How to Lose a Sense of Wonder

I read a true story the other day that made me cry. Made me weep. A true story about a fragile old man who befriended a broken teenage girl and helped her regain her sense of wonder. For, as most of us know by our teen years, wonder has begun to fade just as surely as we’ve forgotten how to skip. What happens to that childlike amazement? Mark Twain had an idea:

 

“We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the native has because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we have gained by prying into that matter.”

 

In full cogito ergo sum mode I sat at my desk and tried to write a story about a rainbow. Not that you must be inspired to pen anything worthwhile but when the task is more tedious than scraping shell bits from a boiled egg, when the draft is more stagnant than a mudhole even though you’ve prayed for inspiration and nothing magical appears on the page, you might hear yourself saying, I’m so done here, and call it a day.

True story. Straightway I drove to the grocery store after a spring rain and pulled into the parking lot and behold! A giant double arc overhead. A glowing ribbon of color, array of bright shades, golden light. Am I alone here?

Does anyone else not see this amazing spectacle? People oblivious, passing in and out the store, sightless. Blind to wonder. Never had I felt so alone. Finally, after packing grocery bags in the back of his car, one man looks skyward, then prods his son to life.

“Hey look up there. A rainbow.” Unable to contain my excitement, I lean my head out the window and say, “Amazing, aye?” The guy in the tweed cap walks my way and says, “Sure is. You know what that rainbow means?”

“Sure. God’s promise to Noah.”

“Did you know there’s another rainbow surrounding the throne in the book of Revelation?”

“Oh yeah! When my brother was a little boy, he saw that scene in a dream! Saw Jesus in the sky with his arms outstretched, a rainbow over his head, saying, “I’m coming soon.”

All the while we’re gazing up at the sky, at the beauty that feels like a miracle. The teenage boy standing next to his father, smiling at us, two grownups carrying on like that. Totally enthralled by a rainbow. Beats all he’d ever seen.  

His father saying, “Why do you reckon there are two of them, one right on top of the other one?”

The boy replying, “I’ll ask tomorrow in science class and let you know.” 

End of discussion.                             

~*~

I don’t know about you, but I’m a slow unlearner. It took years to once more see life through the eyes of a child. As William Blake described it:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

A Heaven in a Wildflower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

Eternity in an hour.

Before it was educated out of us, we lived in wonderment. It was our natural state of being. We were our truest selves, living and taking pleasure in the moment. We were natural mystics, awestruck by the world around us. It was all amazing. Mary Oliver, who clearly held on to her sense of wonder, said it best in “Mysteries, Yes:”

“Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company with those who say                                                          

‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.”

 

What’s your story? When were you last awestruck? Seized by wonder?  What sight stopped you in your tracks and captivated you for a moment in time?  

Art: NC Wyeth 

 

TEA TIME

We met in a one-horse town on a Sunday afternoon at The Bailey Café: the quintessence of charm and hospitality, walls graced with over a thousand teapots. More teapots than you can imagine in one place. A fairy tale ambiance. A hidden treasure.

An afternoon well-spent in good company. With friends I knew well and friends I’d yet to meet. But no strangers, only birds of a feather clinging to the Vine. You know what they say about time flying when you’re having a good time – and I can safely assume that a good time was had by all that afternoon in the company of Wayne Jacobson.

I haven’t seen him since that day at The Bailey Café – which has since closed its doors – but lately I’ve enjoyed Wayne’s company again like a daily tea while reading his latest:

Lived loved, free, full: a collection of 365 daily reflections designed to draw the reader into a deeper place of quiet rest. Yes, that rest that some of us have struggled to attain by the sweat of our brow. Well, maybe not you.

But from my understanding most of us have aspired to abide in the Vine 24:7. Desired the tenacity of Brother Lawrence. The steadfast will to remain in God’s presence all the livelong day and engage in seamless conversation amid pots and pans. Amid the hustle and bustle of life and mundane chores alike.

But what happens when life interrupts that sweet communion? When you’re pushed and pulled every which way to meet the world’s demands? How centered are you then? Disconnect happens even to the best of contemplative hearts.

But instead of enduring the drone of guilt… there I go again, a lapse of conscious effort… slack me.. can’t even tarry with Jesus one solid hour... Wayne offers a suggestion he calls “The Pause that Transforms.” A no-sweat stance. A cooperative effort instead of it’s all on me. My burden. A brief excerpt from the book:

“Look to him early and often throughout your day. As you start your car…before you pick up the phone… pause and see if he has anything to show you…and you’ll begin to see things that are easy to miss….”

The gospel according to Wayne is that simple. His latest work, Lived loved, free, full offers practical steps to lighten the load of guilt that many have unnecessarily shouldered.

Every daily reflection is woven with one common thread: grace – the necessary ingredient for even the strictest ascetic’s self-denial. In Wayne’s vernacular, grace means God’s ability to do in us that which we cannot do entirely on our own. Desire + grace = transformation.

Live Loved Free Full on Amazon
Wayne Jacobsen’s Website

#LiveLovedFreeFull

 

Epigraph

Her disappearance has been gradual. Little by little waning and weaning herself from the usual comforts and consolations – even those offered by her faith. Now prayer rings hollow, even the tried-and-true one liners like “Thy will be done” and “Have mercy on me,” my friend confesses.

