The Loss of Wonder

St. Thomas Aquinas made a statement centuries ago that I came across again recently and it still astonishes me.  He said, “All philosophy begins with wonder.”  What surprises me, the more I think about it, is that if a true feeling of wonder is the sense of being alive in the world, astonished and overjoyed at the world around us, then surely that sense of wonder should have escalated with the advent of technology and mass transportation.  People have the ability to go, do, and see things that, for most of recorded history, people simply did not enjoy.  But is this the case?  Are we, modern and secular people, alive with a sense of wonder?If so, we do a good job of hiding it.  Why is it then that with all this ability around us, we seldom feel astonished?  Why are we seldom swept away with gut wrenching joy?  Josef Piper, in his book, Leisure, The Basis of Culture, tries to answer this question.  He is pondering this paradox and says this about the lengths that people will go to recapture a sense of wonder in life.

[Wonder is not found] in what has ‘never been before’;  the abnormal, the sensational… the ‘numbing of the senses’, these are a mere substitute for genuine wonder.  If someone needs the ‘unusual’ to be moved to astonishment, that person has lost the ability to respond rightly to the wondrous.  The hunger for the sensational, posing, as it may, in ‘bohemian garb,’ is an unmistakable sign of the loss of the power of wonder…

I think Piper is saying something very meaningful here.  He is correct to assert that all human beings alive seek to find a sense of wonder in life.  However, in Piper’s analysis it will never happen as long as we think wonder, astonishment, and overwhelming joy are to be found in the new, novel, and exotic.  Rather Piper says that to find the truly unusual and extraordinary within the usual and ordinary is the beginning of a life of astonishment and wonder!  In other words, a life of wonder is really a way of seeing life and reality in a deeper fashion.  A life of wonder is available to all of us and is right before our very eyes, if we can see it.  We don’t have to have the life styles of the rich and famous to live a life of astonishment and rapturous joy.  Wonder is before us every day, if we have eyes to see!In case that is too abstract to take in, Thomas Howard writes about what this means in the most mundane place, the dwellings we inhabit everyday.  The place so familiar we don’t even think about it anymore.  We will allow him to be our tour guide through our home and see how he imagines it to be.  “It is hard to see ourselves as walking daily among the hallows, that is, as carrying on the commonplace routines of our ordinary life in the presence of mighty mysteries that would ravish and terrify us if this veil of ordinariness were suddenly stripped away.” (Hallowed Be this House).  Howard is saying we walk among things that would astonish us, if we could really see what was going on.  But, alas, we just look at all this stuff of raising kids, going to work, eating meals with friends, or coaching a baseball teams as “clutter.”  If we could just get these things done then somehow we could get on to the big things.  The things that would astonish us.If it is a believer making this assertion then the big things might be a mission trip, prayers, or some ministry project.  If it is a non-believer, it might be getting out of this rat race and having time to travel, or enjoying great dinners, or living like the wealthy.  But both cases miss the point of how a life of wonder is created and nurtured.  Both suppose that the stuff of ordinary life is just that, “ordinary,” something that is holding us back and, like a dead weight, keeping us from really living.  Is there another way of dealing with this?  Heaven knows I have people ask me this question all the time.If you are stuck here, then it is because you have bought the myth of the secularization that is playing all around us.  That myth supposes that what you see before you is all there is.  But what if we went back to the ancient idea found in the Scriptures that all of life is an oblation to God, that literally all the things we do in life are to be given to God as a sacrifice of praise and worship?  That literally all the stuff we think of as clutter is really the place God is seen, felt, and known? For instance, I sometimes look at the meal my wife of thirty-three years has put on the table and I am astonished.  It is somehow transfigured, as I see someone who gladly is laying down her life for others, and it is worship!  Somehow, her act of sacrifice participates in the work on the cross that Jesus did.  Is this clutter or a window into a world of transcendence and meaning?Is the mundane act of gardening somehow a labor-intensive endeavor that keeps me from real wonder or is it the very ground of wonder?  In James Lee Burke’s latest novel, Last Car to Elysian Fields, Dave Robicheaux, the recovering alcoholic detective who has just lost his wife, his house, and almost his life, is fishing with his best friend Clete in Bayou Benoit.  As he watches the fish rise and the breeze blowing the buttercups which sprinkle the levee, he muses, “I had never looked to the skies for great miracles, and, as St. Augustine once indicated, to watch a vineyard soak up the water in a plowed row and produce a grape that could be translated into wine was all the proof we needed of higher realities.”Real wonder is possible, right were you are.  It is seeing and sensing the joy that happens when all the mundane stuff is seen as hallowed and that we actually walk among the hallows and God is present there, right there, the transcendent God meeting us in our normal life of human things we do.  So, open your eyes and look!!!