Wonder

I am so grateful for the thoughtful comments on my post last week asking what this blog is about.  What, you say?  I write it, I should know?  Yes, well … I realize I should.  Pam emailed me after her day with Karen Maezen Miller and said, “I think you should simply say you write about the face of God.”  And I laughed, and went on with my day, and I kept coming back to it.  I don’t know that I’d say it quite like that, but I do think one of the things I am most interested in is the way that divinity itself flashes through even the most ordinary day.  And the thing is, it was only when I really started paying attention and began living inside my own life that I began to see it.

Another way of saying this: I am utterly preoccupied by wonder.

While I’m far more aware now, I do have a few memories from long ago of being simply started by the brilliance of the world.  One of the most vivid is of one late afternoon in AP Biology.  I went to high school in New Hampshire, and we went to class from 4 to 6pm, so it was pitch black during the last period for much of the year.  Pitch black, freezing cold, cloaked in ice and snow.  Hospitable, the environment was not.

I sat in AP Bio, the dark windows all around us contributing to the sense that were floating alone in the world.  My wonderful teacher could have been from central casting, with his bald head, neatly trimmed beard, and clipped British accent.  He was talking about the human body, gesturing to his own arm, talking about bones and tendons and blood vessels.  Something about the many tiny bones in the human hand.  He held his own hand up, looked at it, bent the fingers.  A hush fell over the room.  He looked at us, his dark eyes sweeping across our faces, and whispered, “Isn’t it amazing?”

Oh, it brings tears to my eyes to remember that moment.  I thought of it tonight when listening to Elissa’s gorgeous podcast called What Takes Your Breath Away?

I’m immensely grateful, more than I can express, at the frequency with which the world – and my own life – takes my breath away these days.  May I never stop being amazed.