“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” – Albert Einstein
Foreword: When the Sofa Becomes a Sanctuary
I genuinely love my living room. The colours, shapes, and mix of materials, the relaxed boho-meets-rock-chic aesthetic, often leave me wondering. Wondering about the joy of creativity, of being surrounded by evidence that beauty and meaning are still possible in a world of noise and algorithms.
Last night, during my connect group, the topic of wonder surfaced in conversation. Our pastor had spoken earlier about “resetting the mind,” and we found ourselves marvelling at the experience of spending time in God’s Word, that mysterious opening of Scripture by the Spirit. There’s no precise way to describe it: the sudden lightness, the stillness that feels like weight and air at once. You simply know you are in Presence, not because you can define it, but because everything in you falls quiet.
Our minds scramble to describe this Presence, but it resists definition. It is to be beheld, not explained. And in the beholding, the joy of wonder finds its fulfilment.
The Disenchantment of the Modern Mind
Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, ‘Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.’¹ Yet in modernity’s sleek machinery, wonder has become a casualty of efficiency. Our civilisation, he warned, ‘advances in power but declines in awe.’² The sacred has been flattened into the functional; beauty has been replaced by productivity.
Charles Taylor calls this the “immanent frame,” a world where meaning is sealed off from transcendence, “confining, even stifling, and leaving something vital out.”³ Inside this frame, people still hunger for transcendence, but we search for it horizontally: in art, success, wellness, or technology, rather than vertically. The ache for wonder remains, but we’ve lost the vocabulary to name it.
Taylor’s “buffered self,” the self-armoured against mystery, epitomises this loss: “The rational, disengaged agent is sacrificing something essential… what is sacrificed is spontaneity, creativity, and the beauty of wholeness.”⁴ The result, he argues, is a “cross-pressured” soul, one torn between the allure of unbelief and the longing for sacred depth.⁵
In a mechanised world, the absence of wonder is not just aesthetic; it is existential. We become flat souls in a flat world, living as though everything were explainable, until nothing can move us at all.
Beauty as Revelation
Hans Urs von Balthasar warned that when beauty is divorced from truth, civilisation itself falters. “Beauty is the disinterested one,’ he wrote, ‘without which the ancient world refused to understand itself.”⁶ The modern world’s neglect of beauty has moral consequences. When we no longer see beauty as a reflection of divine glory, we lose both reverence and restraint.
For Balthasar, beauty is not ornamentation; it is revelation. The artist, the saint, and the child share the same vocation: to see truly. “The only really effective apologia for Christianity,” he writes, “comes down to two arguments: the saints and the art it has produced.”⁷ Both are incarnations of wonder; visible witnesses to invisible grace.
C.S. Lewis, too, recognised that our age risks “seeing through everything, until there is nothing left to see.”⁸ We mistake scepticism for wisdom, when in truth, it is the posture of the blind. Yet Lewis insists, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”⁹ Wonder, then, is not sentimental escapism, it is the right apprehension of reality.
Practising Presence in a Mechanised World
Brother Lawrence lived his theology not in monasteries of marble but in kitchens of copper. “We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God,” he wrote, “for He regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”¹⁰ In a world obsessed with scale, his small acts shimmer with eternal consequence.
To recover wonder is to re-learn presence, to train our eyes to see God among the ordinary. Whether washing dishes or wrestling with spreadsheets, the invitation is the same: to recognise that the sacred hides in the seams of the mundane.
Heschel called this radical amazement, the awakening to a world that is not ours to possess but to receive.¹¹ When we live this way, every breath becomes liturgy, every room becomes a temple, every act becomes prayer.
Wonder as Resistance
The rediscovery of wonder is not a retreat from reality; it is an act of rebellion against the flattening forces of the age. To wonder is to confess that not everything can be measured, that meaning cannot be reduced to mechanism.
Evelyn Waugh once wrote, “Christianity, or chaos,” a phrase Taylor cites to illustrate how, in the modern world, the loss of transcendence leaves civilisation vulnerable to disintegration.¹² To stand in awe, therefore, is to stand against nihilism.
The one who kneels in wonder, thus, stands taller than the one who knows everything.
Prayer for the Sacred Ordinary
Lord,
Teach us again to see. To find You in the scent of morning coffee, In the worn weave of the rug beneath our feet,
In the laughter that interrupts our worries. Deliver us from efficiency that erases awe. Let our hearts be temples, and our homes, altars of joy.
For You are the Presence that cannot be named, yet in whose nearness everything becomes new.
In Your Mighty, and Wonderous Name, Lord Jesus,
Amen.
TRACK TO ENJOY:
References
1. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Harper & Row, 1955), 1.
2. Ibid., 45–47.
3. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 734.
4. Ibid., 609–610.
5. Ibid., 304–305.
6. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. I: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 18.
7. Ibid., 122.
8. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 14–15.
9. C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 46.
10. Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), 22–25.
11. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 89–90.
12. Taylor, A Secular Age, 734.
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