Advent

First Sunday of Advent

Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the first Sunday of advent. Advent is a time of anticipation or expectation – of preparation and reflection for something new, for the coming of love made flesh to dwell among us. In the Christian tradition, it is a time of spiritually preparing for the coming celebration of Jesus’ birth. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. In preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the first Sunday of Advent, the theme is Hope.

And as we light our chalice, we also light the first candle of advent, a purple candle signifying hope.

Reflection: We enter Advent – the season of preparation, of expectation, of reflection on the celebration which is to come. This first Sunday of Advent the theme is hope. Hope is the energy that allows us to make commitments, to engage in projects that bring love and justice into fuller flower. The voice of hope tells us that there is a place in this world for our intentions. There is no certainty – no guarantees. Our passions and efforts may never yield the results we pursue, but we and our pursuits belong, whatever they may yield. Hope is the assurance that trying matters, our intentions and efforts belong -- whether we accomplish our aim or not. As we reflect in these days about what Christmas means for us, what it could mean, we consider in what ways we see love becoming incarnate and in what ways we can lend our intentions to those incarnations. Where can our hopes combine with hopes of others to promote love, and build justice, for justice is what love looks like in public?

Second Sunday of Advent

Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the second Sunday of Advent -- a time of anticipation, expectation, reflection, and preparation for Christmas. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. And in preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the second Sunday of Advent, the theme is Peace.

And as we light our chalice, we also light the first and second candles of advent – the first purple candle signifying hope and the second purple candle signifying peace.

Reflection: The invitation of Advent is to reflect and spiritually prepare for the celebration which is to come. This second Sunday of Advent, with the second purple candle now lit, the theme is peace. Also, the first candle is re-lit. The first one is hope, the assurance that engagement in life matters – it makes a difference, whether or not it makes the difference we intended. Our energies are worth it – though perhaps in ways we cannot foresee. Now the second purple candle is peace. The peace at issue is conveyed in the Hebrew word, "Shalom," which implies wholeness, harmony with oneself and others and with the universe; healing of damaged relationships; and justice, fairness, and equity for all. We set our intention to what we can do to contribute to worldwide shalom, yet none of us can, by ourselves, make peace real. The path to peace calls for coordinating with others, revising our intention in light of their intentions and their needs. We cannot do it by ourselves, yet no one else can do for us what is our part to do.

Third Sunday of Advent

Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the third Sunday of advent: a time of anticipation, expectation, and reflection for something new, for the coming of love made flesh to dwell among us. For some of us, it is a time of spiritually preparing for the coming celebration of Jesus’ birth. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. December 25 is our day to particularly celebrate this fact. In preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the third Sunday of Advent, the theme is Joy.

And as we light our chalice, we also light the first three candles of advent – the first purple one signifies hope. The second purple one signifies peace. And today’s candle, the pink one, signifies joy.

Reflection: The invitation of Advent is to reflect and spiritually prepare for the celebration which is to come. This third Sunday of Advent, with the pink candle now lit, the theme is joy. Also, the first two candles are re-lit. The first one is hope, the assurance that engagement in life matters – it makes a difference, whether or not it makes the difference we intended. Our energies are worth it – though perhaps in ways we cannot foresee. The second one is peace: the letting go of attachment to results, the assurance that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well. Now out of that hope, and that peace, emerges joy. Not happiness, which is a passing mood, which comes and goes according to circumstances, but rather abiding joy. Joy is the fulfillment that comes from connecting with something beyond ourselves. Some of us conceive of it vertically – something higher, or something deeper. Or we might conceive it horizontally – not a higher power, but a broader power. Joy is the connecting with a wider reality than our narrow self-interests. It is the embrace of common cause with all beings. Happiness is mutually exclusive with sadness, but joy abides even in the midst of sadness. Indeed, a sharp awareness of the world’s pain, its griefs and losses, is essential to the complete connection and identification with the interdependent web of all existence – a connection and identification that is the ground of joy. We are one.

Fourth Sunday of Advent

Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the fourth and final Sunday of advent: a time of anticipation, expectation, and reflection for something new, for the coming of love made flesh to dwell among us. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, December 25 is our day to particularly celebrate this fact. And in preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the fourth Sunday of Advent, the theme is love.

