Anam Cara

Wonder Awakens Us to the Magic of the World

Wonder enlarges the heart. When you wonder, you are drawn out of yourself. The cage of the ego and the rail tracks of purpose no longer hold you prisoner. Wonder creates a lyrical space where thought and feeling take leave of their repetitive patterns, to regain their original impulse of reverence before the mystery of what is. Such a tiny word; yet is confers the highest dignity and mystery. Most other words have such personal colour and promise. Is looks so tight; it is a little splinter of language. Yet the word is holds all reality and is the dividing line between existence and non-existence, truth and falsity. To say something is means that it has real presence, it is not a fantasy nor a mere notion. The greatest distance in the world is the distance between is and is not.

You have often had the experience of driving somewhere, your mind absorbed. You come over a hill and suddenly the wild ocean is there. When you leave the house on a frosty winter’s night, you find outside the dark heavens braided with starlight and the silent moon presiding over the sleeping fields and mountains. Sometimes we abruptly wake up to the magic of things!

The Shawshank Redemption is a film about friendship in a depressing prison setting. Every kind of brutality operates there. In that prison, the sounds are sinister and the silence is eerie. One day, a prisoner who is working in the library manages to get into the main office. He locks the door and puts on a piece of wonderful classical music, a duet from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and plays it over the loudspeaker into the prison yard. As if from the eternal spheres, like an invisible manna, this beautiful music falls onto all the haunted lives in this dreary place. All the prisoners stop, entranced, and listen. There is total silence and stillness to receive the full visitation of the music. This is a moment of startling epiphany. The visit of the music is such a surprise. In the lovely shock of its beauty, the lost grandeur of creation is suddenly present. This is a moment of pure wonder in a black world.

Wonder never rests on the surface of a fact or situation. It voyages inwards to discover why something is the way it is. In this sense, wonder kindles compassion and understanding. When you meet someone with a difficult or abrasive personality, you move away from him or her. If you begin to wonder what made a person become like that, you may be more open to the hidden story that has shaped this awkward presence. Wonder can often be the key to compassion.