[Humankind] will not perish
for want of information;
but only for want of appreciation.
The beginning of our happiness lies
in understanding that life without wonder
is not worth living. What we lack is not
a will to believe but a will to wonder.

~ Abraham Heschel

If not the first, one of the earliest expressions of human love is wonder. Precognitive, presymbolic, and pretheological, wonder is indigenous to children. And, for what it’s worth, I’ve yet to meet anyone who was not a child once upon a time. No one has to teach a child to ooh and aah. A ten-minute walk to the end of the block and back with a two-year old turns into a forty-minute exploration because every sidewalk crack, every rock, twig, rotting leaf, every dead bug, red berry, and filthy penny is fascinating. It’s enough to make Marco Polo, Lewis and Clark, and Sir Ernest Shackleton proud. But as we get older we begin to lose our natural propensity for wonder and, seemingly, for enchanting exploration. Our theme song becomes “Ho-Hum” and our favorite refrain “So?”

The writer Annie Dillard says that most of us — most adults anyway and many teenagers — are so spiritually malnourished and soul-fatigued that we can’t be bothered with such nonsense or child’s play as bending down to pick up a lost or discarded penny. To do so, especially these days in public, especially in America, while in the company of certain others, is to lower oneself. It’s dirty. Leave it alone . . . It’s not worth the time. It makes you look like a scrounge, a bum, a low-life. These are the charges of those who don’t know any better.

In one of his letters to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh humbly offered that he was learning to “stay close to the ground.” Van Gogh was an unapologetic, deliberate, card-carrying “low-life” who liked to keep company with and paint those common folk who were often looked down upon by the high-and-mighty. Children and beggars and hikers and peasants and saints and holy fools and farmers and artists who work with found objects and amateur penny-picker-uppers stay close to the ground and appreciate what those who cannot be bothered no longer notice or value or are enchanted by. Existential humility, as opposed to low self-esteem, is a characteristic of people of wonder. Dillard says, if we learn to “cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity so that finding a copper coin literally makes our day,” then we inherit a richness that cannot be measured in dollars or cents or earned or purchased or taken away from us.

This enduring richness is not a wealth that is external to us. Nor is it one whose value is merely financial. It is one that is an integral part of who we are and who we are becoming, one that enhances and guides how we look and see, how we move through the day, through our lives, through the world, consciously and intentionally allowing ourselves to be moved by, acted upon, taken hold of, or broken open by a sun-drenched salmon in mid-leap or a harvest moon or the symmetry of the spider’s woven web or another school shooting or the mother and her two children standing outside the grocery store uncomfortably asking for help. It is this indigenous, holy susceptibility the child possesses that we need to recover to live whole and wholehearted lives, for it is what enables us to be not only women of wonder and men of awe but people of indiscriminate mercy and compassionate action who know the intimate relationship between radical amazement and deep sympathy, reverence and justice. Rabbi Abraham Heschel taught that we must actively keep wonder alive in our lives if we are to be people of radical amazement and compassionate concern.

What the contemplative is on to, what she or he understands that others often do not, is that the wonder-full life involves the repositioning of value or the readjusted understanding of what determines something or someone’s essential worth. Value or worth, for the contemplative, are not what they are for a materialist or pragmatist or entrepreneur or investor or art dealer or cut-throat competitive social climber. For the contemplative or mystic, the value of an act never wanders into territory that is beyond or apart from the act itself. Again, children can be our teachers here. Children understand that the value of play is simply in playing. They don’t understand it intellectually. They know it intrinsically, intuitively, and experientially in their bodies. They know by the very nature of play that it is valuable, meaningful, wonderful in and of itself. There is no ulterior significance or value. Nor do children feel any need for such.

Imagine yourself at the park with your five-year old daughter June-bug.

“June-bug! Come here for a minute,” you yell. June-bug hears you and comes running over to you.

“June-bug, what are you doing?” you ask, your inflection sounding curious not critical.

“Huh?”

“What are you doing over there with your friends?”

“What do you mean, daddy / mommy?”

“I just want to know what you were doing. That’s all.” June-bug tilts her head, befuddled.

“I’m playing.”

“How come? Why are you playing?” you ask.

“Daddy / Mommy,” she draws the word out exasperatedly. “I’m just playing.”

“Oh.”

“Can I go play now?” she asks.

“Sure,” you say. June-bug turns and runs to join her friends.

“Enjoy yourself!” you yell.

“I will,” she yells back as she waves without turning around toward you.

Even to say “I play for the enjoyment of it” is already to move a step away from the intrinsic meaning or value or purpose of the act of playing. The young child plays in order to play, and although she enjoys it, she is not conscious that her enjoyment and pleasure are separate from the act itself (because they’re not) or that her reason for playing is to “get something out of it,” even if it is joy. The meaning, value, and purpose of playing is to play and the exhilaration, delight, deep satisfaction, pleasure, and joy are baked into it, not ulterior motives or post-play pay offs.

