Experts tell us that with the advent of technology and mass movement we live in a much smaller world. We have the ability to shorten distance and experience different places, cultures and know things that for most of human history people simply could not know and experience. Does it follow that modern people actually live in a larger world, though? It would seem not. For all the amazing things that we have at our fingertips, we are a people not easily astonished nor possessed with the feeling that we live in a world full of wonder.

      St. Thomas Aquinas made a statement centuries ago, “All philosophy begins with wonder.” If a true feeling of wonder is the sense of being alive, astonished, overjoyed at the world around us, then surely the awe should have escalated with the advent of technology and mass transportation. People have the ability to travel thousands of miles in a day, listen to music from Europe or Asia, and see paintings once only preserved for the rich, offered languages at the university once thought to be unknown. However, we seldom feel astonished. Why are we rather bored, snubbing a gut wrenching joy?    Josef Piper in his book, Leisure, The Basis of Culture , ponders this paradox about the lengths people will go to recapture a sense of wonder in life.

[Wonder is not found] in what has ‘never been before’; the abnormal, the sensational…the ‘numbing of the senses’, these are a mere substitute for genuine wonder. If someone needs the ‘unusual’ to be moved to astonishment, that person has lost the ability to respond rightly to the wondrous. The hunger for the sensational, posing, as it may, in ‘bohemian garb,’ is an unmistakable sign of the loss of the power of wonder…

      Piper is the first to admit that all human beings seek to live and find a sense of wonder in life. However, in Piper’s analysis it will never happen as long as we think wonder, astonishment and overwhelming joy are to be found in the new, novel and exotic. Rather Piper says that to find the truly unusual and extraordinary within the usual and ordinary is the beginning of a life of astonishment and awe. In other words, a life of wonder is really a way of seeing life and reality in a deeper fashion. A life of wonder is available to us and right before our very eyes if we can see it. We don’t need the life styles of the rich and famous to live a life of astonishment and rapturous joy. Wonder is before us every day—if we have eyes to see.

      Thomas Howard writes in his book Hallowed Be This House : “It is hard to see ourselves as walking daily among the hallows—that is, as carrying on the commonplace routines of our ordinary life in the presence of mighty mysteries that would ravish and terrify us if this veil of ordinariness were suddenly stripped away.” Howard would say we walk among things that would astonish us, if we could really see what was going on. But, alas, we just look at all this stuff of raising kids, going to work, eating meals with friends, or coaching a baseball teams as “clutter.” If we just could get these things done then somehow we could get on to the big thing -- the thing that would astound us. If it is a believer making this assertion then the big things might be a mission trip, prayers, or some ministry project. If it is a non-believer it might be that if I could get out of this rat race I would have time to travel, or enjoy great dinners or live like the wealthy. But both cases miss the point of how a life of wonder is created and nurtured. Both suppose that the stuff of ordinary life is dull, complacent and useless—something that is holding me back and like a dead weight keeping me from really living. Is there another way of dealing with this? Heaven knows I have people ask me this question all the time.

      If you are stuck here, then it is because you have bought the myth of the secularization displayed all around us. That myth supposes that what you see before you is all there is. But what if, we went back to the ancient idea found in the Scriptures that all of life is an oblation to God, literally all the things we do in life are to be given to God as a sacrifice of praise—worship? That literally all the stuff we think of as clutter is really the place God is seen, felt and known. For instance, I sometimes look at the meal my wife of twenty-two years has put on the table and I am astonished. It is somehow transfigured as I see someone who gladly is laying down her life for others— it is worship. Somehow her act of sacrifice participates in the work on the cross accomplished by Jesus. Is this clutter? Or I saw my oldest daughter in college take her five-year-old brother in tow around the Grove at Ole Miss all Saturday, on one of the biggest game days of the year, introducing him to all her friends and then letting him spend the night with her. Is this clutter? No, it is amazing, astonishing. It fills me with a sense of wonder to see my daughter embrace a life of giving of herself and her time to her little redheaded brother. And then for her to see that act not as an intrusion, but in terms of joy to the point of wanting to bring her other little brother and sister down for the weekend. She is embracing the life of the cross and it is not an intrusion but charity. She is seeing that wonder is not novelty, but experienced in the normal stuff of everyday life. She is seeing and sensing the joy that happens when the mundane is seen as hallowed and that she is walking among the hallows and God is present there—right there, the transcendent God meeting her in her rounds of learning, serving, friendship and school. And, she is taken up in a sense of wonder at how God meets you if you open your eyes.