Restoring the Sense of Wonder | The Odyssey Online
Start writing a post
Entertainment

Restoring the Sense of Wonder

In which the author states the obvious and startling fact that you are alive.

24
Restoring the Sense of Wonder
YouTube

I served as a lead counselor at a history camp for an organization called Classical Conversations last summer. I got to know one particular little girl who I couldn’t really decide if she was odd, troublesome, nerdy, sweet, or absolutely lovable. Maybe she was all those things. Anyway, one day, during snack time, she approached me.

“Do you believe in miracles?” she asked.

“Of course,” I answered.

“Can I tell you something, and will you believe me and not laugh at me?”

I wasn’t quite sure what I was in for, but, hoping it wasn’t anything ridiculous, I said “Sure. You can trust me.”

“What if I told you that we found diamonds in our house?”

“I don’t know. Did you find diamonds in your house?”

She nodded, wide-eyed.

“Where do you think they came from?” I asked.

“They came from heaven!” she exclaimed. “Do you believe they came from heaven?”

In the split second between the question and reply, a number of thoughts passed through my head. Yes, I believed the little girl’s family had really found diamonds in their house. Also, I got the feeling that she probably wasn’t supposed to be telling me. Was I going to be the patronizing sort of grown-up who entertained her child’s notion of miracles with a big, condescending smile on my face, like it was belief in Santa Claus? Or was I going to be the dream-destroying realist who told her that they were probably just left behind by the previous owners of the house? I couldn’t bring myself to do either. So I told her:

“I think a lot of things come from heaven. Like friends.”

And diamonds,” the girl returned, nodding eagerly.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

When people ask me questions like this, I’m almost never satisfied with my answers. But I think this was one answer I don’t need to dream of doing over. It is the same answer I would have given a full grown adult. The question, admittedly, comes up in a different form: Is something only a miracle if it is odd, extraordinary, or completely out of the everyday experience? If it rains water, we call it nature; if it rained frogs or pumpkin pie, we would call it a miracle. But if you ask me, I don’t think the clouds need to precipitate pumpkin pie to be miraculous. A lot of things come from heaven—like friends. And rain. And diamonds.

You may think this is an easy argument to make if all I mean by a miracle is merely a descriptive adjective for the nice things in life. Last week, I encouraged you to think of the poetic sentiment “soul of the river” in the literal sense—that is, as if rivers really had souls. Before that, we talked about the lost sense of wonder—how our culture has lost its’ fascination for the quiet beauty of ordinary things. Today, I want to take that a step further. What ifwe treated these seemingly ordinary events as if they were literally supernatural events from heaven? Would this serve as an antidote to heal our decrepit loss of wonder?

Perhaps, but it would not do any good in the long run if the claim wasn’t true. No doubt the little girl in my story had a sense of Wonder, but she only acquired it by believing in something that couldn’t have happened: that an angel came in the night and tucked some diamonds under the cushions. Pretending that natural scientific laws are miraculous supernatural interferences may make us happier idiots, but we haven’t changed the laws of nature, only the state of our minds. In other words, the antidote is a painkiller, not the cure. It is like taking a hallucinatory drug that makes us see everything as a beautiful dream when really all we are seeing is the musty old carpet in the basement and the glazed look of our addled friends. I don’t want anyone to regain their wonder in that way. But is that really the true state of the world?

One thing scientists all agree on is that Nature is always moving. Air is moving, water is moving, animals are moving, and even the things that don’t appear to be moving at all (like the coffee cup on my desk) are really swarming with microscopic neutrons and electrons, bouncing off each other and promenading together in their electromagnetic orbits. Nothing you have ever seen or ever will see has ever really “stood still.” Everything is being caused by something else, or so I recall from my high-school studies on Newton’s laws of motion. (Note: I am not speaking as a scientist. I know next to nothing about science. Any real scientist is free to correct me if I get the facts wrong.)

