I Wonder as I Wander

A pre-story note: A good homily, I was once told, is written with three specific people in the congregation in mind. If your words resonate with those three, it will be fruitful for all. Knowing my audience is smaller than a congregation, I write with one person in mind, a different person every week. Here's to hoping the theory holds.

Saturday morning at 8 am Rodrigo and I hopped on the bus to start our journey to San Salvador to retrieve my dad from the airport. The night before I had received the reassuring call from Padre Rafa that Trinidad, a friend from town who I knew to be trustworthy, would be accompanying us to San Salvador and from there drive us to the airport, back to San Salvador, and then back to Agua Caliente. But, like all things El Salvador, plans changed. Around 7:30 am, after I had picked up and fed my six-year-old companion, Rafa called to inform me that it would just be Rodrigo and I going to the airport. And, I assure you, at six Rodrigo was not going to be doing the driving.

Getting on the bus knowing I’d never alone navigated the dangerous buses of San Salvador, had never driven on its chaotic, if not anarchic, streets, and had no clue how to locate the highway to the airport, let alone follow it back to Agua Caliente, could have be described with an array of pessimistic adjectives. Ones that should have come to mind at time include: stupid, foolish, insane, irrational, idiotic, reckless, irresponsible, rash. Romantic optimists might suggest the opposite, that the action was one of trust or faith or love of my dad or some other virtuous Aristotelian thingy, but they’d be wrong too.

Here’s the secret: what put me on that bus, what brought me to El Salvador in the first place, what keeps me here, what makes discovering divinity every moment in every possible thing possible, what births love (and sustains it) in the oddest circumstances, what heals the wounds of hatred, brokenness, and loss, is the simple – and often hard to come by – ability to embrace wonder. Do you know what Rodrigo and I were doing when we got on the bus yesterday morning? We were enthralled in our ump-tienth game of “Veo algo” ("I spy"). We were in the midst of being grasped by wonder.

“Mark,” you might be saying, “you were ignorant of the danger you were putting your and Rodrigo in and that was irresponsible.” You are free to think that. And you are probably right. I'm comfortable with that, because wonder, the things that sustains me, requires ignorance. A Montanan philosopher once journaled, “that only an admission of ignorance can open us to fresh knowings. Wonder is the experience of that admission: wonder is unknowing, experienced as pleasure.”

He also wrote that “love is just wonder aimed at a beloved.” After a bit of editing (I feel at liberty to do this because I’m quoting him third-hand anyway) try on my version of his sentence: God is just wonder aimed at a beloved. For me, this fits perfectly. The ultimate-being-supreme-creator-thingy that got the ball rolling in the first place, keeps participating in Its creation like a child firmly and forever caught up in the rapturous, ignorant joy of beholding the world for the first time. God is like Rodrigo playing I spy in the face of life-threatening danger.

Imagine a God like this.

Imagine seeing the world in this way.

Imagine never letting go of the wonder.

And then, imagine how wonderful life would be if it was always, forever, wonder-filled.

Henry Bugbee (my Montanan philosopher) also said, via a joyfully recollected, but admittedly inaccurate paraphrase by David James Duncan, that “the only limit to the duration of wonder is the limit of our ability to remain open.”

May we always remain open.

(for those wondering, Rafa showed up in San Salvador to take us to the airport - danger avoided)