A Legacy of Wonder

“This is one of the goals…to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.”

In chapter 4 of God in Search of Man, Heschel talks about Wonder or Radical Amazement as being one of the “Ways to His Prescence”. You can read related posts here: The Sublime, Ways to His Presence, Philosophy and Religion and God in Search of Man Part I.

Heschel begins by saying that “the surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted.” When we have the attitude that there are no mysteries and that everything can be explained in its time, then there is no need to go beyond the world looking for its explanation since it’s explanation is well, self-explanatory. Heschel calls this type of “indifference to the sublime wonder of all living things “the root of sin”.

This is the Lord’s doing, it is marvelous in our eyes – Psalm 118:23

Heschel says that “among the many things religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder.” The Biblical man’s attitude toward both historical and natural reality is one of wonder and his radical amazement never ceases. Our time is one in which perhaps no previous generation has had the amount of external distractions (technological, media, social, ect) mixed with a heavy amount of “conventional notions and mental clichés” which has led to a numbing of our sense of wonder and radical amazement. More than ever we need to consider God’s directive to Job “Hear this, O Job, stand still and consider the wondrous works of the Lord…….the wonderous works of Him who is perfect in knowledge….” Job 37:14-16

He does great things past finding out and marvelous things without number – Job 9:10

As a part of their daily prayers, religious Jews pray to God three times a day ”for His miracles which are with us daily and for His continual marvels….”. Jews also pray the Shema which states that “God is One” twice every day. Heschel asks why all the repetition? In every generation, Heschel says “The insights of wonder must be constantly kept alive. Since there is a need for daily wonder, there is a need for daily worship.”

If I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be told – Psalm 40:6

Heschel challenges that there is no act worth committing or even living itself if we take for granted life’s blessings and defeats. When we utter a prayer over a meal alone or in fellowship, are lit up by a smiling childs face, encounter someone who’s overcome or succumbed to an illness, laugh or weep uncontrollably with a loved one or friend, in all these things and more we should “maintain our sense of wonder” and remind ourselves “of the eternal mystery of creation” by “invoking His great name and our awareness of Him”.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. [1] Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well – Psalm 139:14

Perhaps the greatest sense of wonder one might have is the mysterious and perplexing amazement at his own being. Since I was young I have occasionally looked in the mirror and got lost in this thought of me being me. That I have been created and that I’m aware of the grandeur of this and marvel at its grace. As Heschel says “Even the very act of thinking baffles our thinking, just as every intelligible fact is, by virtue of its being a fact, drunk with baffling aloofness” and “The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all.”

May grace and shalom be multiplied upon you in the name of Yeshua the Messiah!