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Awe and Wonder

One of the things I like to do in these inspirational pieces is share some stuff from literature I have read that many folks won’t have read.  That reinforces my assumption that the inspiration I share does not have to originate from my experience and be processed through my brain.  If I read something good from someone else, why not share it?  One such piece I recently found was a little essay by my Franciscan friend, Dan Horan.  

I value my friendship with Dan.  He is a Franciscan and always reminds me that I consider Franciscan spirituality and Quaker spiritualities to be like-minded in multiple ways.  Dan is a Catholic priest and educated to be a theologian.  I respect that, but I admire that fact that he can relate to normal people.  People love him and turn to him for guidance and shaping the way they think about their lives and actions.  When he talks, I listen.

I read a piece from him entitled, “Rediscovering awe and wonder in the miracles of everyday life.”  I appreciated that Dan began the piece by focusing on miracles.  He confesses, “One of the problems with miracles is that they are, by definition, rare occurrences.  At least they seem like rarities to most people since the term itself suggests a violation of the laws of nature or some other divine intervention that would otherwise be characterized as ‘impossible.’”  I agree this is how most folks think about miracles.  

I was however of one accord with Dan when he turns the tables and asks, “what it might mean for us to recognize the miraculous in everyday life?”  I appreciate it even more to watch Dan turn to being a theologian.  What prevents us from seeing the miraculous in the everyday life?  Dan offers this answer.  “I think the fact that many people have lost a consistent sense of God's enduring, immanent and sustaining presence among us as spirit contributes to the collective perception that the miraculous happens only in the rarest or scarcest of circumstances, if at all.”  Basically, Dan is suggesting we need to re-consider the way we think about God.

We would do well to think about God having an enduring, immanent and sustaining presence among us.  Our sense of the miracle happing presupposes the presence of God at work in our world.  We do not have to conceive of this as a momentary stepping into human affairs by an otherwise distant God.  Instead, why can we not imagine God as always being present?  God is here now and is an enduring presence.  God is not only a Sunday God---or Saturday God, if you are Jewish.

God is immanent.  In beginning theology classes, we learn that God can be immanent---within the world---and God can be transcendent---over or above or beyond the world.  I can imagine God is both.  Focusing on the miraculous seizes on the presence of God---the immanence.  For Dan and myself, this presence is a given.  The question is whether we can know it and appreciate it?  Dan wants us to adjust our sense of reality so that we develop “an inherent sense of or openness to the divine or transcendence.”  Interestingly, Dan argues that we need to reconnect with a sense of the Spirit---the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit is the presence of God.  We can work on this acquisition of a sense of God’s presence if we practice gratitude.  I have done a good bit of work on the issue of gratitude, so I second Dan’s suggestion.  It is as if he is telling us to learn to see again, then, learn to be grateful for what we see.  There are little things all over the place, if we but learn to open our eyes and see.  

Appropriately Dan uses the vaccine for Covid as a reason to appreciate the miraculous.  It is amazing what researchers and doctors pulled off in a relatively short period of time.  But Dan also suggestions another step toward seeing the everyday miracle in the little things of life, like cutting our finger and watching it heal.  He admonishes us, to “slow down to think about these amazing human achievements and how we benefit from them…”  If we can do this, then we can join him in saying, “I cannot help but find myself captivated by a spirit of awe and wonder at what is truly miraculous.”

Dan is quite clear in his takeaway.  He wants us “to slow down, to see the world anew, to look at what is before us and what we experience everyday as a form of divine intervention, a form of grace, a form of the miraculous.”  This is pretty simple, but that is Franciscan spirituality.  We can develop a sense of life from practicing this.  Slow down.  Pay attention.  Open your eyes and really see.  Say thanks.  Live gratefully.  This is the kind of things wise parents start teaching their children from a young age.

Maybe Dan is doing little more than telling us that our Divine Parent is much the same.  God as parent or as Spirit is here and now inviting us to see the profundity of creation and our lives in the simple and mundane living of that life.  There is no reason to reserve the miracle only for the extraordinary.  Maybe it is progress to see the extraordinary permeating the ordinariness of our lives.  

In fact, if we get better at experience awe and wonder in the small things, we situate ourselves better to see the truly extraordinary when it happens in our lives.




https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/rediscovering-awe-and-wonder-miracles-everyday-life


 


 



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