Awaiting Wonder
(Photo: mje)
rising, on nothing
one can see with the eyes.
– Suzanne Cleary, Crude Angel
The red-bellied woodpecker’s red head flashes satiny in the sunlight. Even the female cardinal’s muted shades are blended with richly colored feathers. The bluejay’s blue and white feathers are a patterned mosaic down his back. That such jewels exist without the aid of man is a marvel. They oppose the idea of routine existence. They point to wonder, something beyond the usual rhythms of life.
Wonder startles us as the ordinary becomes the remarkable. Ordinary was the way Ornan farmed his fields, sowing seeds, growing wheat, milling flour. Until the day King David came and asked to buy his land. Ornan looked out across the fields he tended and offered them to the king. David, knowing their value, refused to accept them as a gift and bought them for the Lord. On ordinary days, when Ornan looked across his fields, he no doubt found wonder as the evening sun made the ripening wheat shimmer gold. As if it was a glimmering image of the Temple that would one day be built there, on Ornan’s fields.
In his poem “Magnifies an Object Ten Times,” Taylor Mali captures the idea of viewing the world with wonder. The poem speaks of a five year old boy, given a magnifying glass for his birthday. It said on the handle “magnifies an object ten times.” The young boy took it to mean the magnifying glass would only work its magic ten times, only show him a larger view of bugs and leaves for a limited time. He used it sparingly:
And so he went about his days with curious thrift, weighing how much he needed to see any part of the world up close,
He lost count of how many times he used the magnifying glass and kept expecting its magic to stop. At some point he was told or he realized that ten times didn’t mean limited use, but limited magnification which was “a limitless epiphany.”
and says most he misses still is the way the magic made him see the world the rest of the time, not through the glass, but all the time he thought that magic would not last.
They are limitless epiphanies, these ways of wonder: the way a tree becomes luminous in the evening light, a dewdrop twirls a sparkling rainbow, and light paints leafy shadows on a wall. Even a mute eave clip finds its voice in the light of the setting sun. A thin veil hides this world from the next, sheer enough only to reveal light and mystery. The Bible points us to a blending of these realms. Angels step into our world as ministering spirits, a great cloud of witnesses encourages us, and we look intently, paradoxically, at what is unseen, which is eternal. These are the moments of wonder, when we see through the veil. We’re transported from chronological time to kairos, where moments magnify and stand still. We see Jesus, with Moses and Elijah, transfigured on the mountain; or a tiny reminder of this moment when the sun illuminates a bird’s satin head. Whether we see a world through a magnifying glass or see something shimmering in the field, what is wonder but a view of the coming glory?
(You can read about Ornan in I Chronicles 21:15-25 and 2 Chronicles 3:1.)