Originally Published in the Herald-Zeitung, November 19,2022
Who has not occasionally paused to wonder about something or someone, some circumstance, some situation, that gathers mystery around it? For over 30 years I have written in my journal most mornings. As a prompt, I write about what wishes to be remembered from yesterday. It takes only a few seconds, after I have brewed coffee, lit a candle in my study at 4:30 a.m. and sit with that question, that the remembered events line up.
At the end of each morning’s writing, I ask myself: “What did you wonder about or become curious about yesterday?” Sometimes no answer steps up; other mornings two or three emerge, competing for attention.
I sense that wonder has its own way of knowing. A deeper form of learning is often evoked through wonder. Not seeking the right answer but paying attention to the questions that grow naturally from wondering, like the fruit that emerges from a well-tended seed that blossoms into a plant. That is wonder’s pathway.
Curiosity is also a form of wondering. So can questioning what we believe, value, and even what we sense might be time to discard in our lives. In one of his Dialogues, the Greek philosopher Socrates questioned his student on what he thought was the nature of knowledge. When his student grows dizzy trying to answer this question because it sets him wondering, his teacher saluted him: “this sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher,” namely, the love of wisdom (Philo-Sophia). I sense that it grows directly from being curious.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell suggested that one of the primary functions of myth is to stir in the individual a sense of awe and mystery. I don’t think we have to travel any farther than what is valued in an ordinary day to find illustrations of either; but there is no such thing as ordinary, especially when events in our lives encourage or provoke wonder.
Wonder gains traction when it emanates from the heart, not the head. One experiences something or someone that is heart-felt. Wonder does not seek the right answer, the fixed fact; it is more nuanced than that, more pliable, more oblique.
In wondering we run the risk of touching what is mysterious in life, what gravitates toward a sense of awe. It brushes against what is both ineffable and sacred. In the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “what we cannot comprehend by analysis we become aware of in awe.”
As an example: In these blessedly cooler mornings, my wife and I step out early, before daylight, and gaze for a few moments at the stars that appear so brilliantly against a black sky. There, in the stillness of 4:30 a.m., we stand for a moment in silence.
Gazing up at the night sky full of brilliant lights, we are inevitably drawn to wonder what this new day will bring, how it will both shape itself and be shaped in part by our plans, our schedules and our obligations. Wonder then seems to dissolve under the weight of duty.
In this early moment, however, we sense the power of wonder implicit in the ordinary. Wonder coaxes what we call “ordinary”—a word so inadequate to our experience, so we remain for another moment, silent in the immensity of the early morning sky before it dissolves into the day’s birthing sunrise.
In the cool dark air of the morning, we don’t stop to think; we stop thinking. For wonder seems more intimate with a felt sense of what is real and mysterious. In wonder we are allowed to exist in that narrow hyphen between them.
I sense that such fleeting moments are what poets and artists seek through their creative imaginations: to capture the beauty exposed by wonder and how, for instance, the moon’s shadows will spread across another day, shaping itself, already, from darkness into light.
I end by wondering if these moments of closeness with the natural world serve as bridges to the ineffable mystery of the sacred’s presence, suddenly there in front of us if we open ourselves to its terms, not ours.