And because life has become a running series of Job episodes, she’s ready to make her exit, claims to have one foot in the grave already. Naturally, she hopes it turns out the way Julie Suk saw it in her poem, Between Lives.

And what if it’s true that the life we’ve lived flashes by at the moment of death?

Not even for an instant would I want repeated
the boring drone of guilt,
nor the shabby aftermaths of desire.

The black tunnel lit with epiphanies
would be my take –

sighs of contentment, laughter, a wild calling out –

and at the end,
a brief flaring of the one we’d hoped to become
escorting us into the light.

The poetic imagery continues speaking to me, opening new vistas of soul exploration. Take for instance, the “black tunnel lit with epiphanies.” Dark tunnel: a universal symbol for the passage from life to death - although I’ve now reimagined that brief passage as the whole of life’s journey. Which, in light of eternity, is but a vapor. Our lives flashing before our eyes from cradle to grave.

How ephemeral this life is: as brief as the journey through the momentary tunnel at the children’s park where you hear a chorus of wild screams, then travel back into the brightness of daylight.

As brief as the time between Good Friday weighted down with grief and Sunday’s resurrected release from the dark domain. From light we come and to light we return.

As brief as a book cover. “This Life is Only the Prologue,” writes Wayne Jacobsen in his new book I was sent to review (see forthcoming post for more). “On the last page of the last book of his Narnia tales, just when the reader thinks the story is over because the world has ended, C.S. Lewis pulls back the curtain even farther as he writes of the four children:”

“For them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world…had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

~*~

Meanwhile we travel through these tunnels lit with epiphanies along the way. Reminders of who we are and why we’re here. Little signposts pointing to purpose and keeping us on track toward our divine destiny.

For, as Wordsworth put it, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”… and all who’ve come before us “trailing clouds of glory” lit our way. All the poets and prophets and saints, the Risen Christ and all of creation displaying his glory, the children of God who went out in a blaze but passed the torch along.

I’d like to remind my friend and each of us with one foot in the grave that we’re just walking each other home. This ain’t exactly the Hotel California. Whether we check out or not we’re leaving. But the drone of guilt sometimes follows us toward the exit.

Not long ago a fellow poet and dear friend said to me on her deathbed, “I wish I could have been a better person.” This from one of the most caring and generous souls I’ve known. Whoever she’d hoped to become was there all along, discovered tucked inside the pages of her Holy Bible after her death.

A prayer, an epigraph:

Let us feel you on our pulses and in our breathing and convince us in our very bodies that we live and die in the hollow of your hand. Release now these mute longings hidden in our hearts to join the early morning bird song singing green beginnings and multicolored hopes, for you are shaking us and shaping us into a springtime people with Easter in our eyes.  

 

If this life is only the book cover and title page, what would your epigraph say? Your theme song? Mine would be almost as brief as the title: I Was Here. Something as brief as “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Or maybe the last sentence in T.S. Eliot’s East Coker: “In my end is my beginning.”

 

Wishing You

On my New Year’s birthday, I read this poem by Ana Lisa de Jong that spoke to me, really spoke to me. For it’s been some year. Not just any old year. Not a typical year for anyone on the planet. You know what I mean.

Maybe you too have suffered trauma, a disquieted soul, deep grief. A dark night. A dark and stormy night. I joked with my friend Meg yesterday about cliches and how, yes, it was the best of times and the worst of times. The worst of years for obvious reasons.

The best of years because God and I together moved this mountain – mountain-moving: a cliché I couldn’t outdo because of the magnitude of progress this old packrat made decluttering a whole monstrosity of a house, upstairs and down. The silver lining in confinement.

But back to grief and loss, and why Ana Lisa’s poem matters. It matters because she so eloquently expresses what we all know deep down. That the little things, things we often take for granted in our everyday existence, are infinitely the most important. And only through sorrow does this revelation arise. Here it is, Ana Lisa’s poem about letting go and holding on, words to ponder this new year, words that comforted me this side of my deepest grief. 

WISHING YOU

I wish you better.

Whatever you didn’t get,

lost.

Whatever in this last year

you would hope to forget,

I wish you amnesia.

If not forever, just for the time it takes

to imagine, to place new hope

step by step.

And, whatever in this last year you did not receive,

or rather lost as something unable to be

kept in the hands -

I wish you better.

And if not better,

then a balm for your former pains.

A new view,

out through mist dissolving,

curtains drawn back to receive the sun.

Yes, I wish you that thing,

wish you whatever your heart,

if it could find a name,

would place its value on -

that illusive prize

which makes us hope in every new year’s

unknowns,

as though this year might

be the year we arrive at it.

And yet, I think it’s not until

in hindsight,

when we look back,

we see how all along we owned it.

These treasures of the heart

undefined.

And that it’s our losses,

the things that have strummed the heart’s strings,

that were the important things.

Which is why I don’t wish you

amnesia, at least not as much as I do

memory -

and wisdom to treasure,

and recognise again

what are the main things.

That we might not leave them

behind.

 

Ana Lisa de Jong

Living Tree Poetry

January 1, 2021

 Art: Andrea Kowch

What little things have you come to recognize as infinitely the most important?