On Living in Wonder
I am a little concerned about a possible tangent to Christian understanding that Rod Dreher’s recent writings may excite in those who do not understand them, namely, an emphasis on mysticism, on proper Christian understanding of the world as seen through the eyes of faith, as “weird.” As the subtitle of his book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age indicates, what Rod is speaking of is, I believe, the appearance of Reality in the thickened air of materialism to professing believers who have been poisoned by it—and not to normal Christian apprehension.
Because the viewpoint from which I work is that of a Platonist of the Lewisian variety, who understands creation as sacramental in every respect because it is God through his Son in whom it subsists—and who is present to it in such a way that “being” is in fact communion, as the late Bishop John Zizioulas noted—I therefore also believe that what Rod is talking about is nothing other than mere Christianity, the common vision of all believers who accept the Scriptures as true because they have been drawn into them and live in that world, as they in fact require—in what Karl Barth described as “Die neue Welt in der Bibel.” No one (I speak as a Protestant who was raised believing in the Scriptures) can live in the Bible without accepting all that “weirdness” as wholly un-weird, as simply an account of de rerum natura, the shape of the substance of the world in which we live.
Only in a certain frame of mind does this narrative strike the converted soul as “wonder,” as something which, like sexual exultation, or angelic visitation, comes and goes quickly but is remembered as a good and a bringer-to-mind of the divine constitution of the world. One cannot apprehend wonder except insofar as he is carried by remembrance of things past that the world is wonderful because it is at all times subject to the free, sovereign will of its Creator. C. S. Lewis, as one would expect, said it all, herein by a trope of ontological imagination:
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S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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