounded planet not just to survive but thrive, if we want the dream of God to come forth “on earth as it is in heaven,” we need to retrieve wonder, cultivate awe, practice radical amazement.
We are wired for wonder. And the reason we are wired for wonder is the same reason we were wired for holiness, awe, praise, relationship, care, communion, compassion, justice, and joy— because we were made for love. The original creative act of the Divine Artist was a labor of love by Love for the sake of love. By the extravagance and generosity of Divine love we are created to participate in love, that is, to receive and give love. What we have been given is our vocation, our graced task, our life’s work, our contribution to creation. Wonder is what love looks like in its infancy and childhood. Later, after we have been tenderized by life and after life has been tenderized by love, when the way to wisdom has been opened to us, wonder will be not just the first expression of love and the genesis of faith but a consciously nurtured contemplative perspective and practice. Wonder as a chosen way of being in the world evolves from an innate inclination to becoming an integral part of mature faith, a delightful and grateful response to the realization and experience that each thing and each one, everything and everyone, is dipped in love like a strawberry in chocolate, or, to change the metaphor, to come to see in the words of the Quaker Thomas R. Kelly, “every person, every creature is shot through with eternity.” In the beginning and in the end, wonder is one of the surest signs of full human aliveness.♦
FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND ACTION:
Are you a wonder-ful person?
Today and this week, be especially conscious of practicing wonder. Allow yourself to be moved by the incomprehensible surprise of living. Take delight in something or someone. Ooh and aah!
∗Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, Van Morrison, Original release date 1983.