I am afraid we have lost our sense of
wonder. The world is ablaze with wonder, and we seem far too unaware, far too
blind to the grandeur of God with which the world burns. We are creatures whose
appetites for wonder have been dulled by the numbing power of self-dependency.
We have tethered our trust to ourselves and thereby removed any possibility to
be held captive by anything beyond ourselves. But there is a way to wonder again, and J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton help us understand how.
We are much like Bilbo Baggins, the
hobbit of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Tolkien writes of Bilbo:
This hobbit was a very well-to-do
hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood
of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable,
not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any
adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say
on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a
Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether
unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you
will see whether he gained anything in the end.
You see, Bilbo, like all the Bagginses
before him, was all too content to leave his life uninterrupted. He had all the
pleasantries a little hobbit could ask for. But in a very unexpected way, Bilbo
is invited to leave his hobbit hole and The Hill behind for an adventure beyond
the Edge of the Wild. In many ways, Bilbo is not unlike us. We, too, are content
to leave our lives uninterrupted while we enjoy the pleasantries we are tempted
to think we have so rightfully earned. We, too, like Bilbo, have unexpectedly
been invited to adventure though such an invitation seems to threaten all we
treasure.
This is because we, proving again to
be like Bilbo, have made ourselves so big and the world so small in an attempt
to fabricate autonomy. We desire to be immutable, impassable gods, captaining
our own destiny and controlling our own fate. But in this there is no joy.
There is no wonder. There is only disappointment because though we masquerade
as self-sufficient centers of the universe, we are not. Look though we might,
we find nothing in ourselves, if we are honest, that unleashes an
uncontrollable, untamable wonder. And the lesson Bilbo learns through his
adventure is one we must learn too. It is a lesson that unlocks a child-like
wonder we can now but faintly remember.
At the end of his adventure, as Bilbo
approaches The Hill, he stops and says:
Roads go
ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves
where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the
sea;
Over snow
by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of
June,
Over grass
and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.
Roads go
ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet
that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that
fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at
last on meadows green
And tress and hills they long
have known.
Gandalf looked at him. “My dear
Bilbo!” he said. “Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that
you were.”
Indeed, Bilbo was not the same. He had
been changed. He had grown much smaller as the world around him grew much
bigger—as did his sense of wonder. His little world that was once all he knew
was now colored with a fresh brilliance, it shimmered with a new radiance in
the light of a bigger, grander world. But it was not merely geographic
perspective Bilbo gained in his adventure. Bilbo also gained theological
perspective. Tolkien concludes his tale with a dialogue between Bilbo and
Gandalf, the great wizard, reflecting back on all that had come to pass:
“Then
all the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!”
said Bilbo.
“Of
course!” said Gandalf. “And why should not they prove true? Surely you don’t
disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about
yourself? You don’t suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were
managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person,
Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow
in a wide world after all!”
“Thank
goodness!” said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.
Bilbo came to understand there was
something beyond himself guiding and directing and completing the course of his
adventures—and that something, Tolkien would say, is most certainly Someone.
Tolkien helps us see that to recover a
sense of wonder we must be loosed from our dependence upon ourselves. We must
come to know our place, our very small place, in this very big world. And most
significantly, we must come to know the One who is guiding and directing and
sustaining it all. Only the radiance of the glory of the eternal God—revealed
fully in Jesus and echoed in creation—can evoke and sustain the child-like
wonder for which we all long—regardless of our circumstances.
About this circumstance-independent
wonder, G.K. Chesterton writes in his classic Orthodoxy:
Because children have abounding
vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want
things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and
the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people
are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to
exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it
again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that
God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It
may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and
grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
Chesterton, like Tolkien, understands
we have lost our sense of wonder—“for we have sinned and grown old.” Yet the
eternal appetite of infancy our heavenly Father possesses, the unending
rejoicing even in monotony, He makes available to us by reminding us we are
very small, His world is very big, and that He is at work in all things—the
mundane and the miraculous—for our good.
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