I Wonder as I Wander - a Blog for the Feast of Christmas

The shepherd’s sermon produced wonder in the hearers. No big surprise there; wonder surrounds the birth of Christ. Zechariah had everyone wondering because he loitered in the sanctuary when any sane sinner would flee that God-soaked danger zone before the fog of incense could dissipate (Lu 1.21). Then his wife Elizabeth wonder-whipped the whole village by insisting on naming her son herself and getting her God-muted mate to go along (Lu 1.63). Mary and Joseph’s heads whirled with wonder when rickety old saints mummified in holiness broke forth in prophecy concerning their baby boy (Lu 2.33).

Karl Barth, in a sort of reverse Inferno, declared wonder to be the outermost circle of theology. If encounter with God does not astonish you, he advised, consider a different career. If theology no longer astonishes you, consider a second career. So central did Barth consider this emotion that he insisted that “as long as even a poor theologian is capable of astonishment, he is not lost to the fulfillment of his task. He remains serviceable as long as the possibility is left open that astonishment may seize him like an armed man.” Or like a crazed shepherd or a blazing angel or a strong-willed wife or a decrepit priest.

All of this leaves us to ask what we mean by wonder. I like the definition that Edward Rothstein of the New York Times offers. “Wonder, he explains,

is not puzzlement, bewilderment or confusion. But it is also not satisfaction, completion or understanding. It is more open-ended, even a little unsettling. There is an element of calm, poised detachment in wonder but also a restless amazement. In the wake of wonder, we are literally moved. We cannot remain still. We are spurred to explore.

As wonder wound itself around and through the first Christmas, so Christians through the ages have felt it again and again. “I wonder as I wander,” says the old spiritual. But perhaps some of us would admit to a loss of wonder over the miracle of Christmas. By this time of the season the relentless assault of “the holidays” has worn treadless the tires of our souls so that we gain no traction on the ancient path to Bethlehem, which seems to lie snow-bound beneath layers of lifeless secular ice.

If the birth of Christ bothers us - let alone seraphic birth-announcements and special-order quasars - we might bog down in puzzlement, bewilderment, and confusion. We might even feel driven to seek scientific respectability for the whole scenario. Barth considers this a bum steer from the start. “Those theologians and nontheologians hunt for the impossible and nonsensical,” he scoffs,

who assume that the quest for the truth entrusted to theology must be identified with an inquiry into the possibility, verifiability, and explicability of the events that form the backbone of the Bible’s message.

“Theology,” he offers instead, “is necessarily the logic of wonders.”

If on the other hand the birth of Christ bores us - if we wince from carpal tunnel syndrome of the soul at the repetitive stress of the same old stories - we may have settled somnolently into satisfaction, completion or understanding. The completed circle of the creche explains it all nicely. The pastor reads the right verses on Sunday and the family gets the right gifts and our team wins its bowl game and restlessness atomizes beneath the gentle vibrations of our Barcolounger.

But if we would just look again at the story, something might happen. To return to Barth once more, we “might find that astonishment wells up within (us) anew, or perhaps even for the first time.” We might actually enter the packed streets of a tiny town where Romans register the locals like so many ripe pigeons marked for the plucking, and where liberation theologians finger daggers in the shadows and mutter that “messiah” might mean no more than “God helps them that helps themselves,” and where stolid peasants simply sign up and pay off and wait for this latest wave of empire to wash back out to the sea of history and leave the land to them once again. We might even see past the bathrobe-and-blanket-draped deacons and fidgety children and off-key sopranos at the annual Christmas musical and begin to encounter Christmas as something that happened in a world where things happen, but was something that never happened in any world before. And in the middle of a strikingly familiar world we might feel a strikingly familiar ache and suddenly realize that we yearn to hear wild-eyed shepherd babbling on about angels they have heard on high.

We might find that, like those ancient herdsmen, we are literally moved. We cannot remain still. We are spurred to explore - and to repeat our crazy account that makes no logical sense unless we dare to parse the logic of wonder.

This entry was posted on December 11, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.