We need to regain our sense of wonder

August 13, 2014 | Viewpoints
Phil Wagler |

We’re at a fun and befuddling stage of life. We have little children, our youngest is just six months, and teenagers. I enjoy both, and the opportunity to escape one for the other at times.

I love the debates and conversation you can have with a teenager. You have to hit the right moment—and topic—but if you do, it can be inspiring. One of my teenagers messed with my conclusions recently when he asked a question that forced some deep searching. I liked that he could do that. Teenagers have the capacity to question everything. They stretch your intellect and patience. We’ve all been there, yet once we’re through those years we rarely wish to turn back the clock.

I equally love hanging out with my youngest kids, where deeply intellectual discussion is no threat. There it’s about imagination and tickle-fights. And it’s about wonder. Teenagers aren’t alone in asking questions, youngsters do too. Their questions, however, are more innocent and produce wonder, not eye-rolling.

Explain how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and it’s simply, “Wow!” And, their awe inspires your own. Children are crucial to our maturing, for they keep the balance between wonderment and reason. It seems that if we lose either, we stay too childish or become too pompous.

Jim Davies, a Carleton University cognitive scientist and author of Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One With the Universe, notes in an Aug. 1 National Post article, that there is “a pleasing tension between primitive wonderment and rational understanding. If you understand too much . . . the world becomes dull and predictable.”

This is an interesting thought and it led me to wonder, rationally. We have come off a long period in which Christians—and particularly western Christians—have been fascinated with rationality. We have become addicted to explaining everything. The sciences were born out of wonder, but can destroy them and occasionally seem intent on it. Davies admits as much.

Having applied the sciences to religion and the ways of the soul for longer than any of us can remember, it seems we hardly know what to do now when a generation raised with the primacy of science seems equally comfortable in science-fiction. It’s the perfect combination of precisely what Davies is saying, and is something Christians should pay attention to.

Could it be that what is missing in our witness is not rationality and intellectual prowess, but childlike wonder? Have we abandoned, or compromised, our capacity to marvel? Can we actually enjoy not knowing everything? Have we surrendered something of our humanity? And even more troubling, have we marginalized God only to find life dulled by our “brilliance”?

I wonder how Davies’ insights shed light on the state of corporate worship. How do they call into question our need to suddenly explain away heaven and hell, and other things we sense are true or that Scripture points to, but will always have an element of mystery? How might this also help us think through why so many young people are turning away from our churches—even when they have all the “right” answers?

Phil Wagler lives in beautiful British Columbia, where there is much to wonder at. He is author of Kingdom Culture.

--Posted August 13, 2014

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