And as we light our chalice, we also light all four or our Advent Candles – the first purple one signifies hope. The second purple one signifies peace. The third candle, the pink one, signifies joy. And the final purple one signifies love.

Reflection: Dear Spirit of Love, We have lit your candle, the candle of love, on this fourth Sunday of advent. We know love is continuously becoming flesh and dwelling among us – in the birth of every beloved child, and in every act of caring and kindness -- yet this is the time of year that we, by convention, direct our attention to celebrate that fact: the fact that thou, love, art born, and born again and again, and that thou art what saves us. The advent season invites us to grow toward this celebration of love, to grow into that celebration over several weeks, preparing ourselves, deepening our appreciation of the message. We have lit again today, as we first did three weeks ago, the purple candle of hope: the assurance that it matters what we do. Even if it doesn’t matter in quite the ways that we intended, it matters that we did intend something, and we did act on that intent. This is hope. We have lit again today, as we first did two weeks ago, the purple candle of peace: the acceptance that comes to us when we let go of attachment to results. We offer up to the world what we are. We do what we can. We then leave it up to the world what to make of it. This is peace. We have lit again today, as we first did last week, the pink candle of joy: for out of hope and peace emerges joy, which comes from connecting with something beyond ourselves, whether something higher or something wider. Happiness is a passing mood, but joy may abide even in the midst of sadness. And now, as the culmination of advent, we have lit the purple candle of love. “And the greatest of these is love,” for love is the fruition of hope, peace, and joy – yet also the ground from which hope, peace, and joy grow, in an ever-widening virtuous cycle.

Christmas Music

"Sing a song of Merry Christmas"
Wolfgang A. Mozart; arr. Walter Ehret

Sing a song of Merry Christmas
Put care away this holiday.
Sing a song of Merry Christmas.
Put care away this holiday.

This is the time to sing Noel.
This is the time to sing Noel, Noel, Noel!
This is the time to sing a bright Noel, so
Sing a song of Merry Christmas,
a joyous song of Christmas --
Put care away this holiday.

When I was a kid, at this time of year, I heard the usual carols on the radio. Intermixed with them, however, in our house, we played Tom Lehrer albums. To some of you, I dare say, this will also be familiar – and for some of you, perhaps, not – after all, it’s been more than 65 years since Tom Lehrer’s Christmas Song was released. It goes, in part, like this:

Christmas time is here, by golly
Disapproval would be folly
Deck the halls with hunks of holly
Fill the cup and don't say when

Hark, the Herald Tribune sings
Advertising wondrous things
God rest ye merry merchants
May ye make the Yuletide pay
Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and – buy!

The holidays can be stressful. Christmas – and Hanukkah, too – have been so thoroughly Commercialized for so long now that we don’t even think to complain about anymore. It’s just how things are. The shopping and the preparations – maybe the travel, or the hosting of relations that travel to you: so much to do!

“Merry Christmas” we say. But it’s easy to find ourselves with no time for merriment. Our Choir’s opening song urged us to “Put care away this holiday.” I hope that’s possible. May you have time for merriment. May you have time to put care away this holiday.

As I looked over the five choir pieces for our Music Sunday, I noticed that there are two, in some ways opposite, ways to put care away this holiday. One of them is merriment, cheer, gaiety – a little bit rowdy, a little bit loud – a time for raucous belly laughs. But this is also a season for peace. To find the calm assurance of inner peace -- this, too, is putting care away – and relishing a calm and peaceful delight. Not the belly laugh, but the quiet smile.

Christmas is for both the boisterous and the peaceful. More on the boisterous side of Christmas, the next Choir piece is about Wassailing. Why do they call it wassail? Because it’s good for wassails ya. Actually, “wassail” comes from the Old Norse for “be healthy” – used as a drinking salutation, like, “to your health.” Nowadays, wassail denotes a beverage made from mulled cider, ale, or wine and spices. The verb wassailing has two traditions: there’s the house-visiting wassail, and the orchard-visiting wassail.

The orchard-visiting wassail comes from cider-producing regions of England. People would go to apple orchards and recite incantations and sing to the trees to promote a good harvest for the coming year. They called this wassailing.

