With Wide-Eyed Wonder
When the world feels like it’s falling apart, does wonder have a place?
“Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.”
-John Ruskin
After I graduated college, I started a blog on Blogger titled “Wide-Eyed.” Even though the idea of being “wide-eyed” is associated with childlike naïveté, there was something magical about that word—the image of a little kid with eyelids raised and mouth turned up in expectation and awe—that felt true to who I was and who I wanted to be. A wonder-seeker with childlike curiosity ever ready to be amazed and moved by the glories of the cosmos, seen and unseen.
I believed then that the world, to quote poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, really is “charged with the grandeur of God” and that “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.” The subtitle of that blog summarized my sentiment with these words: “There’s more to life than meets the eye.”
Incredibly, that was nearly two decades ago.
Do I still believe it? Can a man in his fifth decade live not with jaded, disenchanted eyes, but ever-ready wide-eyes, open to encountering transcendent awe in this beautiful and tragic domain? Do thin places really exist, places of encounter with Otherness, with Truth, with Beauty, with Goodness, with the Real? Is our dust really charged with the grandness of the Divine? Do encounters with Beauty have the capacity to transform us toward the eternally Good? Is the world really filled with the glory of a good Creator God?
As is common at the juncture of life marked by raising children, paying bills, cooking meals, healing wounds of the past, and maintaining the daily grind of perseverance in our responsibilities, the doldrums can drift in and cloud a weary soul. Add to that the dramatic, chaotic theater playing out on the national stage and various global existential crises. And finally place all of that within the framework of the centuries-long modern materialist-techno-capitalist disenchanting project and you have a recipe for a cocktail designed to inoculate any notion of “wide-eyed wonder.”
Writing about this impoverishment of wonder in our modern age, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes,
“Indeed, if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve upon our current formula…We are like someone who, having found a magnifying glass a revelation in dealing with pond life, insists on using it to gaze at the stars—and then solemnly declares that if only people in the past had had such a wonderful magnifying glass to look through, they’d have known that, on closer inspection, stars don’t actually exist at all.”
To wake us up from our stupor and slumber, psychologist Richard Beck, in The Shape of Joy, presents a winsome case for a recovery of awe and wonder. Even the contemporary fields of psychological and psychiatric research now support what the ancients intuitively knew: the irreducible importance of awe directed at a transcendent Divine Source to sustain a joy-fueled, meaningful human life.
Not only does Beauty shine through a colorful sunrise, a majestic mountain peak, a thundering waterfall, a fresh snowfall, or a flower in bloom, but Beck suggests an even greater encounter may alight upon our eyes through the wonder of moral Beauty.
Is it possible? As an addict for the Divine gifts lavishly displayed in earthy places like the Rocky Mountains, the Himalayas, or the Hawaiian Islands, could it be that the ability to see the wonder of moral beauty is an even greater source of transcendent awe and meaning?
Perhaps it works both ways, too. Perhaps why so many of us are disgusted and wonder-less as we set our eyes upon what is happening in the current presidential administration, we do not see moral beauty. We see ugly, reckless, harmful selfishness.
Famous existential psychologist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl tells the story of his encounter with transcendent Beauty—in a Nazi concentration camp of all places. Incarcerated in dark and demonic domain, he was digging a trench, fighting back despair as he thought about his absent wife, when unexpectedly:
“I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious ‘Yes’ in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. ‘Et lux in tenebris’—and the light shineth in the darkness.”
What is involved in being ready and able to see? Is it purely gift? Does it require us to honestly and humbly face the darkness and our own limitations in controlling or changing the situation? I am reminded of how often the stories we hear and tell are stories where someone is at the end of their rope, caught in throes of an addiction, suffering in a dark place, blown and tossed about in the dark night of the soul, wounded, weary, wandering, waiting. Perhaps it comes unbidden at times. Wholly unexpected, wholly Other. Shaking us from our sadness and stupor. No explanation. No excuses. Just pure, transcendent, awesome gift from Love.
This is not a license to ignore a life of wide-eyed attention and wonder-seeking eyesight, though, I believe. We can recover this as a way of life. We do not have to let the Powers of the age dull our eyesight.
Let this present moment, in which many of us are feeling afresh the apocalyptic tremors of the age, be our awakening moment. May the blade of our souls be sharpened upon the churning, gritty stone of the age. Let our eyes look at transcendent Beauty to leads us to what is Good and Just for the sake of our neighbors and for the flourishing of all.
In closing, if there ever was a place bidding the attention of wide-eyed wonder, I see it in Divine Love displayed on the cross of Messiah Yeshua. A scandal to our imaginations of anything and everything that the glory (read: beauty) of God is or could be. A tragic and beautiful wonder. A truly awe-some and awe-ful sight we cannot comprehend but can apprehend. A thin place of heaven and earth where the thick veil of obfuscation is torn asunder and the Divine light scatters the darkness.
In Your Light we see light.
Shalom to you today,
Jonathan