Saying For Today: Wonder is never meant to be an end, but an opening, a welcome, an invitation from and to Presence.
LOTUS OF THE HEART
Living in LOVE beyond Beliefs
We Share One Life, We Are One Life
Wonder, from the Old English, "to be astonished; to admire; make wonderful, magnify."
The experience of wonder, of the wonderful, is not merely a pleasure given as gift from the Divine. Wonder is before and deeper than pleasure. We experience the taste of this wonder, and in gratitude we serve others in compassion, for them to feel this same gift of Grace, this same Love. Possibly, then, the greatest gift we give another is seeing the wonder in him or her, for him or her, that the other is not prepared to see, but we trust will come to see too.
I did not ask for success I asked for wonder and you gave it me
*Abraham J. Heschel, Hasidic Theologian, Poet, Mystic, and Historian
When a young boy and youth, I was raised in a church which had a dismal view of the world. The world was a place of evil, a realm we needed to pass through to get to the perfect place, heaven. This related to the music in the church. Recently, I returned to a hymnbook we had used, and I had kept from those days. I was surprised at the many songs that extolled this heaven, and how wonderful that place would be, yet we had little, or nothing, to sing about the wonder of being together on Earth with wonder-filled fallible humans like ourselves.
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I am not saying to ignore the pain in our world or our part in it, or that this realm may be a prelude to a different realm of Reality with less or no suffering. Here, on Earth, regardless of views of an 'afterlife' or 'other lives,' suffering is always present, and an antidote is to feel and share the joy of wonder as integral to sentient life, maybe more so, as suffering ~ that is what I am saying. This means, we need to embody the wonder of Life as we seek to lessen the suffering of beings on Earth. I need to see my own particularized being as a wonderful expression of God, of Life, then that communicates to others the glory of being a being here. The glory of my own being, indeed, is the glory of every being, for we are one being. And this glory is birthless and deathless, so we, as particularized presences, are bounded by this timeless "Hallalujah!" of Life, this we are conceived from and at the demise of body return to.
