There are times when life can't help itself and, as the Psalmist wrote, "Deep calls unto deep." Then the mass of the world dances on the pinhead of our wonderment, and our breath so carefully cultivated carries us, like the wind, whithersoever it will.

The root of the word "educate" means "to care"—a caring that flows naturally from a deep feeling for the world. This kind of care seems to embody a type of wisdom that has nothing to do with information or knowledge in its restricted sense. Our connection to the world is not through information about it, but through a sense of wonder. How long since the cry of insects and the sight of the setting sun brought us deeply into ourselves?

Children live in a world of dreams and imagination, a world of aliveness...There is a voice of wonder and amazement inside of all of us; but we grow to realize we can no longer hear it, and we live in silence. It isn't that God stopped speaking; it is that our lives became louder.

Wonder is a searching attitude of simultaneously knowing and not-knowing, of finding pattern and breaking apart, [it] goes against the grain of our organizing mind, but is intrinsic to the creativity of introspection, art, and empathy.

Silence enables us to see the sacredness of all life…"to see life steady and to see it whole." In an age that has lost all sense of the sacred, of awe and wonder at the Divine penetration throughout the physical, human plane, how much we need the recovery of silence. Without some sense of awe, there is little basis for meaning.

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

We are held in a great light,
larger, more gracious than us.
I am grateful.
We are borne in a river of grace
that leaves nothing untouched by blessing.
I am grateful.