I was recently walking in the woods with a friend who is a delightful kindred spirit. We both love nature and we both have an endearing tendency to talk to things we see – trees, squirrels, bugs, birds – you name it, we talk to it. On our way back from the waterfall that we went to see, my friend spotted a small brown Anole. Of COURSE we had to stop and say “hi”! She is an accomplished photographer, so of course, pictures also had to happen. Eventually, we became aware that there was a lady walking her dog who had stopped behind us, waiting for us to finish conversing with the lizard. We smiled and waved our thanks and moved on.
And then there was another lizard! Again we stopped, and again the lady and her dog waited. But I think the third and fourth lizards were a bit too much for her. By this time, we were also quite intent on finding out if we could touch one. They seemed so chill and relaxed around us – especially around my friend – that it seemed like we were experiencing a Garden of Eden moment.
Well, the lady behind us had definitely had enough. She passed by as quietly as she could, but she had somewhere to go and wasn’t interested in joining us or waiting for us to finish exulting over the lizard. I don’t blame her, but the picture stuck in my head. How many opportunities for wonderment do we pass right by?
This brings me to the topic of wonderment as a doorway into awe.
We are born with a huge capacity to experience wonderment and it seems to flow most naturally when we are children. I believe this is one of the reasons why we find children so refreshing to be around. Our adult lives have conditioned, programmed or beat us into a dulled vision of the world. Kids live in a state of wonder. Life is new and exciting. They are still strong enough to exult in repetition. The potential of wonderment hasn’t left us, but we have grown old and tired. They remind us of the freshness of life and spirit when we too thought the world was a wild and magical place.
G.K. Chesterton shares the opinion that fairy tales aren’t for children, they are for adults. We are the ones that need to be reminded.
“We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life, we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant, we remember that we forgot.”
“This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost prenatal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember for one wild moment, that they run with water.” -Excerpts from Orthodoxy
In the next three blogs, I would like to explore three aspects of our relationship with wonderment: why do we lose it, why should we get it back, and how do we get back?
Why do we lose our wonderment?
For most of us, the capacity for wonderment shrinks as we grow older, and we don’t quite make the transition into the richer expression of childLIKE wonder shining through the colored lenses of life experience. What happens? I’d like to frame it around three possible factors, though there certainly could be more.
Limitations to our Creativity
This is not just whether we can paint or draw or write a story. Fundamentally, we are talking about the creative element of God’s nature in us. His imagination created this universe. We have the same desire and ability to create, which means that we can relate to HIM in an area that is core to His nature. But how we are raised, the box we are forced into, the wounds we sustain along the way and the wrong reactions to pain can all conspire to drown out that creative responsiveness in us. We no longer marvel at what is made, or how it got there, or how it works. We start to accept the faulty belief that just because something IS this way, it is the only possible way it could have been.
Children are avid imaginators and creators. Games, forts, stories, drawings, Lego cities – all part of the process of discovering and pushing the limits. The playing field as an adult is different (though any of those things can still be enjoyed!), but the access to imagination and creativity should remain the same.
Most of us are on a healing journey already. What if you were to explore your journey with an eye towards recapturing creativity and imagination? What if you were to invite God to show you exactly how HE sees the uniqueness of His creative power within you? What would that change in your spirit and soul? We are made in His image, and He is a Creator. Your life and view of the world, your capacity to experience wonderment could be radically transformed by that central role being restored in your life.
Burdens of Life
Adulthood grows most of us into a place of worrying about, I mean, managing life.
Responsibility has a thousand weights. If we allow it to happen, it will push us into a task-focused view of life, where we take upon ourselves the impossible goal of controlling the outcome. We don’t rest easy with the things we can’t understand or the reality that our reactions and attitudes are about all we really CAN control, and even those are hit and miss. I admire a healthy child’s capacity to let Mom and Dad take care of life so she has the bandwidth to be dialed into the moment and all it has to offer. That emotional weight of ultimate responsibility rests on shoulders that are much stronger than hers.
I am reminded of a snippet from the story of Corrie ten Boom in The Hiding Place. When she was a child, she asked her father a question about sex. He didn’t answer her directly, but took down a heavy trunk, full of watchmaking supplies, and set it on the ground. He asked her to lift it. Of course, she couldn’t. He told her that there are some things that are too heavy for her to lift, and that she must be willing to let him carry it for her for a while longer. She could accept that analogy in total peace, and allow her father to carry the answer to the question until she was big enough to handle it herself.
And there are burdens we will never be strong enough to carry. Jesus is pretty clear about what we are supposed to do with them. Can we? Can we give ourselves the freedom? Can we release the emotional weight to Him so that we engage with the wonders of life?
Secular Humanism
Everything about the created universe is meant to point us back to God. His fingerprints are everywhere and still visible, in spite of the scars of human corruption. The enemies of God know how dangerous wonderment is. When we experience wonder, we step into the realm of the transcendent. There is an eternal quality to wonder. It takes us outside of ourselves. We acknowledge that there is something we haven’t seen or experienced, or that causes us to marvel at mysteries, talents, skills, or creativity that we admire and respect.
Each moment of wonder is bursting with possibilities of a God encounter. In those moments, we escape the boundaries of all the things that have been silenced and controlled within us. There is more. There is a God. There has to be. This couldn’t possibly exist without Him.
My expectation is that if you are reading this blog, you abhor Godlessness as much as I do. But the effect of humanism on us can be very subtle. Just the separation between the sacred and the secular that we live with every day is an expression of it, and can be enough to dampen us. There is a relentless destruction of everything that might be a doorway into wonderment – things that used to be held in high regard are dragged through the mud. No respect. No honor. No living or looking beyond. We are a culture of spitters who are being taught to step on the lizard instead of to stop and admire it.
In every possible way we can, we must push back against the tide of erasing God from the center of His universe and placing humans there instead. This exploration of the building blocks of awe and particularly of wonderment, which leads so quickly to it, is part of that resistance. I invite you to examine your life and invite the Holy Spirit to shine His light and show you where humanism may have crept in and how you can come in the opposite spirit.
In the coming days, I encourage you to invite the Holy Spirit to show you reasons why your wonderment was diminished. Was it loss of the imaginative spark? Bruises from the journey? Too many burdens weighing down your emotional freedom? Separation from the visible fingerprints of God everywhere around you? The beginning point is awareness. We have to recognize there is a discrepancy before we can proceed with filling it.
In the next blog we will explore more of why we should invest in regaining our sense of wonderment.
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