The house-visiting wassail is the practice of people going door-to-door, shlepping an enormous wassail bowl with them, and singing and offering a drink from the wassail bowl exchange for gifts – traditionally, food, drink, or money. Both the house-visiting wassailers and the orchard-visiting wassailers were there to confer blessings – a blessing on the trees, in one case, and a blessing on the house, in the other case, to protect it from evil spirits.

I have seen carolers – and have even been a caroler – but I’ve never seen people actually wassailing – either the orchard-visiting kind or the house-visiting kind. At least, if they were carrying around a large bowl, I didn’t see it. I understand actual wassailing still goes on in western England and Wales. Americans: not so much. But we do like to sing about it. Wassailing has become, for most of us, a metaphor.

Our lives, lived day to day, are indeed a "wandring so fair to be seen" – as we traverse our days giving and receiving the blessings of life and companionship. And as we go through life, our interactions are a mix of marketplace transactions and nonmarket values. On the one hand, I’ll trade you a drink for some gift from you. There’s that transactional way of viewing it. On the other hand, there’s love and joy being shared – and the human bonds that transcend markets.

"Here We Come A-Wassailing"
Traditional English Carol; arr. Ryan O'Connell

Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green;
Here we come a-wand'ring
So fair to be seen.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you
a Happy New Year
And God send you a Happy New Year.

We are not daily beggars
That beg from door to door;
But we are neighbours' children,
Whom you have seen before.

God bless the master of this house
Likewise the mistress too,
And all the little children
That round the table go.

Christmas is indeed heavy on the music. No other holiday is submerged in its music the way Christmas is. There are a few Easter songs – not many. For the 4th of July, we have a number of paeans to patriotism, but they don’t inundate the air the way that Christmas songs and carols do every December.

Almost every recording artist feels the need at some point in their career to put out a Christmas album. Even Bob Dylan, bless his heart, put out one. I like Bob Dylan, but after hearing his Christmas album once, I have not wanted to hear it again. The record labels are not, however, cranking out Halloween albums, or Labor Day albums.

Think of all the Popular Christmas songs written in the 20th century: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snow Man.” “All I want for Christmas is You,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “A Holly, Jolly Christmas,” “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” “Silver Bells,” “Dreaming of a White Christmas.” New ones come out every year.

Those are fun. I like them. But in my mind the real Christmas Carols are the ones from the 19th Century. These are the ones that seem to me to get under the surface of Christmas and speak to a more fully resonant meaning. “Joy to the World,” “The First Noel,” “Silent Night,” “Do you hear what I hear?” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “Deck the Halls,” “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “Angels we have heard on high,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” “O Little Town of Bethlehem” – you know – the ones in our hymnal. I mean, a 20th-century song like, for instance, “I’ll be home for Christmas,” may be catchy, and even kinda poignant, but it’s not hymnal material.

Of course, the 19th-century also produced some very popular tunes that were just for fun: Jingle Bells, for instance – which is also not in our hymnal.

The thing is, Christmas, as I was saying, has these two very different moods: on the one hand, the merry and festive -- and on the other hand, the peaceful, the quiet bliss. If you were going to pull off a holiday that pulls together such opposite moods, how would you do it? With music. You sing Jingle Bells, and you sing Silent Night – you sing about laughing all the way, and you sing about “all is calm” – and you keep going back and forth until the two moods start to seem like one thing after all. And maybe they are.

Sing to us about the Carols of Christmas.

"Carols of Christmas (Love is All Around)"
Clark William Lawlor

Christmas is coming, the air is dark and cold.
We gather together, the young and the old,
Singing carols of Christmas, ‘round a warm fire's glow,
Sharing stories and laughing, as we shelter from the snow,

CHORUS: Singing, "Joy to the world", "The First Noel",
As we sing on this "Silent Night," knowing all is well.
"Do you hear what I hear?" Listen to the sound,
For even "In the Bleak Midwinter," love is all around.

The frost on the windows, the snowflakes drifting down,
We all build a snowman, there's magic all around.
The kids open presents: pajamas or a train,
Then we circle 'round the piano, and start a new refrain,

CHORUS

Oh, come, let us “Deck the Halls,” “The Herold Angels Sing,”
Oh, “What Sweeter Music, can we bring?”
This Christmas time (this Christmas time),
This Christmas time (this Christmas time),
Oh, “Have Yourself a Merry little Christmas.”

