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I long to remain open to learning from anything and anyone, without prejudice. While certitude confidently raises up its wide-rimmed chalice to be overfilled, hubris builds up roundabout itself an impenetrable fortress to remain safe. Though I wish to be grounded firmly on the rock of truth, I never want to ossify. Wonder makes the teacher’s greatest joy not being called wise but making wise. I learn in order to teach and give all I’ve learned away. I contemplate in order to share the fruits of contemplation. All I am and have is meant for the good of all.
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“What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Cor. By wisdom we can see that everything is a gift of love given for the good of all. By wisdom I see how love coheres all that I know.
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Knowledge without love is data, knowledge with love is wisdom. This gives rise in me not to shame or despair or frustration, but to hunger and thirst. There’s always more, a surplus of meaning to be sought after. I know that I never, in any final sense, will arrive at the end of knowledge. And, by humility, I know how much I don’t know. I am in every moment receiving from God the act of being. The first stance of everything is not grasping and dominating and doing, but absolute receptivity. Theological wonder also requires and gives birth to humility.
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Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Then walks with us silently out of the night. Per Letters to the Exiles, Rilke’s “Go to the Limits of your Longing”: If you allow yourself to receive existence as a new gift in every moment, it will regularly re-set the limits of your constricted horizons. Wonder allows you to return to this “first” moment, which is not “back then” but now. Morning has broken, like the first morningīlackbird has spoken, like the first bird Every day is as freshly new into existence as the light that followed the words, “Let there be…” Wow.Įxistence is a ceaseless wellspring of fresh insight. My favorite philosophical question is closely related, “Why there is something rather than nothing at all?” None of this world had to be, but here it is. I always find my “first person” vantage completely mind-blowing: what does it mean that I am me and not another? I used to think of this beginning at the age of 7 or 8 - it was my first taste of this mystery’s conundrum that leaves your “why am I me?” faced with no better answer than, “Gift.” I was not, I never asked to be, but then found myself suddenly here. As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, I experience myself as “being thrown” into existence. In wonder there’s also an astonished gratitude over the sheer gratuitousness, the undeserved gifted-ness of everything. Someone asked me recently, “What’s most important to you as a theologian? What’s your non-negotiable?” My spontaneous response was, “Wonder!” They replied, “What does that mean?” I proposed an answer of sorts, but here’s what I jotted down later on my journal:įor me, theological wonder is permitting faith to get the mind stuck in amazement, surprise, marvel and openness to the unexpected answers found in a life shot through with the divine. Answers that set the mind off-balance, i.e. And that is what the wonderer really experiences. Rather, mystery means that a reality cannot be comprehended because its light is overflowing, unfathomable, and inexhaustible.
#Level 345 words of wonder full
It does not end in doubt, but is the awakening of the knowledge that existence is mysterious and inconceivable, and that it is a mystery in the full sense of the word: neither a dead end, nor a contradiction, nor even something impenetrable and dark. The innermost meaning of wonder is fulfilled in a deepened sense of mystery.