~ continued from the previous two posts
“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. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time? Amidst the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers–wiser than all alphabets–clouds that die constantly for the sake of God’s glory, we are hating, hunting, hurting. Suddenly we feel ashamed of our clashes and complaints in the face of the tacit glory in nature. It is so embarrassing to live! How strange we are in the world, and how presumptuous our doings! Only one response can maintain us: gratefulness for witnessing the wonder, for the gift of our unearned right to serve, to adore, and to fulfill. It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.”1
~ Abraham Heschel
Indigenous to the human person, wonder is arguably our first form and earliest expression of prayer. If we are fortunate, and God-willing, it will be our last as well.
The beauty of wonder as the primordial prayer of a child is that it is as pure and honest as any prayer we will ever pray since it happens spontaneously and naturally, prior to any outside influence or instruction of “what prayer is.” When a little child squats for minutes on end and traces her finger along the crooked lines of a crack in the sidewalk, enraptured with the branched veins as if she were a miner and it was an artery of gold, her innocence introduces her to her first taste of wonder as “the inarticulate speech of the heart.”2
The rhetorical question “Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?” accentuates the felicitousness of wonder as a final act. Wonder serves as the impetus for the closing prayer of our life which is a summing expression of gratefulness “in return for the mystery by which we live.” Annie Dillard writes, “I think that the dying pray at the last not ‘please,’ but ‘thank you,’ as a guest thanks a host at the door.” What could be a more fitting and thoroughly human last hurrah? What greater grace, what better place to pass over from than a place of wonder and awe that evokes gratefulness for the mystery of it all, womb to tomb, cradle to grave?
When Rabbi Heschel states that “prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living” and continues by saying “it is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live,” I suspect he intended the double meaning of “all.” It is all we can offer in the sense that there is nothing else to offer in response for the gift of one’s life but gratitude. And it is all we can offer in the sense that it is the totality of what we have to offer since the giving of thanks or the giving of praise is really nothing less than the total giving of oneself to the One “from whom all blessings flow.”
But as I mentioned in the previous post, there is a problem, namely, human resistance to surprise, the refusal to be intentionally susceptible, the unwillingness to be moved. Ten to twenty years ago, this attitude used to be captured in the increasingly common refrain among teenagers, “Whatever,” almost always accompanied by the equally nonplussed tilt of the head, shrug of the shoulders, and hands palm up thumbs rotating out. Another version of this was the couldn’t-care-less catchphrase “So?” A moon rise. Yawn. So? A sunset. Yawn. So? A whale breaching. Yawn. So? The centripetal pull of silence. Yawn. So? This unresponsive response was not unique to American teenagers living in the early twenty-first century. It seems to be a recurring ailment of humans and each generation has it’s own iteration.
Whereas callousness, apathy, indifference, and cynicism are the full-blown nemeses of what Heschel calls radical amazement, presumption, arrogance, and entitlement are its precursors. As are belittlement, rejection, abuse, loss, unresolved grief, and trauma. While noticing, beholding, being moved, wonder, awe, and gratefulness are signs of life, the aforementioned are the warning signs of despair and death, boredom and meaninglessness. The callous, indifferent, or presumptuous person would not be able to hear the inflection or understand the connotation of Heschel’s exclamation, “It is so embarrassing to live!” This would flummox them. Part of the unnamed oath of the walking dead is that they don’t do embarrassment. Their unspoken agreement, their shared and mimicked M.O. is that nothing phases them. Heschel writes:
How embarrassing for man (sic) to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not to sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment.3
We live in a time when embarrassment is not in vogue, when shame has been shamed. And usually, for good reason. I know full well the negative impact of being shamed. Shaming is always abusive and meant to demean. But there is shame that is not engendered by shaming but instead is the awareness of an incongruity between who we are meant to be and how we actually are, between what the earth and world are meant to be and how they actually are. There is an “ultimate embarrassment” that is kin to reverence and awe, that comes from within, that is profoundly humbling but not humiliating, a blush that is revelatory without being diminishing or condemning, a sudden awareness of the discrepancy of our lives when held up against “the mystery by which we live,” a provocation that returns us to our true selves by exposing us to our false selves not to demean but to reorient and enliven, and ultimately to awaken us to “the divine margin in all attainments.” It is what Jacob experienced after his all-night wrestling match with an angel in which he was wounded and blessed. “When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he said, ‘Truly, God is in this place and I did not know it.” I imagine him with humbled heart and ruddy cheeks for as Heschel says, “Faith is a blush in the presence of God.”
