God’s wonder and ours

One of the most insightful pieces I’ve ever read about C.S. Lewis is the biographical essay on Lewis written by John Piper in February 2010. You can access it here. My favorite section of Piper’s talk is the one entitled ‘The Wakening of Wonder at What is Really There.’ Here are three wonderful paragraphs from that section:

‘Lewis’s keen penetrating sense of his own heart’s aching for Joy, combined with his utter amazement at the sheer, objective realness of things other than himself, has over and over awakened me from the slumbers of self-absorption to see and savor the world and through the world, the Maker of the world. And this sense of wonder at what is—really is—has carried over into doctrine, and the gospel in particular.

Lewis gave me, and continues to give me, an intense sense of the astonishing “realness” of things. He had the ability to see and feel what most of us see and do not see. He had what Alan Jacobs called “omnivorous attentiveness.” I love that phrase. What this has done for me is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and to be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the coldness of the wooden floor, the wetness of the water in the sink, the sheer being of things (quiddity as he called it). And not just to be aware but to wonder. To be amazed that the water is wet. It did not have to be wet. If there were no such thing as water, and one day some one showed it to you, you would simply be astonished.

He helped me become alive to life. To look at the sunrise and with say with an amazed smile, “God did it again!” He helped me to see what is there in the world—things which if we didn’t have them, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He convicts me of my callous inability to enjoy God’s daily gifts. He helps me to awaken my dazed soul so that the realities of life and of God and heaven and hell are seen and felt. I could go on about the good effect of this on preaching, and the power of communication. But it has been precious mainly just for living.’

If you want to read a short but brilliant example of this kind of wonder at ‘what is really there,’ check out this piece.

I wonder if behind our wonder at what really is, stands God’s own wonder at what really is. G.K. Chesterton, in his classic Orthodoxy says, ‘It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but he has never got tired of making them.’ Chesterton says that God has ‘the eternal appetite of infancy.’ ‘The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.’ Have you ever thought of this? It rings true, that God is ceaselessly amazed and ceaselessly exuberant over each new baby, new flower, new sunrise, new day. One of the guys in our church recently told me that his young nephew has a cube with cut-out slots into which fit wooden blocks of the right shape. Every time – every time – this little boy gets a wooden block in the right slot, he pumps his arm and exclaims ‘yessss!!’ Every time. It never gets old. Chesterton is suggesting that’s the way God himself is. Endlessly creative, endlessly enthusiastic, endlessly enthralled with his creative work. Behind our own wonder at what is ‘really there’ stands God’s own wonder.

Posted by Stephen Witmer on May 24, 10:10 AM