Suppose your spiritual life was a basketball team. Who would be your starting five?
I think us here to wonder, myself. . .
The more I wonder. . . the more I love.
~ Shug in The Color Purple, Alice Walker
There are only two ways to live . . . one is as though nothing is a miracle. . .
the other is as if everything is.
~ Albert Einstein
The first running mate I would choose to join LOVE on my starting five is WONDER. Whereas choosing love for the top five is no shocker—nor is putting love at the center of an authentic Christian spirituality bound to get many objections—wonder is more likely a surprise pick. There are many other worthy choices and my guess is that wonder might not even show up on the top ten list of many serious practitioners of the Christian faith. For me, wonder is at the top of the list in the category marked Most Overlooked in the religious or spiritual life.1
Plato, and Aristotle after him, maintained wonder is the beginning of philosophy (love of wisdom). Following Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s lead, I’m convinced it is the beginning of all genuine religion and spirituality as well, and subsequently all good theology.
Before it is anything else, wonder is the response to the sublime mystery of being itself. Presymbolic, precognitive, and pretheological, wonder is a stirring of the soul in the presence of what Heschel variously calls the sublime, grandeur, and most tellingly, the ineffable. The ineffable is not something we create, but something we encounter. Wonder is an intrinsic response to a reality that can be experienced but not comprehended. The ineffable “completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.” It is not something we can intellectually grasp, define, or explain. It is rather something that grasps us and in a covert way insinuates who we are and reveals a core dimension of what it means to be human. In fact, the sole validation (or soul validation?) of the ineffable by humans is in its capacity to trigger and evoke this response from within us. Wonder (and awe), therefore, cannot be taught, but only evoked and awakened. It is the numinous within us that recognizes what rationality cannot, and that is the numinous quality of reality itself.
Heschel—arguably the greatest theological writer ever on the topic of wonder as I have suggested elsewhere—deviates from the common understanding of the sublime as the large, vast, beautiful, fantastic or overwhelming power. For Heschel, wonder can be evoked by a chunk of artisan bread torn from a loaf and passed, a laborer’s calloused creased hands, a piece of music, your grade-school child walking with complete unself-conscious self-possession, or a lone leaf on a tree branch as well as by a spectacular meteor shower or a sunset.
Wonder is indigenous to the human person. An ontological reality, it cannot be humanly constructed. There is nothing calculated or contrived about it. It is natural. But to become more fully human, it can’t lie dormant. It must be enacted. It is up to us to keep wonder alive. To be human is to be endowed with the capacity to be moved, to be acted upon, and to be responsive. “We take it for granted,” Heschel writes, “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.”
This endowment, it is important to remember, is the intrinsic religious impulse that comes with us into this world at birth. Long before the development of doctrinal religion elucidating beliefs, there was elemental religion rooted in a primordial experience (The word religion re+(ligare) means to bind back, refasten, or reconnect). There is nothing inherently wrong with doctrine, but it must be faithful, true, and in some sense, in service to that original encounter and experience and the invisible, divinely-spun string that tethers us like a life-line to the Source and Giver of life. Again, it is a precognitive and pretheological experience.
Wonder is one of our most primal responses to being moved by that which is beyond ourselves. Heschel insists, not to be moved is to betray one’s humanity. Thus, the nemeses of wonder are indifference, irreverence, apathy, callousness, and cynicism. When they are a volitional course of action, they are acts of resistance rooted in arrogance, in a hubris that takes things for granted. These are the unkempt weeds, the deadly sins right under our noses, that will choke the life out of a person, community, and society.
Spiritually speaking, when St. Iranaeus of Lyon asserts “The glory of God is the human person fully alive,” wonder is perhaps the first real sign of human aliveness. Not only does Heschel believe that “the beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living,” but also that wonder is the genesis of faith. Whereas wonder is the fitting response to the grandeur, sublimity, and the ineffable dimension of life—to “that which lies, within our reach but beyond our grasp”—awe is the commensurate response to the mystery to which the sublime and ineffable allude. As such, awe is the inaugural expression of worship. So intimate are wonder and awe that it is nearly impossible to point where one begins and the other ends. They are like a watercolor painting where blue and red wash violet into one another.