CHORUS

The next piece, in a few minutes, will be "Now the Holly Bears a Berry," which is a variation on "The Holly and the Ivy." This evocation of the natural world in connection has me reflecting on the ways that Christmas may be taken to be about something beyond nature. And yet, this particular carol embeds the Christmas story completely within nature.

As we noted earlier, our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. And yet the holiday is called Christmas. It’s a Christian holiday – and isn’t the Christian story about love being made flesh and dwelling among us is a bit more... specific?

Sometimes we use the word “supernatural” to describe the difference between the traditional Christian account of Christian and a more “naturalized” version. Some people believe in supernatural stuff going on, and some people don’t, and there’s the difference. Some people tell a supernatural story about Christmas – and some people don’t go in for that. The thing is, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn’t as clear as we sometimes imagine it is.

That distinction is a cultural product, and it has shifted over time. The very idea of supernatural – that is, the sort of line we draw between what we call “natural” and what we call “supernatural” -- is all fairly recent. And it’s not always clear where or how the line is to be drawn.

For instance, it has occurred to me – and might have occurred to you -- that the ghosts depicted in the movie "Ghostbusters" are not supernatural. You might think that if anything counted as an example of a supernatural entity it would be ghosts – and that people who don’t believe in the supernatural, therefore do not believe in ghosts. But if “ghost” means the sort of entity fictionally depicted in Ghostbusters, then ghosts are entirely natural.

Why do I say this? The ghostbusters use nuclear-powered backpacks to shoot a stream of protons at the ghost, and then they contain it within a metal box. If something is susceptible to physical protons and a physical box, then that something is a physical thing. The entities are fictional – and the physics involved is fictional, too -- but it’s still recognizable as physics.

There is a history of uncertainty about where to draw the line between natural and supernatural. There was a boom in seances in the 1920s and into the 1930s. This was the time when radios were first coming out. If invisible disembodied voices could speak to us from afar through the medium of a box, then why couldn’t the spirits of the dead speak to us through a medium? If radios were natural, then maybe seances were, too. Or if seances depended on something supernatural, then it sure seemed as if radios did too.

A lot of people were unsure about where to draw that line between natural and supernatural. Today, our physicists propose that there might be something called dark matter. The way that galaxies curve in their rotation, the way galaxy clusters form, and the tiny fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation seem to require a lot more mass out there than we can see or detect – so physicists hypothesize that the mass is there, but it’s a different kind of mass that’s invisible, undetectable – dark matter – which they estimate, has a total mass of more than 5 times the mass of all the visible matter in the universe. Is dark matter supernatural? If you say “no,” then why not?

Physicists are divided on the question of whether quantum indeterminacy is irreducible – but if it is, that would mean there’s no natural law that determines certain quantum phenomena. Would that make them supernatural?

They more you look at this notion of supernatural, the more elusive it becomes. It’s not at all clear what, if anything, it could mean.

There are, in fact, a number of approaches to Christmas that quite explicitly ground the basic story in nature. "The Holly and the Ivy" is quite an old Carol – one of the few that might go back to before the 19th century, though the earliest known publication was in 1833. "The Holly and the Ivy" - and Doughlas Wagner’s riff on that carol -- “Now the Holly Bears a Berry” -- seem to emphasize the continuity between the natural and the human. The holly brings forth berries – and Mary brings forth her babe. There is wonder there – a kind of awe inspiring magic – in the way that life brings forth life, but there’s nothing we could call supernatural, unless we called everything supernatural.

It’s all natural, through and through. And that’s just super!

"Now the Holly Bears a Berry"
Traditional English Carol; arr. Douglas E. Wagner

Now the holly bears a berry, as red as the rose
And Mary wrapped her baby in warm swaddling clothes.
And Mary bore her baby, for all to come and see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.

Now the holly bears a berry as white as the snow,
And Mary held her baby in her arms long ago.
And Mary shared her baby with all who came to see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.

Now the holly bears a berry as black as the night,
And Mary laid her baby in tghe moon's crystal light.
And Mary shared her baby with all who came to see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.

