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Teaching for Wonder

- Pastor James

I received my elementary and middle school education in Korea in the 60's and 70's. It is not over simplification to state that education in those days was primarily rote memorization. I dutifully memorized the names of historical figures, the years of revolutionary events, and all the miscellaneous pieces of information that might appear on exams. Undoubtedly, memorization and repetition are an important aspect of learning. But for me, the most enduring lessons occurred outside classrooms, unintentionally taught by my father. As soon as I was able to walk some distance, my father took me to fishing almost every month. We would get up before sunrise and take a train to the upper part of Hahn River. From the train station, we would walk about an hour on a country road, surrounded by rice fields on each side, and we would occasionally rest under a weeping willow. I still remember vividly the serenity and calmness of the morning river, the sense of peace in being immersed in this tranquility, and the freedom of breathing the misty, cool morning air. I didn't enjoy the fishing part as much, and whenever I got bored, I would venture into the surrounding low hills and explore ant colonies or catch dragonflies. Even though I was not conscious of its influence on me at the time, this experience of being immersed in the serenity of the morning river and the surrounding beauty turned out to be deeply formative.

Education has changed since my childhood. We know more about the human mind and the multiple dimensions of intelligence, and this knowledge is widely reflected in contemporary education. When I examine the curriculum my children are using, I am impressed by its creativity and variety. In social studies lessons, I am grateful to see postcolonial sensitivity to past atrocities and genuine attempts to nurture appreciation for diverse cultures and ethnicity.

In spite of these advances in education, we are losing a quality that is essential to the development of faith-the sense of awe and wonder. Christian educators Kenda Dean and Ron Foster write in The Godbearing Life that today's young people have become "awelessness," that is, they have "lost their compass to the stars" and "forgotten the way that points to transcendence." The reasons for the loss are complex, but I believe that one crucial factor is the home environment that debilitates children's sensitivity to the beauty and majesty of God's creation and dilutes their capacity for wonder and amazement. As many Christians educators begin to recognize, home is the most influential environment for education and is the one that has the most enduring impact far beyond Sunday schools and youth meetings [3]. Yet many of us allow our home to be destructive educational environment to our children. We give them over to latest technological gadgets to satisfy their momentary hunger and abandon them to a TV set for long hours of fast-moving, flat images. We allow our children's tender hearts to be shaped by the people who control the programming of television and their shameless, cynical, and materialistic values. We live with a neurotic fear that our own children might be feeling left out if we don't buy them the latest toys that other kids have. The pressure on both the parents and children to conform to the environment is tremendous.

Certainly, I am not advocating shunning technology or mass media. I believe that they can be effective instruments for enriching our lives. But I want to point out our uncritical acceptance of whatever the market offers-the promise of convenience, efficiency, prosperity, pleasure, all this here and now-without caring for the losses in the human soul that such blind acceptance entails. As Neil Postman points out, technological changes are ecological, that is, they are interrelated with everything else, and the introduction of one often results in the loss of others. When we surround our children with the latest gadgets, video games, and hand-held games during their formative hours at home and allow them to absorb mindlessly the pre-imagined, pre-determined 2-dimentional images that the media offers, then there has to be ecological losses-primarily in the soul of our children.

If we allow such an environment to reign our home, how is faith possible? How is it possible to see the beauty and glory of the Divine when we surrender ourselves to the ideology of self-fulfillment and materialism? Is it sensible to expect that one hour of Sunday worship or Sunday school can reverse the hours of numbing effects?

This dilemma is articulated poignantly by Abraham Heschel, a Jewish theologian. According to Heschel, there is the innate possibility within the human soul to find a way to the awareness of the divine power, beauty and grandeur in the midst of the concrete world we live in [1]. Yet the actualization of this possibility depends upon how we relate ourselves to the created order. Heschel writes:
    Small is the world that most of us pay attention to, and limited is our concern. What do we see when we see the world? There are three aspects of nature that command our attention: its power, its beauty, and its grandeur. Accordingly, there are three ways in which we may relate ourselves to the world - we may exploit it, we may enjoy it, we may accept it in awe (Heschel, 33-4)
I find Heschel's insight penetrating. Depending on how we relate to the nature, our soul can either become callous or sensitive toward the nature's power, beauty and grandeur. The dominant environment of our society teaches our children to use, control, and exploit the nature while smothering their God-planted capacity for awe. Education of our children must be intentional in shaping their fundamental relationship with the created world. Again, Heschel articulates the different orientations for education through his eloquent, poetic prose.
    The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use. . . . He feels, acts, and thinks as if the sole purpose of the universe were to satisfy his needs (Heschel, 34).

    We teach our children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. The sense for the sublime, the sign of the inward greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to all men, is now a rare gift. Yet without it, the world becomes flat and soul a vacuum (Heschel, 36).
Our innate capacity to sense wonder, beauty, and awe is what makes the human soul rise above the rest of the creatures. The capacity is already there in the tender recesses of every human soul in the form of yearning, and it simply needs to be kindled and cultivated. The heart of education is simple-to create an environment where this wondrous yearning for beauty and grandeur can be nurtured. As Rabindranath Tagore, an Indian Nobel laureate, wrote, the human soul "has a natural yearning for the inspiration of the sunlight and spring, and for every thing that secretly helps the seed to sprout and the bud to blossom" [2]. Authentic education taps into this foundational yearning.