Wonder has been greatly underappreciated in the history of Christian theology—and to a slightly less extent—in Christian spirituality. In his seminal work The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto states:
So far from keeping the non-rational element in religion alive in the heart of the religious experience, orthodox Christianity manifestly failed to recognize its value, and by this failure gave to the idea of God a one-sidedly intellectualistic and rationalistic interpretation. (p.3)
Wonder is the first manifestation of “the non-rational element in religion.” It is unconsciously and typically relegated by most people to what I call the second or third string modes of being. As we know, lots of times the second and third stringers don’t even get into the game. Even in secular culture, wonder—until very recently—got very little attention except from nature lovers, mystics, poets, and artists of one form or another. We fail to be open to wonder, to tend it, and to keep it alive at our own peril. “As civilization advances,” warns Heschel, “the sense of wonder declines. . . [Humankind] will not perish for want of information, but only for want of appreciation.”
Wonder is not the same as curiosity, of which there is plenty in the world. The main difference is that once one’s curiosity has been appeased, instead of making the curious one “curiouser and curiouser,” it soon disappears whereas with the experience of wonder this is not the case. Take, for example,—beholding the do-si-do-ing blues, greens, and violets of the Aurora Borealis. Physicists have now learned that the woven whisps of multi-colored light in the Arctic night sky occur as a result of disturbances on the sun pulling and stretching the earth’s magnetic field like a taut elastic band until things calm down and the band is released, snaps back, and the force of the recoil hurtles ripples and waves back toward the earth from 80,000 miles away at speeds up to 45 million miles per hour. As they travel earthward they speed up due to the gravitational pull of the earth and cross paths on the celestial highways with slower earthbound electrons that hitch a ride. When the electrons reach the earth’s thin upper atmosphere they collide and play bumper cars with nitrogen and oxygen molecules which throws them all into a frenzied state. When the excited electrons finally calm down they release into the northern hemisphere what are commonly called the Northern Lights.2 Upon learning the cause of the light show that is the Aurora Borealis, what person—let alone, physicist, mystic, or mystical scientist—who has a pulse could possibly experience a diminishment of wonder and awe? Doesn’t knowing the scientific explanation of the Northern Lights, in fact, increase our fascination, arouse even more radical amazement in us rather than, like curiosity, cause it to evaporate? Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be entered into more deeply each day we receive as pure gift.
Wonder is the child’s first form of spontaneous prayer as well as her first expression of love. If we are granted the grace of walking gently (and slowly) into that good night called death, I hope for each of us that wonder is also one of the last ways we love and pray before leaving the earth. For mortality up close and personal with our name on it has a way of either making one terribly regretful or delightfully verklempt at the sheer exquisiteness of it all and the ridiculously wondrous opportunity to witness and participate in the Divine-human dance of life and love. This is what Heschel means when he writes:
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? . . . It is so embarrassing to live!
For the woman of wonder and the man of awe and the child of radical amazement, ooh and aah—thank God—is the refrain we can’t get out of our head. Like its sibling Compassion, Wonder is one of the surest signs that we’re truly alive, fully awake, and deeply appreciative. It’s one vital indication that we realize it’s not all about us—life, that is—or even mainly about us.
Now, the question will be what does wonder ask of us? What do we do with the wonder?
to be continued. . .
1 I’ve never been all that enamored with the fashionable distinction of the day, “I’m spiritual, not religious.” I get what people are trying to say. But we have to be careful with broad sweeping generalizations and critiques. As stated above, the etymology of the word religion likely refers to the connection or ongoing reconnection to the Source and Giver of our lives. It is, therefore, inaccurate unfair, and/or naive to suggest “religion” is bad and “spiritual” is good or better. However one self-identifies, the question for me is this: is y/our spirituality or is y/our religion mature, healthy, enlivening to self and loving toward others OR is it immature, unhealthy, detrimental to self, and indifferent or dehumanizing to others. Contrary to what some people think, believe, or assume there is, in fact, healthy religion, and unhealthy spirituality in addition to unhealthy religion and healthy spirituality.
2 “What Causes the Northern Lights? Scientists finally know for sure”, NPR, June 10, 2021. Find the article here.
PHOTO: The northern lights (aurora borealis) illuminate the sky over Reinfjorden in Reine, on Lofoten Islands in the Arctic Circle.
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