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.
