Only recently have I noticed how often I use the word “awesome.” I use the word often in philosophy classes at St. John’s University and I use it often in Sunday homilies. In both classes and homilies, I am trying to help others appreciate in some new or special way what is part of their experience.
Of course, I am not equating what I try to do in class with what I am trying to do in a homily, but I don’t wish to give the impression that I think there is no similarity between my two efforts. In both, I am trying to help others become aware of something special in their experience, something wonderful and awesome.
When I saw an ad for the book “When I in Awesome Wonder: Liturgy Distilled from Daily Life” (Liturgical Press, Minnesota, 2017, pp. 171), I knew I had to get a copy and read it. In the early pages of her book, Jill Y. Crainshaw, refers to two philosophers’ reflections on the nature of wonder, both of whom offer some helpful insights into the meaning and nature of wonder and also the nature of the awesome. Crainshaw writes the following:
“Philosopher Jerome A. Miller’s perspective on wonder energizes my own. Wonder, Miller says, seizes our imaginations and stirs within us a desire to encounter the unknown — what is other or strange to us — as it is embedded in the multiplicity of worlds in which we live and work and worship and play. In other words, wonder opens our eyes, ears, and hearts to those unexpected or overlooked or unfamiliar facts of our everyday lives.”
Another philosopher, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, says this: “Wonder … responds to a destabilizing and unassimble interruption in the ordinary course of things, an uncanny opening, rift or wound in the everyday.”
There are parts of both Miller’s and Rubinstein’s comments about wonder that I very much like. What I like about Miller’s comments is that he points out that wonder helps us to see what is part of our experience but which may have previously gone unnoticed. I like Miller’s comment that wonder opens our eyes, ears, and hearts to appreciate what previously was overlooked.
I also very much like Rubinstein’s point that wonder responds to a special opening in the everyday. Recently I had an experience at a play that was really extraordinary. The experience shed special light for me on the nature of beauty, about which this series of nine columns has discussed in several different ways. The experience happened during my attendance at a revival of the musical “Ragtime” at City Center in Manhattan. The revival was part of a series called “Encores,” which I think means that the play might have a chance at a Broadway revival in the future. If that should happen, I will encourage any person I know who loves theatre to see it.
Based on E.J. Doctorow’s novel, part of the play deals with racial prejudice. The scene that deeply touched me, and apparently the rest of the audience, was a duet between two lovers, each a person of color who has experienced terrible, really frightening racial prejudice. With magnificent voices, they sing about how their future, because of their love for one another, will be different and about how they will live “on the wheels of a dream.”
I cannot recall the last time I was moved to tears while watching a play. During this duet, they were streaming down my face. It seemed as though everything beautiful and powerful in the play was captured in that duet. It all came together — the plot, the dialogue, the drama, the music, the action, the themes, the absolutely phenomenal voices of the two lovers — in some miraculous way, it all came together in that overwhelming moment.
For me it was a moment that was rare in my experience of attending theatre with some regularity since I was a college student. For me, it was a tremendous moment of theatre that, in ways that I cannot explain, was somehow religious. For me, not only was it a marvelous moment of theatre but, in some mysterious way, a moment of grace.
Writing this series of columns about beauty has been a labor of love for me but also an opportunity to probe more deeply into my own experience to find and better appreciate moments of beauty. Each of us is surrounded by beauty, and each experience of beauty can be related to the absolute beauty of God, who is the creator of all beauty. Experiences of beauty can be like pointers toward the beauty of God.
If we are attentive we may grow in our appreciation of beauty and be more aware of God’s presence in our lives. That would be awesome and wonderful.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica. His new book, “The Cosmic Love Story: God and Us,” is available on Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.
