Take three deep breaths and remember that you are alive. It’s a simple practice, variations of which
can be found in several religious traditions.
That breath, that second, the infinitesimal moment of life is a gift of
a gracious God. And yet how often those
moments pass without notice, our eyes fixed on screens, our minds transfixed by
shiny objects while life, real life is happening all around us.
One of
my concerns about the church in the modern era is that our experiences of awe
are often artificial. The feeling of
wonder may be real, but it has been manipulated into being from the outside. I suspect this began a few centuries ago when
Christians stepped into large cathedral sanctuaries filled with the overwhelming
sounds of choirs and pipe organs. The
stained glass windows separated holy space from common space as the liturgy
filled the room. The spaces were
designed to evoke wonder. For a couple
of hours, worshipers were transported from the common life of toil into an
image of the Reign of God.
While
this pattern certainly was inspiring it strengthened the understanding that
divine awe and wonder should be found inside the building, not in the common
spaces of life. Meanwhile the church was
learning how to manufacture wonder, a tradition that continues to this
day. I regularly receive worship supply
catalogs and have noticed how in the past decades they have more and more
supplies that I normally have associated with theatrical productions: stage lights and spotlights, sound systems
and headset microphones just like the motivational speakers use. I’m not against adopting modern
technology. The stained glass window was
the original PowerPoint slide. The whole
Reformation movement was founded on the innovation of the printing press. Although the embrace has often been
tentative, the church has eventually accepted new types of instrumentation and
presentation. Yet the purpose of the
theater is to manipulate, to make you feel empathy for pretend characters, to
make you feel excited by false battles, to make you weep at pretend death. The more we embrace the theatrical; the more
we embrace the manipulative and the more difficult we make it to find wonder
outside of the stage lights and spotlights.
My goal
in writing this is not to declare some worship practices as right and some
wrong, nor do I think we need to abandon grand displays of worship. My goal is to encourage wonder as a daily
virtue rather than a special occasion only found in places designed to create
wonder. The awesome aspect of the
Christian story is that our God of wonders, who formed the universe with a word
and knows the whereabouts of every subatomic particle, has been made known to
us in ordinary humanity. The incarnation
of Jesus points to a God who makes the ordinary extraordinary and makes the
common wonderful.
If you
truly pay attention to the world around us you will see that the universe
itself is a constant source of wonder.
If you consider the vastness of space, the simple fact that we are
something and not nothing is a source of wonder; that we are not just dust carried along the
flows of an expanding universe. If you
look through a microscope and see how a drop of pond water is filled with life;
if you pick up a beach rock and consider how you are holding millions of years
of history, these are opportunities for wonder.
You are discovering the wonder about which the psalmist wrote:
“The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1)
In my
next article, I will write about the intersection of wonder and faith. For now, I encourage you to gaze up at the
night sky and watch the transition from night to day as the sun rises. Pay attention to the variety of life around
you, life that flies and crawls and swims all around you. There is awe and wonder right where you are,
all of it praising the living God.
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