Similarly, the significance, satisfaction, and worth of wonder or an act of kindness or praise or enacted compassion or contemplative prayer is the act itself. In a seminal article titled, “The Contemplative Mood: A Challenge to Modernity,” Raimon Panikkar argues that a contemplative or mystical orientation to life radically challenges many of the cherished and guiding principles of modern Western society. Panikkar maintains that the dominant culture of the West is driven by five primary incentives: the Heavens above for believers, the History ahead for the progressivists, the Labor to be performed for realists, the Conquest of the Big for the intelligent, and the Ambition of Success for everyone. He asserts whereas modern technological society emphasizes and celebrates the elsewhere, the later, the result, the greatness of external actions, and confirmation of the majority, a contemplative way of life values the here, the now, the act itself, the hidden or intimate center, and inner peace. Both the incentives of the present-day dominant culture and what it celebrates are nemeses of a contemplative way of living and kill wonder.

Characterizing the contemplative or mystical orientation as stressing “spontaneity, desirelessness, delight in the momentary, indifference to wealth, prestige [and] success,” Panikkar highlights one particular trait that goes to the core of this way of living which is the seedbed for radical amazement, that is, wonder and awe. It’s one the uninhibited child knows well. He states:

Contemplation is something definite, something which has to do with the very end[1] of life and is not a means to anything else. A contemplative act is done for its own sake. It rests on itself. Contemplation cannot be manipulated in order to gain something else. . . It has no further intentionality.[2] (emphasis mine)

What most concerns the mystic is present reality. “When contemplatives eat, they eat; when they sleep, they sleep; when they pray, they pray, as the masters remind us.”[3] For Panikkar, the contemplative act is essentially a free act, a loving act done for its own sake and not in order to acquire something (e.g. sanctity, enlightenment, perfection), to receive an award (e.g. admiration or adulation), or to attain a reward (e.g. heaven). The contemplative acts sunder warumbe, “without a why” as Meister Eckhart would say.[3] “The contemplative,” writes Panikkar, “cannot conceive of what is meant by an after-life, as if the life now witnessed were not life, the Life, the thing itself.” [4]

Often, as people get older, or more sophisticated in the current ways and means laid out by the dominant culture, they begin to question what was once indigenous to them as children. The dominant culture doesn’t encourage or appreciate contemplative seeing because it is not expedient, it doesn’t lead to or produce anything of material value. The payoff is nonexistent or negligible for anyone asking “But what does it do for me? For ME? What’s in it FOR ME?”

By way of contrast, and turning a contemporary euphemism on its head, for the everyday mystic “it is what it is.” What is? Everything and each thing is what it is. Seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting or touching what is as it is, the mystic avails herself to “the divinity of what just is.” To sense or encounter the divine presence mediated through everyday occurrences, nature, objects, interactions, or common deeds, however, requires our being present. It involves the full, conscious, and active participation here and now in the moment, occasion, conversation, action, feeling, phenomenon, or deed at hand without thought of remuneration or side benefit. Rabbi Heschel writes, “Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence.” That is a profound statement. Of all the imaginal offerings of the mind for what heaven or the afterlife or the other side conjure up, I’m guessing that for most who believe in such things being present is not one of them. Yet, Heschel suggests it will be presence, more specifically our desire, willingness, and ability to be present, that will distinguish  life in the next realm from our life in this world. And if, or when, we “get that,” we pretty much have all we need.

Yes, each person, each thing, is what it is AND YET is more than what it is, more than who she is, more than who he is. But we can’t awaken to and receive the mystery without first being consciously attentive to the nunc, the hic, and the haec (now, here, this). All reality is allusive and is an intimation of the Much More. But the quotidian as well as the sublime mystery of life itself and everyday living exceed intellectual comprehension, resist analytical dissection, defy verbal articulation, and conceal as well as reveal. Mystery is not a synonym for a scientific or mathematical quandary waiting to be resolved. Rather, it signals that a particular ineffable reality holds a superfluousness of meaning, not a lack of meaning. From a scientific standpoint, mystery is something to be deciphered. From a religious perspective, mystery is neither something we produce nor something we resolve but something we sense and to which we give reply or go out to greet like a lover. Wonder and awe are the ultimate and fitting responses to mystery. Humility, silence and tears are not far behind. These are responses to an evocation, not the result of a calculation. Mystery is not a puzzle or problem to be solved but something that grasps us and invites us to enter ever more deeply.

If we look and listen with our heart, the contemplative life calls us to be present to the present moment. It awakens us to the now, the this, and the here wherein lies the liturgy of life. It offers no external incentive or future reward, only the experience of being fully alive in the immediate moment. It is this way of being that conceives the holy susceptibility that makes wonder possible.

PRACTICE:
• How is it that you cultivate wonder?
• Do one thing today or this evening to keep wonder alive in you.

• P.S. Ever since reading Annie Dillard’s award winning book A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in my early twenties, one of my spiritual practices has been being a low-life (ah, that explains it you say) and picking up pennies. Each time I do so, it reminds me not only to be on the lookout since, as Dillard claims, “The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand,” but also to cultivate that spirit of humility, simplicity, and awe that help me to notice and appreciate moments of grace.

[1] By “end” in this instance, Panikkar is referring not to our one final mortal death but rather to the highest purpose for or chief end of one’s life on earth. In Raimon Panikkar, “The Contemplative Mood: A Challenge to Modernity,” 1981.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

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