I invite you to think of a time, if you like, when you were just awestruck;

A time when you were overcome with wonder. 

If you’re open to it, we can take a few moments and be in a prayerful way and bring this memory back to your imagination. 

Let’s settle into some moments of silence where we open ourselves to the presence of God. 

You can close your eyes if you like … settle into your breathing … invite in the Holy Spirit … 

And in a prayerful way, I invite you to bring up from your memory an experience that your felt awe, wonder, maybe even the presence of the holy, a holy experience. 

Feel free to remember where you were for this holy experience, what you felt, what you saw and heard and smelled and tasted … who or what you were with … 

And if nothing is coming to mind, just let this right now be a holy experience. 

Holy One, our Creator, Thank you. Thank you for these moments of awe, these moments of wonder. Thank you for the times in our lives that by your grace we have felt and known that a much greater power is on the move through our lives and through the world. Thank you, Holy God, O Holy Mystery, for all the ways you help us know that you are with us and that you are beyond us: through our experiences, through our faith, through the scriptures, through community, through Jesus. In your Name beyond name, we pray. Amen.

I offer this as a good practice. It is a good practice to remember and treasure our experiences of awe and wonder, especially if they were for us holy experiences. Take these things and ponder them in our heart, like Mary. It’s important to not dismiss these kinds of experiences. 

It is also important that we protect our capacity for them, to guard our ability to feel awe, guard our openness to wonderment, our willingness to just be struck by the Wow of it All. 

This does takes protecting, because there are so many forces in ourselves and in our world that can constrict us and prevent us from just witnessing what is before us and being awestruck by what is awesome. There are holy moments all around, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. 

It’s telling, that the forces in our lives that can choke out our wonderment are pretty much the same forces that can block us from feeling gratitude. Wonderment and gratitude are closely related, I think. They both are postures of appreciation for what simply is. Wonderment and gratitude are both ways of opening our arms and embracing the preciousness of some part of existence, if not all of existences. And the forces that block us from this are the same: things like worries, fears, preoccupations, things like exhaustion and despair, things like cynicism, self-importance, entitlement, things like addiction, vampiric forces that steal our attention and energy.

Now, these forces – and we could name more –also happen to be forces that push us away from hope. The same forces that choke wonderment and block gratitude, also push us away from hope. 

Hope, in the religiously mature sense, is deeply related to wonderment and gratitude. And I mean hear hope that is not naïve, hope that’s not just a blind certainty that the future is guaranteed to turn out the way we want it to be. I mean a hope that does not at all dismiss our agony over the ways that things are not as we know they should be and could be. 

The kind of hope I’m talking about is rather an open appreciation for the astonishing field of possibilities that our Holy Creator is constantly offering every instance of creation; and an appreciation for the sacred forces that are at work in constantly offering opportunities to work together for the good when we put our trust in God. 

Our view of reality is so limited, we simply cannot know what all is possible, we simply cannot accurately predict the future fully enough to be able to close it all down in despair. And it is in the experiences of wonder and of gratitude that we can be open and humble enough to come to know the miracle born in every moment. And when we say “Yes” to being allies of the wild and holy source of those miracles, the source of all life and creativity, then our imaginations can open a little more to the next choice we can create to participate in that goodness that is possible. So, we can make our way, moment to moment, doing our part, with a Christly heart. 

This takes practice – especially because there are so many forces within us and around us that militate against wonder, gratitude, and hope. 

That’s why it’s good we have spiritual practices of wonder, gratitude, and hope, that are woven into our religion. Daily, Weekly, Yearly practices. “Religion”, “re-ligio,” literally mean “to reconnect.” “ligio” like “ligament” that keeps our bones together, “re-ligio”. 

Daily there is the practice of prayer, which guides us to gratitude, to faith, to openness to what is possible with God. The Lord’s Prayer, for instance, that Jesus taught – we can see how that is a prayer of wonderment, a prayer of gratitude, a prayer of hope, as well as a prayer of release in forgiveness, in practicing openness to the activity of God in our lives. 

Then weekly, our worship, when we’re doing it right, helps us to return to wonder, to remember to gratitude, to trust in new possibilities, to be encouraged in doing what is right, come what may.  

And yearly, in our sacred calendar, this is season of Advent, when we prepare ourselves for Advent, the dawning, literally the “Coming into being,” of Emmanuel, God-with-us, Christ in our midst. This is a season where we are invited, year after year, come what may, we are invited to wonder, we are invited to give thanks, we are invited to hope in the astonishing possibilities born with our God who joins us in the midst of strife and uncertainty. 

So let me close by returning to the Psalm we opened with: 

Psalm 95 

(Version by Nan Merrill)

O come, let us sing to the Most High, 

Creator of the Cosmos;

Let us make a joyful song to the Beloved. 

Let us come to the Radiant One 

With thanksgiving, 

With gratitude let us offer our 

psalms of praise.

For the Beloved is Infinite,

The Breathing Life of all. 

The depths of the earth belong to Love;

The height of the mountains, 

As well. 

The sea and all that is in it, 

The dry land and air above

Were created by Love. 

O come, let us bow down and give

Thanks,

Let us be humble before the 

Blessed One. 

For the Beloved is Supreme, and

We, blessed to be invited to 

Friendship

As companions along the Way. 

O that today we would harken to the 

Beloved’s voice. 

Harden not your hearts, as in 

The days of old, 

That you be not separated from Love. 

Be not like those who hear the Word and 

Heed it not, 

Thinking to be above the Most High. 

For life is but a breath in the

Eternal Dance, 

A gift to be reverenced with trust, 

An opportunity to grow in spirit

And truth, 

That in passing into new Life, you enter Into the Heavenly City.

(Image: “Morning Star” by Kate#2112 is licensed under CC BY 2.0)