Wonder

Old Wonder and Shalom Peace

“This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,” whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. “Here in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!”

Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but . . . he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. . . .

“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship. ¹

This is from a wonderful children’s story called The Wind and The Willows. Kenneth Grahame, like C.S. Lewis, and George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton wrote often about childlike wonder. Lewis, in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, said of the Penvesie children when they heard that Aslan was on the move: “At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in his inside.” The name for this was awe – a biblical kind of fear. All four of these authors wrote for children and adults, but they captured awe and wonder especially well in their books for children.

What they are reaching for is to bring their reader into a grasp of the haunting otherness… either of God or of some other created thing. Lewis, writing in the preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology, said this of MacDonald: “The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, the magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live”. He, MacDonald and Chesterton (and others) knew that children are more awake to this glory than most adults. They draw us into the “weight of glory,” which is less like beauty or light, and more like weight and depth. (Glory in the Old Testament is related not to light, but to weight). Most children’s books, especially those written by those with a Christian worldview, are so much better at wonder than books for adults.

Yet, while I love the innocence of childlike wonder it’s old wonder that captures my heart. The kind of wonder that survives the groaning of time, of pain… I know Simeon should be saved for after Christ’s birth, but I just can’t help it. He is my Christmas hero. And the way Luke describes him! “Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him” (Luke 2:25). (But the whole account should be read! 2:25-35). Such beauty, such poetry and simplicity. A 500-page novel could be written from these few words. Picture if you will, this man (we think he is old, but we don’t really know that for sure) – a simple devout man, who came to the temple often. When did he come? Did he leave a wife and family at home every day? Did he travel the same path to the temple? Did he come with an expectation that this might be the day? We don’t even know if he was a priest, Luke only tells us he was devout and righteous; but the Holy Spirit rested upon him and told him things about the Messiah.

The reason I am so stuck on Simeon in this week, is that the virtue we celebrate this week is peace. Peace is what Simeon was looking for – but he uses a quite unusual word for it, “consolation.” Simeon was waiting for Consolation – His people were waiting for Consolation, a Messiah who brought a peace that would never cease, never end. This picture for me is not just comfort or solace – even though those things are needed! The picture of consolation conjured up for me is so fraught with the idea of deep sorrow, oppression, and suffering. When I think of consolation the first word that comes to me is inconsolable. I see someone wracked with sobs… not a dainty cry, but an ugly cry. The people of God in Simeon’s day were inconsolable because they had suffered for so long and were in such great despair and fear that their Messiah would not come. Simeon’s response to holding the infant Jesus is a kind of wonder that is not merely magical or hopeful – it is old wonder. It’s wonder that has walked a long distance and yet still has the capacity to say of God – “He has met us here… He is “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isa 9:6 ESV)

To embrace mystery (and so encounter wonder) means we are stirred by “otherness;” especially when it comes to God in Christ who was made man.

We can marvel at the baby in the straw because we know His glorious end.

We marvel not only at the strangeness of this, but with the knowledge that the Creator of heaven and earth, so loved us, that He sent his Son to die for us. Not even the noblest of humans could have done that. Wonder is all over the place in Luke’s narrative of Christ’s birth. The angel in Luke 2:14 cried – “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

Old wonder is a gift to those who have left behind their cynicism about the state of the world. It’s the capacity to stay in the grace of awe and worship in spite of hardships. We tend to sanitize the birth of Christ -through Christmas carols like “Away in a Manger” and yes, even “Silent Night.” There could not have been much quiet or sweet smells in a stable full of animals, and where a woman is giving birth in pain like any other mother. A cacophony (don’t you just love that word?) of noise, and the smells of wet sheep, trampled straw and the smell of birth. In only a short time, an unimaginable horror would take place – the slaughter of every boy under the age of two in the region of Bethlehem. This was the world that the “Consolation of Israel” was born into.

Longanimity is the virtue that allows us to hold onto wonder through long periods of suffering and pain. It’s what Paul calls long-suffering, and it enables us to endure by the power of the Indwelling Spirit of God…

It gives us what we need to stay the course, to press on to the “Day of the Lord” where we will once and for all leave behind our suffering and pain and take up our home where there will be no more tears. Longanimity is the grace that helps us look toward the end. – It’s a virtue that I believe Jesus called his disciples to, especially in the garden of Gethsemane when he asked his disciples, to keep vigil for him. Three times He asked them, and after one of those times, he asks Peter “could you not watch for one hour?” (Mark 14:37). (Ugh, that pierces my often fickle heart). Simeon was a man who kept vigil well. He waited his whole life for the Consolation to come to his people. Again, longanimity is the grace to stay the course – to look not only to the end of our pain and suffering, but to Him who is our peace.

“Peace on earth” – this is the word of the Lord as it came through the angel singing over the shepherds. This is the peace that Consolation brings – not a truce between enemies, not a ceasefire in battle, but a deep abiding sense of well-being. The Old Testament calls it shalom – wholeness, right-ness, wellness and completeness.

