Wonder and Awe

Easter Sunday was this past Sunday.

I have often marveled that the five themes of Advent; hope, peace, joy, love and light, are also in the story of the Resurrection.

There is hope that there is more to the story than just death. It mixes with the despair of the crucifixion.

There is peace in the garden where the empty tomb lies. It combines with the strife and the shouting, the calls for death and the taunts of the soldiers.

There is joy because “he is not here, he has risen.” It intermingles with the grief of the nights before and the torment of the cup that had to be drank.

There is love in the entire message, cohabitating with the hatred that drove the story home.

And there is light outshining the darkness because death cannot hold us apart from the final adventure we seek if we want it.

But in this story is a certain wonder. There is a certain awe. There is a certain mysticism that we cannot rationally explain.

Wonder and awe.

It’s easy to lump these two abstracts together, but according to philosophers Ulrich Weger and Johannes Wegemann, the two ideas are different:

“Wonder inspires the wish to understand; awe inspires the wish to let shine, to acknowledge and unite.”

~Ulrich Weger and Johannes Wegemann, “Towards a conceptual clarification of awe and wonder: A first person phenomenological enquiry,” Current Psychology. March 2021. First published online 23 November 2018

Wonder is curious to know the why and drives the ideas of exploration and learning. Wonder caused the women to enter the tomb even though they were told he was not there. While that can be a good thing, there are times where it can also be detrimental. Wonder wants to pick the story apart, It can turn to skepticism, making us doubtful like Thomas.

Awe just lets the story shine out for what it is. It ignores some of the plot holes as it brings the message that the very themes we look for in life are still there. The peace, the hope, the love, the joy, the light and the magic that we see in the Christmas story are in the Easter story as well, even in the darkness of the empty tomb before the stone is rolled away. Awe doesn’t need explanations. It sees the whole picture, messes and all and it inspires us to do better, to be better, to unite in the magic that draws us together.

Awe was what drove the women to run back to the disciples cowering in the locked room, becoming essentially the first preachers of the good news.

We need both in our lives. We need the wonder and the healthy doses of skepticism. But we also need those moments of awe. We need that moment of splendor while looking at a landscape or a sunrise that takes our breath away. We need that bubble of jubilation at hearing a baby’s belly laugh. We need the exhilaration of the thought of seeing something new. We sometimes just need that hope and peace, joy and love, light and magic that comes from just letting the moments of life unfold without wondering the explanation behind it.

We need the magic that comes with our wisdom.

Stay magical, friends.

Write your own story.

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