When you throw a pebble in a lake, the laws of Nature dictate that a ripple will follow. But it was not the laws of Nature that caused the ripple, it was the pebble. Furthermore, the stone did not throw itself, you threw it. In a word, the ripple was caused by you. Now a raindrop, just like a pebble, will cause a ripple in the lake. But unlike the pebble, the raindrop was not caused by you. It was caused by the vaporization of gasses in the sky, which was caused by evaporated water. But hey, you know the water cycle, I don’t need to reiterate your seventh-grade science teacher. But here’s the catch: you can’t say the water cycle was caused by itself—that is, you can’t say the events of evaporation and precipitation are mutually causing each other to happen. If you can explain how that is possible, you have invented the Perpetual Motion machine, and our whole energy crisis would be over. It was caused by a whole separate platform of foreign events, such as heat and wind and gravity and a million other things I don’t know about. And what was causing those things? Now my brain is getting dizzy.

No matter how far you trace it back, the only thing my imagination provides for the ultimate initiator of the causal chain must be something like a person throwing a pebble in a lake. That is why the Greek gods of nature actually seem to me a much more likely hypothesis than the modern world will have us believe. Science can answer a lot of questions, but it leaves us wanting. Our imagination demands that we have persons, or, perhaps, a Person (what Aristotle called the “unmoved mover") who orchestrates the cycles of Nature. So, to answer our little girl’s question, yes. Her diamonds did come from heaven. And she came from heaven too. So did you. So does everything else.

I realize that both to the religious and the non-religious alike, I am probably not saying anything new. In fact, everything I have said has been said much better in C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles. I am mostly compelled to write this because even people in my community who hold religious views have come to view “faith” as a vapory, abstract concept, quite disconnected from everyday life. But faith becomes all the more immediate when you step out into that nippy October air and realize that the wind in your hair is not just a byproduct of uneven heating on the Earth’s surface, but a whispering from the breath of God Himself. Even believers have a hard time coming to terms with this. How can you call a little breeze in your face an encounter with God? Well, I would hardly call it a direct encounter—that would be truly terrible. It is more like hearing the music from a festival a long way off, the echoes of a campfire song deep in the forest. The festival may be far out of reach…you may never reach it at all. But as long as you are following the sound, I believe Wonder has been restored to its’ rightful place on the throne.

Report this Content
This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
student sleep
Huffington Post

I think the hardest thing about going away to college is figuring out how to become an adult. Leaving a household where your parents took care of literally everything (thanks, Mom!) and suddenly becoming your own boss is overwhelming. I feel like I'm doing a pretty good job of being a grown-up, but once in awhile I do something that really makes me feel like I'm #adulting. Twenty-somethings know what I'm talking about.

Keep Reading...Show less
school
blogspot

I went to a small high school, like 120-people-in-my-graduating-class small. It definitely had some good and some bad, and if you also went to a small high school, I’m sure you’ll relate to the things that I went through.

1. If something happens, everyone knows about it

Who hooked up with whom at the party? Yeah, heard about that an hour after it happened. You failed a test? Sorry, saw on Twitter last period. Facebook fight or, God forbid, real fight? It was on half the class’ Snapchat story half an hour ago. No matter what you do, someone will know about it.

Keep Reading...Show less
Chandler Bing

I'm assuming that we've all heard of the hit 90's TV series, Friends, right? Who hasn't? Admittedly, I had pretty low expectations when I first started binge watching the show on Netflix, but I quickly became addicted.

Without a doubt, Chandler Bing is the most relatable character, and there isn't an episode where I don't find myself thinking, Yup, Iam definitely the Chandler of my friend group.

Keep Reading...Show less
eye roll

Working with the public can be a job, in and of itself. Some people are just plain rude for no reason. But regardless of how your day is going, always having to be in the best of moods, or at least act like it... right?

1. When a customer wants to return a product, hands you the receipt, where is printed "ALL SALES ARE FINAL" in all caps.

2. Just because you might be having a bad day, and you're in a crappy mood, doesn't make it okay for you to yell at me or be rude to me. I'm a person with feelings, just like you.

3. People refusing to be put on hold when a customer is standing right in front of you. Oh, how I wish I could just hang up on you!

Keep Reading...Show less
blair waldorf
Hercampus.com

RBF, or resting b*tch face, is a serious condition that many people suffer from worldwide. Suffers are often bombarded with daily questions such as "Are you OK?" and "Why are you so mad?" If you have RBF, you've probably had numerous people tell you to "just smile!"

While this question trend can get annoying, there are a couple of pros to having RBF.

Keep Reading...Show less

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Facebook Comments