Pop 89: Surrender to Wonder
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
Mid-struggle to stay cheery, I look up from my computer, and lo and behold, the snow is glittering. The cause of this glimmering grace is both moon and sun. Through my large back window, the full moon casts her warm blue light and long dark blue tree trunk and bare-branch shadows behind my cozy room. The Church of Mary’s Nativity has long gone empty, but her steeple holds its head up high against the lightening sky. Meanwhile, through my front window, the sun sends news of his ascendance above cattle lowing in frozen hills. His flags of pink and red spread more glitter on the golden patches of snow. Together the moon and the sun are performing their daily magic- melting the hardest of hearts on the coldest of days. And in this moment, my consternation is gone.
This moment reminds me: Life is where I put my time and energy. Don’t spend precious both on building a case, which is, sadly, exactly what happens when I stare at the screen too long. Alert as I am to the nefarious motives of social media screamers - which includes us all because, let’s face it, that is the only mode of expression social media profits from - I get all caught up in righteous indignant rants. But the gentle glow on the snow has renewed in me a resolution: I’m not spending any more time talking about “stupid people.” After all, we all get our stupid moment in the sun; we are all walking-talking contradictions. Remember when our mothers said: “It takes all kinds to make the world go around?” Why don’t we just accept each other for our differing opinions and get on with the important things, like watching the snow twinkle?
The monk Richard Rohr reminds me that I must allow myself to be “at least slightly stunned by this moment. To let it draw me inward and upward toward a subtle experience of awe.” But while these twinkly moments do indeed stun me, thrill me, make me want to whistle in admiration and weep at the magic of it all, I just don’t trust the world we live in is But then I am incapable of appreciating subtlety. This is a world that hammers us with rude, crude, heartless and creepy remarks. But that’s an outward glance, whispers Rohr, not an inward one.
The “inward and upward draw” that wonder enables in us is a means toward self-reflection. But, we seem less a culture of self-reflection than a culture of self-admiring. Instead of turning the magnifying lens on ourselves and our motives, we turn the camera lens on ourselves and take another picture. The camera becomes the means of capturing a moment we then store in our phone rather than pause to treasure in our hearts. But we need to get on with our day.
In order to let the awe and the wonder do its work, to fill our entire being and inspire us to a point of transformation and transcendence, we need to surrender to it. Not just store it in a device. Rohr writes: “We must allow ourselves to be captured by something beyond ourselves” and then: surrender to it! This mysterious zone, this place where awe and surrender meet, is actually the best definition I’ve ever heard for “the great dialogue called prayer.” That’s what Rohr calls it; you call it what you want. All I know is: it’s better than a head full of worry, complaint and bitching.
In Rohr’s lovely little book “Just This,” he discusses the “log removal process.” He refers to verse seven in the book of Matthew. I have not read the bible from cover to cover, but luckily the language of the prophets and the scribes endures, showing up in everything from Shakespeare to Jay Z, so Matthew’s admonition to remove “the log in our eye” before we whine about “the speck in another’s” is familiar to most of us. The log removal process allows us to begin anew, to allow the wonder in.
Log removal is an old idea, but when viewed by a new, renewed self, miracles can happen. “A new idea held by the old self is never really a new idea,” writes Rohr. “ whereas even an old idea held by a new self will soon become fresh and refreshing.” When I pause to consider, log removal feels more fulfilling than “logging on” to another online store to order another thing I didn’t know I needed and have it packaged by an underpaid employee at a “fulfillment” centre. I’d rather earn my own respect than points on a shopping card. Social media isn’t just about consuming; it’s a way to spread dispiriting, life-denying, vicious lies and gossip at a thousand hits a minute, anonymously - and those thousand hits can end up being death by a thousand cuts, as the Maria Ressa, Nobel laureate author of “How to Stand Up to A Dictator,” describes it. Ressa wrote the playbook on facing a dictator. And she makes it clear that dictators aren’t just politicians, but Silicon Valley dudes in jeans and sweaters, promising “fulfillment” and “engagement” every time you click on their site. So how do we become new? Stop resisting wonder when it nudges into our lives. And then surrender to it. The ego resists awe, and the will resists surrender, writes Rohr. We are trained to explain away awe and taught to never, ever surrender as if every encounter is a prospective fight. I hear a lot of weary adults claim that they “do Christmas for the kids.” But anyone who talks like that needs Christmas most! Kids already know how to surrender to wonder; wonder is their territory, they are the experts. Christmas is for all us Sad Sack Scrooges. So I’m stepping away from the computer. I can already feel the excitement rising as I put on my boots and hear an owl hooting out back.