Peace is not a gift that passes from Christ the giver to us the receivers. His peace is ours because he is ours, and the peace he is experiencing we are experiencing. Our experience of peace is his peace in us because he is in us.”²
John Piper

This is echoed by Elizabeth Goudge – “Peace had come down to dwell with men forever. No matter what the suffering, the fighting, the storms, the distress, nothing now could ever take from the lovers of God the gift of his peace. Men could never again doubt the goodwill of God toward them, for God had given his own Son to be born, to live, to die, for their salvation. God’s goodwill was incarnate now as a little child lying in a manger.”³

Old Wonder – Simeon’s words to Mary and Joseph were not words of the kind of peace that is conciliatory or cheap. Simeon knew he held in his arms the hope of the world, the entry of a radical new world, an upside world where finally, there would be peace. But he knew that there would yet be much suffering. As he gives the baby Jesus back to Mary, he says to her – “and a sword will pierce through your own soul, that the hearts of many might be revealed.” This is echoed in what Jesus later says, when he says, “³⁴ Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Mat 10:34 ESV). Wait, didn’t the angel just say – “Peace on earth, goodwill to men?” Jesus does not speak to any kind of peace which seeks merely the absence of conflict, or a weak truce between enemies. No, His peace is a peace that goes deep into the souls of His people, a shalom peace. In the gospel of John he says “peace be unto you,” seven times, three of which are after His resurrection and are meant as an encouragement to not be afraid of Him as He brings His resurrected body before them.

The image that comes to my mind of this kind of peace is of hands crossed over the heart, receiving what only God in Christ can bring. In fact, while the Holy Spirit only rested upon Simeon, He lives within every heart that calls Christ Lord. Take a moment, and simply do this: place your hands over your heart and welcome the shalom God brings to your life. Receive well-being, receive Him once again as the healer of all our pain and sorrow. Finally, receive Him as your eternal “Consolation.” And then, bow the knee in worship before Him.

“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.” Numbers 6:24-26

Picture by Omid Mozaffari on Unsplash

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, New York: Scribner & Sons, 1961 (page unknown.
John Piper, The Incalculable Wonder of Being a Christian, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-incalculable-wonder-of-being-a-christian
Elizabeth Goudge, God So Loved the World, New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1951, p. 26.

A Holy Wonder

Dear friends, this week we start our journey through the life of Christ, and of course, we begin with Advent. I’m amazed with each new year just how many people are drawn to observe Advent. There are Christians and non-Christians who experience the longing and a deep ache for a time and a place apart. I think we all want the same thing. We want to know hope, and peace and joy and love and we want to experience their fullness. Christians alone, however, have a name for that longing. We call it the Incarnation – the birth of a child who will rescue a dark and angry world from its remorse and regret and who will do so in astonishing and “awe-ful” ways.

Our world is so jaded, and social media has done us no favors because we are presented with constant idealized images of perfect gifts, decorations and company. We turn to Christmas movies and songs and traditions in hopes of finding a way out of our cynicism and weariness.

Last year as I reflected and wrote, the call for Advent to be a penitential season struck me. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions have historically been much better than other traditions at emphasizing that. Advent like Lent should be a time to ask the Holy Spirit to help us prepare our hearts for the coming of the Lord, by acknowledging and confessing our sins and great need for grace and forgiveness.

Yet this year, I have been drawn back into the wonder and incredible mystery of Christ’s coming to dwell with us and among us and in us. In this season of Advent I want to draw on the experience of wonder and awe in the face of hardships and trials.

“The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature’s total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the Incarnation.” (C.S. Lewis)

Miracles call for wonder – for the imagination to dwell on the unknown, the unbelievable, and the unfathomable. We shake our heads and say to ourselves – “I never knew it could be like that…” Wonder is the natural habitat of the child who has not had time to become jaded or cynical! Lewis Carroll called the one who delighted in the childlike – ” the child of the pure unclouded brow and dreaming eyes of wonder!” (Through the Looking Glass, 1865). I know several people like this – but sadly would not count myself as one of them.

A good friend of mine shared a story when as a young mother she had a job cleaning a Catholic church. Part of her responsibility was to vacuum the sanctuary. She had been a Christian only a short time and had no idea what she should do as she cleaned the aisle between the seats and before the altar. She knew vaguely that their tradition was very different from her own and that there might be specific rituals called for in their sanctuaries. So, she put a tissue on her head, and as she vacuumed the rows of seats whenever she reached the aisle she would genuflect before the crucifix. She would bow every time she moved across the rows! There was not an ounce of legalism in what she did – and as she told this story, it made her hearers smile and chuckle; mostly because this was typical for her. She delighted in the simple (but alien to her!) ritual whether demanded of her or not.