Our Choir began this morning with “Sing a Song of Merry Christmas” which urged us to put care away this holiday. And may you indeed make time for merriment this holiday season. But I’ve been saying there are two ways to put care away: one is with boisterous merriment, and the other is with a calm and blissful peace. With the choir’s closing number for this special music service, we circle round to the peace theme. Peace, peace, peace on earth, good will to all. Joy, love, singing together. The choir will invite us, at a certain point, to join in a chorus of "Silent Night."

"Peace, Peace"
Words and Music Rick and Sylvia Powell; arr. Fred Bock

Peace, peace, peace on earth - and good will to all.
This is a time for joy. This is a time for love.
Now let us all sing together of Peace, peace, peace on earth.

Peace, peace, peace on earth -- and good will to all.
This is a time for joy. This is a time for love.
Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright.
Round yon virgin, mother and child
Holy infant so tender and mild;
Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.

Now let us all sing together of
Peace, peace, peace on earth.

Awe and Wonder

It is December. The holiday season descends upon us. It’s a good time to experience wonder, and even maybe a touch of that intensified sense of wonder that we call awe.

Sometimes when you think you are out of fuel – running on empty or running on fumes, it turns out the fuel you have keeps you going -- for eight days. Sometimes some energy comes out of you that leaves you wondering: where did that come from? You didn’t know you had it in you. Hanukkah invites us to consider that sort of wonder.

And then there is the number one source of awe. When psychologist Dacher Keltner asked people all over the world to submit accounts of their experiences of awe, he found that experiences of awe tend to come from one of what he calls the eight wonders of life.

Big ideas or epiphanies tend to trigger awe. That’s one.

Two, being present at a birth, or at a death brings awe.

Three, mystical experiences of transcending wonder and mystery are awesome.

Four, art and visual design can inspire awe, as can, five, music.

Six, nature can awaken awe in us, and we experience awe in, seven, collective movement like in dance or team sports.

But Keltner found that the number one source of awe was not any of these. The thing that most often inspires awe in people, more common than nature, or spiritual practice, or music, or losing yourself in a whirling dervish: is seeing people unself-consciously display the goodness they are made of. Witnessing human strength, courage, kindness, perseverance against difficulty is what most commonly leads people to feel awe. “Around the world,” writes Keltner, “we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”

And what is Christmas all about? Well, it’s about a baby. The story carries us in our imagination to a poor woman, away from home, giving birth to a little baby. Being present to a birth is one of Keltner’s 8 sources of awe, but Christmas is also about the birth of love in human hearts. It’s about love becoming flesh and dwelling among us. And when we see that happen – and it’s happening all the time: people doing something good, something loving, something kind, something courageous and difficult – that’s the most common source of awe we have. The wonder and awe of love becoming flesh and dwelling among us – even within us – that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Wonder is itself a wonder. What an amazing thing that we should be beings who get amazed, a wondrous thing that these animal bodies – yours and mine – should be built to experience wonder and even awe. The capacity for wonder is apparently not unique to humans. The chimpanzees – whose branch on the evolutionary tree split off about 7 million years ago from the branch that eventually led to homo sapiens – also seem to experience wonder. Jane Goodall noticed the wonder or awe that chimps seemed to feel in the presence of a waterfall. There doesn’t seem to be any utilitarian purpose for this. It doesn’t seem to confer any reproductive advantage, so how did natural selection select for the capacity for wonder? For these chimps it looks actually risky. They could slip on the rocks. Chimps can’t swim, so the risk of falling in could be life-threatening. Jane Goodall explains:

“The chimpanzee's brain is similar to ours. They have emotions that are clearly similar to those that we call happiness and sadness and fear and despair and so forth. So why wouldn’t they also have feelings of some kind of spirituality? Which is, really, being amazed at things outside yourself.”

She goes on to say:

“I think chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are, but they can’t analyze it, they don’t talk about it; they can’t describe what they feel.”

Hmm. Being amazed at things outside yourself is part of spirituality -- as is, for that matter, being amazed at things inside yourself. The larger part of spirituality, it seems to me, is the making meaning of things, of life, of this existence. So describing the feelings of wonder or awe – which is how we place those feelings in a context of meaning – is itself a big component of spirituality. If the chimps can’t describe what they feel, then I’d say they have a seed of spirituality, but that seed hasn’t sprouted into spirituality. That seed is wonder, and it does seem that the chimps are experiencing wonder. It’s true we don’t know what’s happening in a rain-dancing chimp’s mind. Let’s remember, we don’t know what’s happening in a rain-dancing human’s mind. We don’t know what’d going on in each other’s minds – or even in our own mind. We are mysteries to ourselves.

