Unseen Beauty: A Journal

Wonder

Wonder isn’t dead; it’s just eclipsed by Nintendo. Being a humanities teacher is a challenge, to say the least. Most days, I call my class cultural literacy, not humanities. I’ve had students tell me on exams that Archduke Ferdinand was Hitler’s Great Dane, mascot of the Nazi party, that the Medici family moved to China where they invented spaghetti sauce and became known as the Boyardii, and that Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he was afraid of heights. But of all the disturbing bits of ignorance I have encountered, one disturbs me more than all of the rest: people no longer understand wonder.

The medieval period has always been one of my favorites to study. As attached as I am to the hot water heater, light bulb, and flush toilet, I find myself equally drawn to the sense of wonder inherent in an earlier age. There is, in my mind, a sense of right-ness to considering the more miraculous, simpler explanations for our world, for seeing in the events around us a will and a direct force that the modern focus on Sola Sciencia tends to debunk. Perhaps that makes me a barbarian, a fool, but it makes me a fool who is happy believing in the power of wonder, embracing the primal instincts that still draw crowds to the box office for horror and fantasy neatly wrapped within the twilit safety of the movie theater.

Of course, I am no ignoramus; I believe the lessons science has taught us, and I am grateful for their knowledge. But accepting that the pile of numbers and scientific methodology offered up as rationalization is all the explanation there can be is the willingness to kill all of the hope and the Truth I carried with me from the purer halls of childhood. There is a call for me in the medieval belief that the sun rises because people beseech God to bring it up. Something in that mystical, perhaps childish, direct correlation between cause and effect satisfies my soul better than the maze of wires and plastic balls I recall as the solar system from my middle school days.

My frustration is how to convey that wonder, how to teach my students to open the doors of their mind, closed and rusted behind superficiality, commercialism, and years of training that anything mysterious can be explained away by a laboratory. If, even for a moment, I can capture their imaginations, I may win the struggle and get them to wonder, even for a moment, whether the roses petals do shudder in anticipation or fear when they pass by.