Asked For Wonder

"Wonder is not precisely - Knowing." Emily Dickinson

Art by Irma Kukhianidze

We live in an endless news cycle of horror and terror, of tragedies and losses, of sorrows and greed. It is overwhelming. I realize this when I opened my wonder journal and found that I have not written an entry in months. It’s easy to get caught up in even our daily work to the point where we forget or believe we don’t have time for enchantment and exuberant joy. We have come through a season that is proclaimed to be one of joy and wonder, yet more often than nought, it only feels stressful and over commercialized. We have spent time with family, which in itself can be a trial, during a time of great political divisiveness.

So how do we become re-enchanted? How do we cling to that sense of childlike wonder and delight? How do we continue to find hope in the hopelessness?

I often hear that the world is hard and heartbreaking and not a place for dreamers.

How do we so easily lose sight of the fact that each of us is an amazing, complex wonder of existence? That we are here, now, in this moment is nothing short of miraculous in this incredible universe. As the scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wisely wrote, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Or, as the Rabbi and Civil Rights Activist, Abraham Heschel understood, “Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.”

What I love about Heschel is that he grasped that wisdom is begun and rooted in wonder. He spoke of living in a radical amazement that takes nothing for granted and sees how phenomenal daily life really is. He wrote that “To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

This was not some rose-colored glasses man but someone who was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Poland. His mother was murdered by the Nazis. His two sisters died in concentration camps. He fled to the United States and, during the Sixties, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.

He saw wonder as a moral imperative. It makes me think of Rachel Carson saying,“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

Heschel said, “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”

Yet how do we approach a mundane daily life as magical, as miraculous, as wonder-filled? How do we not lose sight of the fact that we exist in this universe and that we are as immense as it?

“We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn,” Abraham Heschel wrote, “or scoff at the totality of being.” We must lose our cynicism, our skepticism, our belief that our existence only matters in how much we achieve or have in our bank accounts. It is, to quote Heschel, an “endless pilgrimage of the heart.” A pilgrimage that gives attention and focus to the celebration of our very existence, to the “transcendent meaning of our actions.”

Whether you believe in God or payer or not, you can’t help but love Heschel for stating, “Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.” Asked for wonder.

Wonder is something greater than ourselves. It offers us perspective in that we are finite on this Earth but infinite in this universe to which we will return. It is the realization that we are here, now, and should be present to this very moment. To see that within ourselves are the depths of loveliness, beauty, brilliance, creativity, and joy. This does not negate our own darkness, which we must acknowledge, but it is understanding that we are greater than our darkness. We are the light of the stars themselves from which we are part of.

May we, like Heschel, daily ask for wonder, seek wonder, strive for wonder. And, like Heschel, we will always receive it.