It turns out various loud stimuli – machinery, boisterous people, or waterfalls -- can elicit chimpanzee displays. But what about that sitting quietly and staring at the waterfall afterwards? That’s just what I – and most people – would do at the foot of a waterfall: quietly gaze.

Philosopher Jesse Prinz identifies three components of wonder. There’s the sensory.

“Wondrous things engage our senses — we stare and widen our eyes.”

That part, we have in common with chimps, and some other animals. Then there’s the cognitive. Wondrous things are beyond what we can cognitively comprehend. There’s something perplexing about them. Whether the chimps experience this component is less clear.

Finally, there’s the spiritual. “We look upwards in veneration;” our heart swells. Wonder is what we experience when we confront mystery.

Dacher Keltner’s definition of awe is similar. Awe, he says, is

“Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.”

This is not mystery like a whodunit. It’s not the kind of mystery you can figure out. This kind of mystery, you don’t solve. You live the mystery. Who am I? Who is asking that question? What is this world? What is matter?

The more we attend to the details of what the physicists say about it, the weirder and more mysterious it gets. For instance, physicists say that matter is whatever occupies space and has mass. That's handy for scientific purposes, but from a wider standpoint, it simply replaces one mystery – the mystery of matter -- with two mysteries -- space and mass. Why is there me? Why is there anything? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where am I – what is the meaning of this geographic location, or this stage in the arc of my life?

These are the questions that admit of no settled answer. You might have provisional partial answers, but it might be better to not even have that much. Just be in the mystery, without grasping after an answer. What sort of place is the universe? What is life, and how does it happen? What is consciousness, and how does it happen?

Scientists seem to have a lot to say about these, so maybe they are in the category of things to figure out. On the other hand, the scientist's stories leaves us with just as much mystery as ever. When the physicists say that, you see, there are 11 dimensions, and billions of parallel universes made possible by different pathways taken by photons – or when biologists tell us about the chemical equations of the reactions inside a cell, reactions which, they say, constitute and define life – or when neurologists say that consciousness is an emergent property of 100 billion neurons firing across 100 trillion synapses – one may reasonably feel that such steps toward solving the mystery don’t really clear up any of the mysteriousness we must live.

Knowing the science merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder. Before the science, there were elaborate theologies. Knowing the theology, likewise, merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder. Wonder and awe are, we might say, a kind of falling in love: with our world, with ourselves, with the experience of being alive.

Wonder is typically expressed in the form of a question, which might fool us into thinking an explanatory answer is being sought. It is not. The point of love is to love, not to explain it, figure it out, or solve it. The point of wonder is likewise not to get an explanation, solution, or answer. The point of wonder is to wonder – to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe -- bounded by humility, by gratitude, and by joy.

What is your number 1 source of wonder? Is it a starry sky? A mountain top view? Charlie Parker’s saxophone playing? A murmuration of starlings? There are contexts we can place ourselves in that encourage wonder. And then sometimes wonder descends upon us in the midst of the perfectly ordinary.

Thomas Merton wrote about an amazing experience of wonder he had in 1958 on a street corner in Louisville. Merton, then age 43, was a Trappist monk who had spent most of the previous 17 years at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky – most of that in silence. On a rare trip to Louisville, about an hour’s drive from the Abbey, he had a sudden and stunning experience of wonder. He described it in his journal:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness,... The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.... This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: ‘Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.’ It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes:... A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. They are not ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers! Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed ... I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

That’s a powerful wonder. How did that happen to Thomas Merton?

I raised the question earlier: Why do we have experiences like that? What practical function could they serve? Why would natural selection favor a capacity for such experience? We might also ask the opposite question: Why doesn’t it happen to more of us more often?

Writer Raymond Tallis wonders why wonder isn’t a constant, or at least greater proportion, of life. Why am I not “for the greater part of my life transilluminated with awe?” he asks. Why do I not “pass through the world open-mouthed with amazement and joy”? We are surrounded by, submerged within, wonders of sight, and sound, and smell, the wonder of every single thing, and of all things together – of what Philip Larkin called “the million-petalled flower of being.” Is not our proper state of mind one of “metaphysical intoxication”? So many wonders and yet so little wondering.