Christian education must tap into the same yearning because the yearning for the transcendent God comes from the same soil. The sense of awe and wonder before the sublime beauty of the creation points to the One who created all this. The Prophet Isaiah exhorts us, "Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these?" (Isaiah 40:26). Our eyes are so often focused on things that demand immediate attention, give instant gratifications, or satisfy physical and emotional needs, but the prophet calls us to lift our eyes on high and see. If the nature, a mere creature, causes us to stand in awe, how much more wondrous is her Creator!

The sublime beauty does not necessarily have to do with the vastness in size. It can be seen in every snow flake or in every maple leaf, even in structures too small to be seen with bare eyes. Seeing the incredibly complex yet eloquently simple design of the DNA is an occasion for giving praises to God. From the smallest to the largest structures known to humankind, the nature witnesses to the beauty of her Creator. As the Psalmist declares in Psalm 19:
    The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
In my room, I hung on the wall a poster-size photograph of the Tadpole galaxy taken from the Hubble telescope (for high-resolution images, go to the official Hubble site). This galaxy is so named because it has a long tail trailing the bright spiral core. The Tadpole in itself is wondrous and beautiful, but truly remarkable are the multitude of faint dots in the background. In the above picture alone, which is an extremely narrow segment of the sky, there are 6,000 galaxies. Some of these fuzzy dots reveal a clear spiral pattern while others are barely-visible specks of dusty light. Here we are looking almost at the very edge of the universe, nearly 13 billion light years away and dating back to the origin of time and space. Numbers are easy to say, but what is 13 billion light years? Absolutely incomprehensible! Mind-numbing! Even more incomprehensible and awe-inspiring is that all these faint dots are not stars but galaxies, each with billions of stars in it!



To me, seeing an image like this is a religious experience. The vastness of the universe is terrifying. Our planet earth is less than a speck of dust in this incomprehensively vast universe. Even more so, we human beings are incomprehensibly miniscule in such a scale. Yet the universe is more beautiful than any human artists can ever conceive-repulsive in its terrifying emptiness yet attractive in its infinite mystery. Rudolf Otto described such a moment of deeply felt experience as the numinous, which comes from beyond the sphere of intelligibility and pervades the human mind with wonder and awe. This is the kind of beauty that can only be described as "holy." Such is the garden that God has created.

Standing before the beauty of holiness, we are confronted by the Infinite One who holds the universe in His hand. In His presence, the only appropriate response is to bow down and worship in awe and humility. But for Christians, the confrontation with the Holy One takes us one step further, for we are confronted simultaneously by the infiniteness of the Father and the feebleness of the incarnate Son. How can the feeble infant in the arms of Mary be the incarnate Son of the Father? How can it be? Our mind cannot conceive of the union of the infinitely powerful Creator and the utterly helpless Infant. It is absurd to the utmost degree! Every Christmas is an occasion for a test of faith. Yet such is the realm of authentic faith. Faith is not a real faith without the shocking realization of its own absurdity. Faith without wonder and awe is but a passive intellectual consent to conventional religious doctrines.

Tragically, many of us surround ourselves and our children with an environment inimical to faith. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, education occurs everywhere, not just in classrooms. We go on chasing sound-bite news, feeding our minds with the constant flow of information, entertaining ourselves with fast-changing images of television, allowing our souls to be formed by the values of those who control the media, and abandoning our children to the same gods of materialism and self-fulfillment. Surely, one hour of hurried worship on Sunday will not undo the daily doses of idolatry. As John Westerhoff, a Christian educator, once asked, we must also ask: Will our children have faith? It would be tragic if they have acquired religious habits and are able to confess correct doctrines but live a life devoid of awe and wonder. What we need is not more theological information but more sensitivity to life's glory and wonder.

Faith education starts from the garden that God has created. Its beauty is unsurpassing, and its richness is beyond imagination. It has the power to kindle the primordial yearning for beauty and glory. Already, we have so much to offer to our children simply by taking them to the garden of God and pointing them toward our Creator. "Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these?" There is wondrous peacefulness in taking a walk along a wooded trail with family, simple pleasure in picking up leaves, delight in seeing the colors and shapes of flowers, and refreshing power in breathing in the misty morning air. All this is a priceless gift from the Creator not only that we may enjoy the beauty of creation but also that we may know He is the Lord of all.

Perhaps, our most intense longings are revealed in what we pray for. I close with a prayer of Abraham Heschel that exemplifies his most deeply felt longing:
    I did not ask for success;
    I asked for wonder.
    And You gave it to me.


Notes

[1] Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Noonday Press, 1955).

[2] Rabindranath Tagore, A Tagore Reader, ed. Amiya Chakravarty (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).

[3] See, for example, Mark DeVries, Family-Based Youth Ministry (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1994). Ben Freudenburg and Rich Lawrence. The Family Friendly Church (Loveland: Group, 1998).