👁️ From Anonymity To Intimacy

Some statements on wonder from John O’Donohue

“If you have an infused sense of wonder then your wonder is able to transfigure that which is unknown within you and around you and it will take away the anonymity, the distance, and the separation, which the unknown always makes the vulnerable and fragile human creature experience. Wonder makes the unknown interesting, attractive, and miraculous and that’s why when wonder awakens in your life it is the lovely subtle presence that is always at the threshold of your heart transfiguring the anonymous into the intimate.”

“If you lose your sense of wonder, you no longer live in the sacramental majesty of a world. Nature is no longer a presence but it’s a thing and your life, instead of being a sacrament of possibility, becomes a dead cage of fact. Time instead of being eternity becomes routine. So wonder is a grace and a gift.”

Pairs well with this quote from Katherine May:

“Enchantment came so easily to me as a child, but I wrongly thought it was small, parochial, a shameful thing to be put away in the rush towards adulthood. Now I wonder how I can find it again. It turns out that it had nothing to do with beauty after all-not in any grand objective sense. I think instead that when I was young, it came from a deep engagement with the world around me, the particular quality of experience that accompanies close attention, the sense of contact that emerges from noticing. I worked hard to suppress all those things. I thought it was what I had to do in order to grow up. It took years of work, years of careful for-getting. I never realised what I was losing. But enchantment cannot be destroyed. It waits patiently for us to remember that we need it. And now when I start to look for it, there it is: pale, intermittent, waiting patiently for my return. The sudden catch of sunlight behind stained glass. The glint of gold in the silt of a stream. The words that whisper through the leaves.”