Jesus comes home, and his own people don’t know what to do with
him. Their initial response to his mighty deeds and to the wisdom of his
teaching is amazement. “Wow. Where did he get all of this? What kind of wisdom
is this? What mighty deeds!” But then the whole thing unravels. They talk
themselves out of wonder, and they try to make Jesus somehow manageable. “He’s
only a carpenter, after all, Mary’s son. We know his relatives. Come on. We
know where he comes from.” In the end, they find Jesus offensive and altogether
too much for them - that divine power could be so mundane, so accessible, so
familiar. The result is tragic indeed, the tragic loss of wonder. Jesus is so
confounded by their lack of faith that he finds himself unable to perform any
mighty deeds there. He is as powerless as Samson with his hair cut off.
Wonder allows God to be
God. It beckons us to be aware, to see as God sees, and to take nothing for
granted. Wonder receives with open hands, open heart; it never grasps; it loves
all God loves and gives and gazes upon. Wonder does what God does. It is
reverent awe that is at once humble and selfless. Wonder speaks as John the
Baptist and says, “He must increase, I must decrease.”
But when we refuse to
notice reverently, the whole thing collapses. So what. Big deal. I know where
this is coming from. It’s all too familiar, too ordinary - whether it be the
pattern of light falling upon a wall, a blossom or a tiny bug inching along, or
the unexpected kindness of a friend or even a passage of Scripture. Wonder is
then poisoned by cynicism, the absolute enemy of
contemplation.
Wonder happens when we
allow ourselves to be disarmed by God’s in-breaking and respond with reverent
awe. It lets us acknowledge what we do not know or may never know or understand,
to acknowledge and appreciate our limits, our finiteness. It is a different
kind of knowledge, a state of being with the world and with oneself that, like
being in love, colors all we know. (See Peter de
Bolla) It allows humble faith; it
allows uncertainty. Like love, wonder allows all things, believes all things.
It lets God be God, magnificent, extravagant but also hidden and quiet and
unremarkable. We begin to see the world ever charged with the divine, with an
ever-present porosity - a thinness between the ordinary and the divine.
To pray we must relax into
an unknowing that is a certitude beyond argument. To allow Christ in means I
don’t have to understand; I believe. I pay attention. I gaze on beauty as well
as confusion and believe that God is working. I allow myself to be disarmed and
fascinated by Christ and how he will use anything at all to get my attention.
Our life of liturgy and prayer demands wonder, not dramatic but real and
ongoing; an unwillingness to judge, a willingness to be still, a second
naiveté, perhaps a constant naiveté, back down to a place where we can be
amazed and inefficient, unaccomplished. Prayer and liturgy are after all
essentially inefficient - they do not accomplish anything. They very simply
grant us the inestimable privilege of praising Almighty God. (See Robert Taft)
Photograph by Brother
Brian.
