Our Hope Muscle and Receiving Wonder

 

As I read the beginning pages of Katherine May’s book Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, I found myself traveling in a liminal space, on the threshold of something new and revelatory and still carrying grief, anxiety, confusion, joy, love, kindness of not just recent, but also distant past.

Written as we emerged from a time of pandemics when there was already divide between returning to “normal” and celebrating new potential ways of living and being, the author immediately locates a yearning and points to a consolation in the desolation. The yearning is for transcendence and meaning making; the consolation is the reception of enchantment.

Similar to Rabbi Heschel’s I Asked for Wonder and the contemplative desire for deeper connection with that which astonishes, that which mystifies, that which causes wonder love and praise, there is an acknowledgment, even gratitude for, beauty and its healing properties in the mystery of creation. The issue, it would seem, is whether we are aware and how we might receive and integrate such wonder, especially in the midst of oppression, virus, violence, materialism, abusive power, lies, …the list seems endless and overwhelming.

The hope however is that even one kernel of wonder might reconform or reconfigure the molecules of our anxious souls with a power as great as glory, as great as grace!

The truth is that such divine wonder simply is…the challenge is that we, instead of observing and noting, ought to receive it and make it part of our selves, developing our hope muscle like aerobics nurtures our hearts.