I am drawn to wonder. I think we all are. In fact, I think it is THE driving force in our lives.
As children we constantly explore nature, books, neighborhoods, friendships, sports…we are always seeking new things. Most of us grow tired of our childhood pursuits and push on to something new, something more adult. The world of business calls, deeper relationships, sex, or some intellectual avenue becomes the new thing filling us in our twenties and thirties before we settle down into a routine. It is in this “routine” stage when most of us lose our drive to seek wonder. We become bored about what is and see no hope in what comes next. We become Billy Crystal’s character in City Slickers, (watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqX6z6djbD4).
Many people regain their sense of wonder by switching from one pursuit to another. They jump jobs, move locations, engage in illicit affairs, dive into drugs, or any one of a number of options, some moral and some not so moral. Eventually, we blame the things around us saying they aren’t enough and that we need something new. Sometimes, you run into a real spiritual person telling you that you should, just as Paul said, find ways to be content in everything. In some sense they are right, but as with any scripture, this one can be misquoted and misapplied. We are built for wonder. We are built for pursuing things that are amazing. We are built with eternity set into our hearts and nothing on this earth will ever satisfy that longing.
Yeah, I know. You get tired of hearing that God fills that space in our lives. I get tired of hearing it too. Yet, even though it’s true and I know we have an infinite abyss which can only be filled with an infinite object like God (Pascal’s words, not mine…and, by the way, there is no mention of a God-shaped vacuum in his writings!) I still long for the possible joy associated with the mundane things of this world. I, (and I think we all do), live my life in pursuit of the next layer of the fractal.
Yes, I said fractal. Many of you know what a fractal is, but for those who don’t, a fractal is a mathematical construct with an infinite regression of similar parts. (For a more detailed explanation, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal). Fractals are quite complex, difficult to comprehend, and can be quite beautiful. You can spend days, or more, exploring a fractal trying to take in its complex beauty and never reach its end. But for all the beauty of a thing that is infinite (at least mathematically) it is still a regression of similar parts. It’s the same thing, over and over, found in deeper and deeper levels. There is nothing new around the corner, it is always the same thing.
This is why I say things we pursue as a child and as an adult are fractals. They can be complex, difficult to comprehend, and beautiful but as we quickly find out, they are also repetitive. No matter how far we go down the rabbit hole of a fractal, we never encounter something new. We eventually lose interest and stop pursuing that fractal because our sense of wonder is not tied to repetition. So we do the obvious thing and jump to another fractal, but let’s be honest here…everything is a fractal!
Well, not everything. The psalmist says, “open my eyes that I might behold wondrous things out of your law.” Of all the places to find wonder, the Jewish law is probably not high on our list, yet that is where the psalmist seeks. And if we think about it just for a minute, it becomes glaringly obvious why.
<<<insert one minute of thinking>>>
See what I mean? But seriously, if God is the one who created all things, then every fractal joy we pursue comes from him. Every pattern, every possibility, every moment of every day, all of it is rooted in God and his nature. The laws that he reveals thus are not merely stipulations by which we must abide, but they are something altogether different. They are windows into the very nature of God’s being. And he, unlike the fractal world in which we live, is an infinite regression of unlike parts. Not only is there infinite depth in God’s being, but there is infinite complexity as well. More than enough to keep us engaged with finding new and wondrous things around each corner if we are only willing to set aside our hope that the childish fractals will satisfy us and hold onto the mature one as the only source of wonder.
This does not mean we abandon this world, no, actually it means we dive into it finding the joy God has set before us, but we must continually realize that what we seek is not really the fractal of nature, relationships, or sex, but we seek the source of all these things, the mind of God, the one for whom we were created to live in relationship. In the words of C.S. Lewis,
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