The prayer of wonder and the wonder of prayer are constitutive dimensions of an authentic spirituality. Wonder is one of the surest signs that we are awake, alive, and appreciative. The mystic, like the rapt little girl, traces the vein of wonder to awe which is not an emotion but “an answer of the heart and mind to the presence of mystery in all things, an intuition for a meaning that is beyond the mystery, an awareness of the transcendent worth of the universe.”4 Awe includes the felt suspicion and insight that there is a meaning greater than ourselves. Initially, it is the natural and embryonic form of worship, but for the serious practitioner of faith it will become an integral aspect of spiritual maturity. Together with wonder, awe naturally gives way to gratefulness and praise, and fosters wisdom and compassion. Notice, all these acts are signs of aliveness and evidence that we have been moved. They are living reminders that responsiveness is required for us to become fully alive, that is, deeply human and genuinely holy.
In the poem “Messenger,” Mary Oliver states “My work is loving the world.” She means her life’s work, her vocation and that includes “learning to be astonished.”5 By practicing wonder we keep wonder alive and wonder, in turn, continues to enliven us and to evoke gratefulness which, as Heschel stresses, “maintains us.” So, this is our call: to be attentive and contemplatively engaged and responsive to the mystery and gratuitousness of life by collaborating with the possibilities hidden in the present moment.
This being said, even the deepest sleeper, even the most caustic cynic, even the hardest of hearts and the most defended of persons, despite their resistance, have the capacity to be suddenly broken open by the subversive power of grace, by the “tacit glory of nature,” by a sense of the numinous in what Rudolph Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.6 Or it might happen through a teacher’s simple but sincere affirmation, “You are a gifted writer,” by a serious illness or a brush with death, or by a piece of music—maybe Morten Lauriden’s “Lux Aeterna” or Dustin O’Halloran and Ane Brun’s “Horizons” or Antony’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will” or Edgar Meyer’s “Short Trip Home.” Both the indifferent one and the person who tries hard to hide her wounds might be broken open by a visit to a refugee camp, or by the hospitality of the family for whom a home is being built on a mission trip with Habitat for Humanity, or by an unpremeditated meditative walk through the Museum of Tolerance or by the wrinkled landscape of an old woman’s face that maps the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of a life and become the overture of divine presence.
None of us are totally awake or filled with wonder or gratefulness all the time. But let’s not risk the tragedy of living unresponsive lives. Let’s encourage one another to take nothing and no one for granted but rather to receive everything as grace. Let’s not fear feeling existential embarrassment, a healthy blush, and a sincere humility through the work of wonder or the draw of awe that swing the gate open to “gratefulness which makes the soul great.” Little else can sustain us.
NOTES
1 Abraham Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, 5.
2 Van Morrison, “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart No. 2,” on CD of the same title.
3 Abraham Heschel, Who Is Man?, 112.
4 Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man, 106.
5 Mary Oliver, in Thirst, 1.
6 Philosopher Rudolph coined this term in his book The Idea of the Holy. It means “the mystery that it tremendous and fascinating.” As opposed to fear which makes us shrink and/or pull back, awe is alluring, drawing us in even toward what feels prodigious.
ARTWORK: Moonrise with Juniper by Kathy Conzelman.
Used with the artist’s permission. See Kathy’s work here.