A NEW YEAR FILLED WITH WONDER
Let us not lose sight of our capacity to wonder, as we move away from the Christmas stories of Magi, shepherds, angels and the star, and into the unfolding Liturgical Year that can, if we let it, influence our ever-changing communal, family and everyday lives. In his 1991 book Called to Communion, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) asks us to be wonderers more than makers as we journey toward communal and personal fullness – unitive love – while “resisting the temptation to fall into the infidelity of self-willed autonomy.”
MAKERS VS. WONDERERS
Pope Benedict contrasts our being makers with what he says is the opposite: being wonderers. The more, he says, that men “decide” and “do” in the Church and in our personal lives, the more cramped things becomes for us all. What is great and liberating for the Church and for humanity is not something self-made but the gift that is given to us all.
Pope Benedict wrote that our tendency to focus on what we are making and doing places a barrier between ourselves and God. He recommends that we use our capacity to wonder to remove these barriers, thus enabling our connection with God in the here-and-now experiences of our everyday lives. He says that when I, as an individual and as a Church member, concentrate solely on being a maker or a doer, that is, focus on the “value my own activity above all, I restrict my horizon to the realm of things that I can grasp and that becomes the object of my making. Strictly speaking, I see only objects.” I, because I am human, “have absolutely no capacity to perceive what is greater than I am, since my own perception of a reality would set a limit to my activity. I squeeze the world into the realm of my experience; I am amputating what I could experience. In other words, I have built for myself my own prison.”
“True wonder, on the other hand, is a ‘No’ to this confinement in empirical, this-world reality. True wonder prepares us for the act of faith, which opens to us the horizon of the eternal and the infinite. And only the unlimited is large enough for our nature and in accord with the call of our essential being.”
When we allow wonderment to remove the barrier that keeps us from experiencing our connection with God, our Creator, our Father, we see everything and everyone more as they are seen through God’s eyes. And, in this wonderment, we too are born to new life.
READ WITH A SENSE OF WONDERMENT
With this in mind, let us read these excerpts from Sunday’s Readings:
The Lord said to me, “You are my servant, through whom I show my glory. . . I will make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” Isaiah 49
Paul adds that each of us has already “been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy.” 1 Cor 1
“John testified, saying, ‘I saw the Spirit come down like a dove from heaven and remain upon him. I did not know him, but the one who sent me. . . told me, On whomever you see the Spirit come down and remain, he is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’” John 1:32-33
And, perhaps like John the Baptist, we will sense the Spirit coming down on ourselves and those around us, and in wonderment proclaim, “Now I have seen and testified that Jesus is the Son of God.” John 1:34
Let us think about how much we and the people around us need us to be wonderers: those who remember that a life worth living is first and foremost a life spent experiencing God and God’s goodness to us. And then, individually and communally, as the St. Michael Community of Wonderers and Believers, may that wonderment flow in us and out from us into the lives of those we meet.
Sister Loretta