We perish for want of wonder, thought Chesterton, though we are surrounded continuously by wonders. Whatever the mysterious process by which we became the sorts of beings with the capacity for wonder, why aren’t we exercising that capacity ALL. THE. TIME? Well. Daily life presents barriers to wonder. The barriers to wonder include distress – hunger, pain, illness, bereavement – and stress – busy-ness, tension, anxiety. As Raymond Tallis writes:

“No one chasing after a bus has the time to be astonished at the intricate coordination of everyday life that ensures that buses run to timetables and that we can act in accordance with goals that are at once singular and abstract.”

A focus on caring for others, doing good in the world, requires solving the problems that need solving, focusing on the practical needs. This reduces the world around you to two categories. Everything is either an instrument that will be helpful for your purpose or an obstacle that threatens to thwart your purpose. It is a noble thing to have goals, purposes, to pursue accomplishment – at least, it is when those goals and accomplishments involve making the world better, easing suffering, improving the overall quality of life of the inhabitants of this planet.

We need, and we take, breaks from our work – and that’s where we can cultivate a wonder that might even linger when we return to work, coloring our tasks with an abiding background radiation of peace and delight. Unfortunately, modern life encourages us to make our leisure as busy as our work. We line up our diversions and then make our free time as rushed as our work time. There’s hiking, kayaking, bicycling, tennis or some fun form of exercising. There are things to see: a play, a concert, an art exhibit, movies. There are novels to read and whole seasons of intriguing television shows to binge watch. Tallis writes that

“Even the most elevated pleasures, designed to open us up to the world in such a way that we might wonder at it, may be assimilated into the flow of unthinking dailiness.”

We work frenetically and then play frenetically because if we don’t we might be . . . bored. Ah, boredom. These, then, are the three main barriers to awe and wonder:
(1) the purposive focus of work;
(2) a similarly purposive focus on our diversions, and, when neither of those is happening,
(3) allowing ourselves to be bored.

Boredom says that

“indifference is the appropriate response to things around us. The ordinary is indeed ordinary. To take it for granted is precisely the way to take it. There is the uneasy sense that, though we urge it on ourselves and on others, wonder is somehow insincere, fake, sentimental. After all, a state you can enter only when it’s convenient, and which is convenient only when there’s nothing serious or important going on, must itself seem nonserious or unimportant.” (Tallis)

We speak appreciatively of child-like wonder, but most of us would rather be known as a serious adult: productive, on the one hand, and erudite, on the other. Boredom is for serious people, who expect or want or need life to give them serious work and serious play. Boredom makes that demand and signals that it is not being met. But boredom precludes wonder – just as wonder precludes boredom.

We can’t make ourselves have experiences like Thomas Merton had in Louisville at the corner of 4th and Walnut. We can only cultivate – nurture the slow growth of the wonder plant, not knowing what shape it may take as it grows, facilitating a power that, though we nurture, we do not control.

The way to cultivate wonder is with a spiritual practice. Indeed, what makes a practice a spiritual practice is that it cultivates wonder. Continual mindfulness of death, Raymond Tallis points out, is conducive to wondering at life. Over many centuries – as the development of human civilization afforded the leisure to pursue wonder, that wonder led us to create art, as a way of expressing our wonder. Wonder led us create religion, as way to tell a story about awesome creation, and to have rituals to reinforce the wonder. Wonder led us at last to create science – the exploration of nature’s wonders. Writes Jesse Prinz:

“For the mature mind, wondrous experience can be used to inspire a painting, a myth, or a scientific hypothesis. These things take patience, and an audience equally eager to move beyond the initial state of bewilderment.... Art, science, and religion, are inventions for feeding the appetite that wonder excites in us. They also become sources of wonder in their own right, generating epicycles of boundless creativity and enduring inquiry.”

That’s a long way from a Chimp staring at a waterfall with no way to describe it.

From time to time we all need to reconnect with that original experience, the seed from which art, religion, and science all grow – and just sit at the foot of a waterfall. Just sit and gaze.

May we all find or take time to do so.