Wonder is the beginning of all wisdom,
and wisdom is the beginning of all good works.
- Peter Kreeft

I read these lines just a few days ago and they resonated with me. Wonder is a concept that I have been growing toward for a while now. Actually, it is probably more accurate to say that over the past few years I have found language to describe something that has exhibited a strong pull on me for most of my life. I have come to realize that that pull is wonder and I have been in pursuit of it since I was a child.

When I was young I read an article in Newsweek about how the first astronauts would get to Mars. For a short while I was determined to be one of those astronauts. As a kid I loved reading science fiction and imagining other worlds and different ways that things could be. (Psst, I still do today.) I went to college and studied physics and became amazed at just how well we could describe and explain the natural world through math. I also studied engineering and marveled at just how well we could manipulate the resources of the natural world into machines and toys and various other devices (not all positive, I might add). I loved school and I learned a lot.

Then I entered the workforce and found that the daily life of an engineer is far less full of wonder. At least that was my experience. Instead I found it full of paperwork, meetings, bureaucracy, and very little of the exploration and problem-solving that I had come to love in school. (Again, that was just my experience.) Even when I worked at NASA, the job was far from wonder-full.

I was pretty excited then with the idea of going back to school, to seminary, and exploring other elements of the human experience: religion, theology, the problem of pain, the meaning of it all. I had more questions and reveled in the opportunity to keep chasing after wonder. In seminary I found space to explore the intersection between Christianity and science. These were two areas that I had been immersed in for most of my life, but had rarely considered how they might work together. My study culminated in the thesis I wrote during my final year in which I explored the phenomenon of light through Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and the Bible. I came to the conclusion that light functions as the medium in which our reality of time and space, matter and energy exists. Light is something like a bridge between the creation and the Creator. That was a fun project and one that I’d like to revisit someday as I think there is more work to be done there.

For the last few years, I have been engaged in pastoral ministry. I have continued to read about science and continued to read theology. I continue to learn. Wonder still pulls me. There is so much about this world that I simply don’t understand. Some of it is too marvelous for anyone to understand right now (Quantum Mechanics for example). I once read that the physics of space and time are so ambiguous that “many physicists will admit…that spacetime is probably not a continuum, but they have no mathematical alternative.” Science marches on. It continues to make discoveries. It continues to form hypotheses, but there are deep questions at its foundation that will someday require an answer. I can’t help but wonder at how much those answers will challenge even some of our most deeply held convictions about the world we live in.

Now, if I’m going to be honest, there is little about the American church today that draws me into wonder. And I’ll admit that that is a near constant disappointment for me. But I haven’t lost all hope. The Great Tradition of the Church was steeped in wonder until a few hundred years ago. The Christian faith has deep mysteries to it that have confounded and amazed people for millennia. What is creation? How did all that we know come from nothing? What is evil? And how can it be so apparent in a world created by a good God? And the central mystery of all, the Incarnation. How did God enter his creation? How can Jesus be the source and purpose of all that exists even as he took on flesh and became a part of it?

There are still mysteries out there to explore. There is so much we don’t know. There is so much reason to think that our scientific understanding of the world will one day be totally upended. The Christian faith also has much to wonder about. Creation and the Incarnation (literally the enfleshment) are mysteries ripe for awe and contemplation.

So I still wonder. And I want to give you permission to wonder. These days our world can’t seem to see past the end of its own nose and readily encourages the rest of us to do the same. We are caught up in the tyranny of the immediate. We are regularly fed the narrative that things are too critical right now to make room for mirth or play, or that wisdom comes from whoever shouts the loudest or has the most followers, or that adopting the fears of the world around us is a sign of maturity. There is more for us out there.

I invite you to take a step back. To allow yourself time to sit and ponder. To read some good books that were written long before the chaos of today. To take a long walk through a quiet wood. To listen to your favorite album beginning to end without stopping. To imagine. To learn. To wonder. Who knows what you might find out there.