A Reflection in Three Parts
Part Three

I’m a soul in wonder. ~ Van Morrison

In the place where wonder comes from,
there I find you. ~ Bruce Cockburn

Out of the mouth of babes. ~ Some former babe

Every person, every couple, every family has their special repository of stories that become not just “things that happened” but moments, experiences, and events that reveal who we are, what we value, what we have suffered and endured, who we love and who loves us, what keeps us alive, what we have learned that is worth saving and what has saved us. One story that is in the repository of my only daughter’s and my relationship was an extended moment we shared together many years ago in which she played the wise sage and I the captivated novice. She was three. I was thirty-four.

We were in our backyard raking leaves and mowed grass. She had her little twenty-inch red plastic rake and I had my metal-based, wooden-handled, big-daddy rake. It was about four in the afternoon. The summer day dazzled with one of those exquisite, cloudless, azure skies that those of us from the Pacific Northwest so love and appreciate. Suddenly, without warning, my daughter exclaimed, “Ooooh! Daddy, yook! Da moooon.” Immediately, I looked up. There where the sun was supposed to be, in the “blue true dream of sky,” adorned in the white lace of simple elegance was this magnificent moon as round as round can be. We stood silently together, heads tilted skyward, and gazed. Just gazed. And the moon pulled us as only the moon can.

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, and a human potential. My daughter’s delight validated a suspicion I’d long had that we come into this world made for wonder. We bring it with us at birth, or maybe it brings us, into this mysteriously bedazzled and heartbroken world. A more recent swimmer not only in her mother’s womb but in the womb of God, the young child keeps forever in her heart “the place MY wonder comes from”1 and knows in her bodying forth that wonder and the world come from the one same source. Though human existence presents many empty distractions and is marred by cruelty and scarred from suffering so that amnesia often sets in, the infant who becomes the child who becomes the teenager who becomes the adult who becomes the elder never completely forgets the original wonder from which she came nor loses her capacity to recognize it or her inborn desire to respond to it— a momentary glimpse behind the veil, a sound here, a whiff, a taste, a touch there, a sudden intuition, a connatural knowing of truth on earth as it is in heaven.

Linguists tell us that in many cultures the long O, Om (Ah-oo-mm), or Ooh sounds are variations of the primordial “unstruck sound” uttered by the Divine Source who breathed life and the cosmos into being. In the Sanskrit of Indian philosophy and Hinduism, the OM sound is also understood as the God-sound, as the formless form or manifestation of God-as-sound.2 In Hebrew the equivalent word for breath, Spirit, wind, and air is ruach (ROO-akh), in Aramaic it is ruha (ROO-ah), while in Arabic it is ruh (ROO). In Greek it is pneuma (NOO-muh). In Latin, the word for Spirit is spiritus (spiri-TOOS). I believe it is no accident that in these languages the word for Spirit, breath, wind, and air contains the double-O sound just as I believe that my daughter’s exclamation of wonder arose from the “native intelligence” she received in the divine gestation of her being. Before the child-mind knows the soul-body knows, and the child, still open and as yet undefended, allows herself to be the hollowed reed through which the Spirit blows, moving her to respond to the mystery of life: “Ooooh! Daddy, yook! Da moooon!”

To be a person of radical amazement is to sense, then know, that being itself is full of wonder. To speak or chant the “unstruck sound” of an “ooh!” or an “aah!” is to participate in the original and ongoing in-spiration of the Divine who in-spirits, animates, and sustains all creation. It is spirit. It is breath. In every inhalation and exhalation we make, to exclaim, chant, whisper, sing, or pray this sound is audibly to join our respiration to the Holy, originating, and recreating Breath of Life that blesses and sustains not only us but the entire “commonwealth of breath.”3 

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,”4 the sudden catch of breath, the immediate, intuitive understanding of the embodied soul, wide-eyed as it is wide-mouthed, sometimes still and hushed, other times giving way to an “oooh” or an “aaah” or inebriated joy or surprise wrapped in laughter. 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.

My daughter, and Rabbi Heschel, and numerous poets, and certain songs, the spaciousness of silence, and the dizzying heights and sobering depths of human love, the subversive moments of awe or pathos that come with being alive, and the blue-graced wetness of my youth growing up in the Northwest and its fir-green landscape lined by the rugged elegance of the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges taught me that to be human is to be moved. We are made to be moved. It is indigenous to our very being. Not to be moved is to forfeit one of the essential capacities and glories of being alive. Rabbi Heschel writes:

We take it for granted that man’s (sic) mind should be sensitive to nature’s loveliness. We take it equally for granted that a person who is not affected by the vision of earth and sky, who has no eyes to see the grandeur of nature and to sense the sublime, however, vaguely, is not human. . . . It is unworthy of man not to take notice of the sublime.5

Wonder and awe are the human response to the antiphonal nature of life, the human side of the divine-human rhythm of call and response. Reverence steadies and sustains them as a deliberate and daily way of participating in life long after moments or experiences of radical amazement have faded. Momentary responses, both intuitive and volitional, they become a conscious way of approaching the sublime and the mystery that approaches us if we have the humility to be parabled by grace, and the courage to be acted upon by life. Wonder and awe, what Heschel calls radical amazement, are sure signs of our aliveness, that we are paying attention, that we are responsive, that we are making good on the inherent pledge of our humanity and the superfluousness of our God-given lives.

Wonder is what love looks like in its infancy and awe is one characteristic of what it looks like in its most venerable form. When we age wisely, the radical amazement indigenous to our childhood becomes a full, conscious, and active way of participating each day in the liturgy of life. But important as wonder is, what is even more important, claims Rabbi Heschel, is what we do with our wonder? What becomes of our awe?

To be continued . . .

1 Bruce Cockburn, “Love Song.”
2 Cyprian Consiglio, “The Sound and the Silence,” (Paper Delivered at the National Pastoral Musicians Convention, East Brunswick, IN, 30 June, 2008).
3 This lovely phrase is David Abram’s.
4 Van Morrison, “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart.”
5 Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, New York, Harper & Row, 1951), 3.