May 2000
 From Your Minister
by Rev. Jane Ranney Rzepka, minister, CLF
Precious goblets fashioned from rhinoceros horns. Fossils. South American featherwork. Polyhedral crystals. Turkish weaponry. Coral. Antique coins. Astonishing! Found in a "cabinet of wonders."
That's what they used to do in the 16th century: collect what seemed miraculous and amazing, and display it in a special cabinet. When you felt a little low in the awe department, you could visit your cabinet of wonders and regenerate the vertiginous passion of wonder.
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Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750.
by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Zone Books, 1998
"Rene Descartes called wonder the first of the passions, 'a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.'" Page 13
"As theorized by medieval and early modern intellectuals, wonder was a cognitive passion, as much about knowing as about feeling." Page 14
"Deep inside, beneath tasteful and respectable exteriors, we still crave wonders. Sitting wide-eyed under a planetarium sky or furtively leafing through the Weekly World News in the checkout line, we wait for the rare and extraordinary to surprise our souls." Page 368
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When I was a child, "wonder" was a big deal in our Unitarian Sunday school. We were trained to notice. Frog eggs to tadpoles to frogs, a black-and-white photograph by Ansel Adams, the sound of a gong, the night sky, the unimaginable found under a microscope and the mechanics of the microscope itself, bulbs morphing to daffodils. For me, the feeling of awe was visceral, and I also felt enlivened by the intellectual charge. That's the kind of religion Unitarian Universalism can be: engaging.
In recent years, bona fide wonders have been out of fashion. These days the spiritual trick is to take the ordinary and find something special in it. Indeed, I know that if I checked my basement I'd find boxes of my own sermons that promote exactly this approach: the "wonder in a blade of grass,"-the joy of a comfortable pair of shoes, the lessons one takes from the neighbor's cat. But what happened to the truly grand and amazing out-of-the-ordinary wonder of wonders?! Somehow I forgot all about the uniquely cool!
So I'm on the lookout for the rare seahorse that drifts into a cove off the coast of Maine, and the four-year-old who understands calculus, and the Taj Mahal. I'm noticing with amazement that you can sit in a cybercafe in a village in Eastern Turkey and e-mail your buddy in Yonkers in a flash. I just read that Walt Disney and Salvador Dali collaborated on a short animated film. That's astounding! Did you hear about the sea worms they found on the ocean floor that were 250 years old and still alive? What wonders!
Don't worry—I won't go too far with this—I'm not interested in the miraculous, those phenomena that just aren't going to turn out to be real. The unicorn horns in the cabinets of wonders were really narwhal tusks, not such wonders after all. For me, the spiritual boost comes from attending to wonders that are rare, mysterious, and true.
Medieval abbots and princes collected their ostrich eggs, coconut shell goblets, magnets, and glittering ores from Bohemian mines. They displayed coral ("a sea plant petrified by the blood drippings from Medusa's severed head"), little musical organs "made entirely out of glass from Barcelona," nautilus shells, and cleverly constructed "automatic" ducks that quacked—they collected a mad mix of nature, art, and imagination.
People need that, don't you think? Religion needs that sense of happy astonishment. Well, maybe not the coconut shell goblets, exactly, but that feeling of our world as a wondrous place, worthy of gasps and gratitude. When we open ourselves to full-strength awe, we are on the road to the religious. Let's get ourselves a cabinet of wonders.
Jane Rzepka, Minister
Quest May 2000 Contents
 REsources for Living
Betsy Hill Williams, Religious Education Director, CLF
A flying tiger is my animal friend. He has big wings and flies faster than a space shuttle. He can breathe fire and has sharp claws and teeth that are fangs. He's with me in my dreams and gives me rides on his back, fast like a roller coaster. We wrestle and play fight. He's just there for me. -Age 5
(from 10 Principles for Spiritual Parenting, p. 188)
Imagination. What a wonderful thing. When you were young, did you have a flying tiger friend, or any kind of imaginary friend? Did you see fairies in the soap bubbles or build fairy houses in the woods? When I was young we used to picnic in an area of town that we called the Enchanted Meadow. Today there are eight or ten houses there and the residents have never heard of the old nickname. The enchantment may be gone along with the meadow, but the experience left an enduring image in my mind of a real-life magical place. Enchantment, imagination, wonder. As Jane mentions in this month's "From Your Minister" column, "wonder" is big in UU circles—finding wonder in the ordinary and allowing ourselves to see and be open to extra-ordinary wonders. It's quite commonly believed that children are better at this than we adults. And I agree. During our younger, cognitively less-developed years, the line between fantasy and reality is blurred, allowing us to imagine things we cannot see, and feel genuine awe in the presence of extraordinary things. As we get older, it is harder and harder for us to cross this line and connect with the world of imagination, dreams, and enchantment.
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--Betsy
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The fantasy/reality line so often referred to in the literature of child development reminds me of the pagan notion of a "veil between the worlds." In the Celtic calendar, the days halfway between each equinox and solstice (November 1, February 1, May 1 and August 1) are known as "cross-quarter" days and are celebrated as "doorways" into each new season. In the goddess traditions, doorways are sacred; they are a place between two different states of being. Two of these cross-quarter days, November 1 and May 1, are also celebrated as doorways between the spirit world and the physical world.
The "veil between the worlds" is lifted on Samhain (Halloween) when the dead are honored and on Beltane (May Day) when the whole living world is honored and celebrated. A rich variety of rituals are practiced and myths told to help human beings maintain communication between the worlds, particularly at these times. As Starhawk, (et al) writes in Circle Round:
When we believe that only what we can touch and count and measure is real, then the earth loses life and vitality and becomes a gray and polluted place. But when we learn to recognize that all around us a great conversation is taking place, if we have ears to hear, then the world becomes again a place of magic, and we remember again how to live in harmony with nature. May is a good time to look closely at your own "veil," your own barriers to the world of creativity, imagination, and wonder. What keeps you from experiencing "full-strength awe?" I've heard it said that our society educates the wonder and magic out of our children (and ourselves). How can we nurture it back in?
Imagination Games
Here are two simple family games to play around the dinner table, or in the car to help you step outside the physical, tangible, logical world and awaken your creative powers. Psychologists tell us that creativity flows from a part of our brain that likes to "talk" in images, so the goal of each game is to enrich and expand your mental images.
Discover-it
In this game, one person starts the others on a mental voyage of discovery: taking a trip, finding something, noticing something, imagining yourself in the place of another person or thing. Set the stage, or begin the journey, with a concrete or familiar situation: you're on a bus, swimming at the lake, or listening to music in your room. Then ask a question, or leave "blanks" for the others to fill in what they see. If more than 2 people are playing, take turns just listening—no arguing about anyone's visions!—to each other's stories. Switch places so everyone has a chance to both set up and take the discovery voyages. Here's an example: "Imagine yourself swimming in a pond when you notice an old box on the shore that you know contains something special for you. Open it up. What do you find?"
Circle stories
One of my strongest (and funniest) memories from college days is of a group of 5 or 6 friends sitting in a circle on the floor, making up a group story. Since then, my family and I have woven wonderful stories on long car rides—sometimes scary, sometimes funny, but always original and often magical. The procedure is simple; one person begins the story and one by one the others add to the story line. Whenever it feels right, someone ends the story. You could expand this idea to include friends and relatives far away by starting a circle story by mail. Write down the first few lines or paragraph of a story and end it mid-sentence. Send it off to a grandparent, cousin, or distant friend and ask him or her to add to the story and send it back. You could start a "chain story" that includes the imaginations of people from all corners of the world.
Quest May 2000 Contents
Last updated June 12, 2005
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