On Wonder

When I was a junior in college, I traveled to Seattle for spring break with a few of my close friends. We spent a couple days in one of their family’s homes on an island in the Puget Sound, and each morning, a friend and I would take a kayak out and paddle around near the island.

Our last morning there, we saw ripples in the water while we were paddling out away from the shore. We’d seen some smaller marine life—some fish and what were either seals or sea lions—but all of a sudden, something much bigger was coming up for air relatively close to our kayak. It was a whale! 

We sat still for a while, just watching, afraid that talking would break the spell. Eventually we paddled back to shore, pulled another friend into our two-person kayak, and did our best to keep it steady as we paddled back out.

After a while, the whale moved on. I don’t remember a lot of details about this Seattle trip—it was a decade ago—but I remember the feeling of sitting there in a kayak on the water in the early morning light, watching a whale come up for air.

I felt very small, but the good kind of small. And I felt like maybe the world was beautiful in ways I’d never known about. I think one word for it is wonder.

My life has been littered with these experiences of wonder—a swim though Guatemalan caves filled with water, a night sleeping under the stars in California, road trips through the New Mexico wilderness—an embarrassment of riches. I’m not sure quite how to pin wonder down with words, but I think this excerpt from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes” is a start:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it. 

On easier days, this is all I need. The world is full of astonishing and beautiful things, and to recognize them and to tell about them is sacred work. 

But the days don’t feel particularly easy right now. The implications of the US election are huge, though none of us can predict exactly what will unfold, or when. I am paying attention to the world, and I suppose I am astonished, but mostly I am afraid. There is so much work to be done. There is so much we cannot do ourselves.

And I can’t help but ask, is thinking about wonder a luxury in a world that is burning?

Maybe it is. But I’ve been returning to a passage from This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley: “More than the grand beauties of our lives, wonder is about having the presence to pay attention to the commonplace. Wonder includes the capacity to be in awe of humanity, even your own. . .To be able to marvel at the face of our neighbor with the same awe we have for the mountaintop, the sunlight refracting—this manner of vision is what will keep us from destroying each other.”

Wonder, then, does not mean disconnecting ourselves from reality in favor of putting our hands over our ears and looking at the trees. (Though many of us, myself included, might benefit from logging off of Facebook or Twitter and going for a hike.) But wonder is not escapism. It’s not denial.

Wonder might be a stubborn resistance to letting what we’re afraid of and what we’re fighting against have our full attention. 

Wonder does not erase grief or uncertainty or fear. But wonder stubbornly insists that if we pay attention, we might still be surprised by beauty and love. Even here, even now. Wonder points us towards not just the goodness of what’s possible, but the goodness of what already is, in the beauty of the world around us, in the faces of the people we love, in our community dinners and the delightful chaos of every week’s Sunday school.

I don’t think wonder alone will save us. But I also think that we too easily confuse cynicism with wisdom, despair with maturity. We decide wonder and imagination are things best left to children, who don’t yet know how serious the world is. But it’s precisely because the world is so serious that we need practices that sustain us in the work we are being called to do. We need rest. We need community and ways to connect with God and with ourselves. We need joy, and curiosity, and yes, wonder, as we keep dreaming together of what might be possible, and as we keep committing ourselves together to the work of love and justice in the world.

So, for now, I am paying attention. I am walking in the woods, and singing Taylor Swift songs with the kids at my church, and thinking about what sorts of resistance these upcoming years will demand from us. I am still afraid. But I hope that I will keep finding that the world might not just be more terrible than I’d realized, but more beautiful too, not just in the wonder of breaching whales but in the ways we show up to care for one another, whatever comes next.