The Food of Love and Wonder

Most of life is a circling back, the second attempt at figuring things out. And wonder is one of those things that takes a few tries to understand. That’s because we don’t lose wonder in an instant, and it doesn’t come back just as quick. Wonder is a living thing, and it feeds on belief. It is nourished on faith.

And wonder isn’t alone in its aliveness; love is the same. Love isn’t a fact, it’s a food. And love doesn’t stand still. We’re always growing in love, either closer or farther; there’s no neutral ground.

My wonder didn’t simply disappear. I starved it to Death.

All the details of life tend to obscure and steal focus. I was lost in all these swirling questions of identity and value, of boredom and addiction, of doubts and fears and shame, of not knowing what every next step should be. All these thoughts haunted me, every moment. The word for my wonderlessness was disenchantment.

I had bought into a way of living—a naturalistic, scientistic, machine world with a bit of Jesus sprinkled on top. My world, my way of life, my entire way of being had been demythologized, un-magicked. I reduced everything to method and explanation, and that way of living starved the wonder out of me.

But maybe the opposite could be true. Maybe there was wonder everywhere. What if all of it, every day, was a liturgy? What if I just needed eyes to see (Psalm 119:18)? And what if everything was food? How I woke up, how I had breakfast, my attitude doing chores, my time at the office, an evening with friends—what if all of that was a kind of food that fed Love and Wonder?

It was my deafness and my blindness that was killing me, unable to hear the Hidden Music, unable to see the magic of everyday life. I had divorced every bit of Supernaturalism from its Source and explained it away with some kind of counterfeit. But there was a way to be re-enchanted, through the food of Love and Wonder. It needed to be experienced, and I needed an entirely new way of being alive.

Thank you, God, for opening my eyes to see more of you and to feast on the food of your love and wonder, your mercy and grace. Amen.