One of my favorite commercials from several years ago that aired during December pictures for me the essence of Advent joy. There are 3 (maybe 4) children seated on a couch in front of a fire; their stockings hung on the mantle above. The scene shows their glee and unbridled joy at waiting for Santa to come and fill their stockings. Before long though they had fallen asleep, in the dark, with the smoldering ashes of an almost extinguished fire. Ah… the weary waiting… I can barely remember what the commercial was for – except that each one of these children had a headlamp around their head! So as the night deepened and the fire dwindled – all you could really see were four flashlights glowing in all different directions as they fell asleep! I suppose the commercial was about batteries but for me it was about Advent, and excitement and waiting and the anticipation of miracle!

Wonder, in many ways, is like a sixth sense. Leanne Payne described it as an “intuition of the real” – the substance of which is neither strictly tangible or objective nor feeling-based or subjective. It’s a way our souls (and bodies) react to something unfathomable in the world around us.

At the heart of wonder is the experience of being drawn beyond ourselves. It is about an awestruck encounter with ‘otherness’…
Mike Starkey

Mike Starkey writes that “at the heart of wonder is the experience of being drawn beyond ourselves. It is about an awestruck encounter with ‘otherness’; with people who are different from us with a world full of unexpected marvels, a God who draws us beyond the trivia of our own expectations.” [1]

To embrace mystery (and so encounter wonder) means we are stirred by “otherness;” especially when it comes to God, and even our understanding of the Incarnation is so other than any thing we could have ever imagined. We can marvel at the baby in the straw even though we know His end. We marvel not only at the strangeness of this, but at the knowledge that the Creator of heaven and earth, so loved us, that He sent his Son to die for us. Not even the noblest of humans could have done that.

Awe is another name for wonder. True wonder is not naïve – nor dependent on children watching a fireplace late into the night on Christmas Eve. Instead, it is the inner knowledge of the miracle of the Incarnation that ignites wonder in us. It was wonder the shepherds experienced in hearing the voice of the angel. The wise men followed the star “rejoicing exceedingly with great joy” (Mat. 2:10), because they held awe and wonder in their hearts. Even the animals in the stable knelt in awe before the new-born king. (ok – this is probably a stretch but who knows!)

Wonder endures when it is rooted in worship. It is not dependent on our circumstances or our introspections.

Many of the beloved Christmas carols we sing this time of year were written in times of war or great tragedy. We’ve sanitized them though, singing along with Michael Bublé’s version of “I Heard the Bells”, as we walk the malls on Black Friday. Christmas Bells was a poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow after a long season of personal tragedies. The last of these tragedies was nursing his son back to health after fighting in the Civil War. That Christmas morning in 1863, he heard the bells and despaired over the absence of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men.” “He cried out, ‘Where is peace?’ He looked around and saw hate, despair, all mocking the idea of peace. But as the bells continued to ring, he was reminded that God was not dead or asleep and that there was still hope for personal and national peace. The poem he wrote included two or three verses directly referencing the Civil War. When the poem was set to music several years later, those verses were omitted from the carol.” (War-Time Christmas Carols, https://amusicmom.com/war-time-christmas-carols).

The opening scene of my all-time favorite Christmas movie (White Christmas) begins with the sounds and sights of warfare. It’s Christmas Eve and Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are singing “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” against a stage backdrop of a snowy winter’s day. They move on to honor their general who is leaving the front but before they are done they hear enemy fire and soon bombs drop and battle disperses the hope of Christmas. It was war that was the true backdrop of the song and not the crafted painted scene of a New England winter’s day. Awe is made sweet often at times because it is fragile, and its object is often threatened. The enemy would dash both our hopes and our longings. The birth of Christ that day in a stable revealed just how fragile life is. He came not as the warrior-king His people hoped for, but as a vulnerable, frail and weak infant.

1 Chr. 16: 12-17 – Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced, O descendants of Israel his servant, O sons of Jacob, his chosen ones. He is the LORD our God; his judgments are in all the earth. He remembers his covenant forever, the word he commanded, for a thousand generations, the covenant he made with Abraham, the oath he swore to Isaac. He confirmed it to Jacob as a decree, to Israel as an everlasting covenant.” Such an incredible truth for a people who often fell away and had forgotten their own covenant. It is the same with us, is it not?

I think what sets us apart as Christians from the world around us is that we can hold on to awe even in the midst of dark circumstances. It is indeed a weary world we live in, and we are so often buffeted by storms and trials, but our hope is sure and fast. Wonder thrives where there is hope.

“Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32).

My hero in Luke’s story of the birth of Christ is Simeon. Every year when I read of his encounter with his Messiah I am filled with awe – at his prescience, at his wisdom, and at his wonder. His words are often the last prayer of some traditions’ evening service – compline. “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32). He had spent decades waiting for “the consolation of Israel” to appear and now he held him in his arms. Now his hope was realized – now his wonder complete. As he “took him in his arms… he praised God…” (verse 28).

And so it can be with us. Let’s enter Advent with wonder in our hearts. Let’s let it simmer in our hearts, let’s light the candles and sing the music. For our Savior has come and will come again. May our worship be full of awe and wonder.

“A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks the new and glorious morn”.

[1] Mark Starkey, Restoring the Wonder (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), 1999. P. 31.

If you’re inclined here is a version of “I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day” set against the background of the civil war.