It snowed last week in the Chicago area. The snow was soft, gentle and lovely as it slowly covered the grass, the tree branches, and the porch railings. As the sky grew grayer and darkened with the coming night, the world outside seemed to hush and become still. I stood outside and looked up at the snowflakes as they fell onto my face; large, fluffy, graceful snowflakes. And I embraced the quiet that seems to surround first snowfalls. The world seemed to hush. The birds huddled in their branches, the sounds of cars and airplanes diminished, and the immediate world seemed still. Peaceful. Quiet.
I think we grow out of our ability to wonder as we grow up. One of my new favorite authors, Sarah Clarkson, writes,
“Children know. Sometimes I think the whole form of their little lives is a kind of prayer, and that’s what Jesus meant about becoming like a child in order to enter the kingdom. They watch intensely. They notice, and until they have voiced the full extent of their observations and had them validated, they are not to be swayed to another subject. They quest, and they thoroughly question the people they trust. They wonder. Sometimes, in our age of oversaturated opinion, it seems almost too commonplace a thing to say that children possess a capacity for fixed, receptive wonder that their adults have lost, but it’s true. It’s true. They walk outside in their smallness, and what they see is a kind of workaday miracle, not in the sentimental terms we adults often employ but simply something to be engaged by amazement. Leaves! Airplanes! Wind! Can I taste, touch, join this wildness pouring into the open portals of my whole sensing self? What is this but the abandoned sort of prayer we all crave?” †
As we grow up, out of our ability to wonder like a child, we become busy with things to do, places to go, and even our preparations for Christmas. While important, doing things often takes the place of being – being quiet, still, in wonder. Especially the past few months, L’Arche Chicago has been involved in lots of doing: building and preparing the St. Joseph House to open as the fourth home in our community. The house is now home to its four core members and is decorated for Christmas. Delicious meals are prepared in the lovely kitchen, stories are told around the dining room table, Uno is played at the accessible counter – the doing of ordinary life continues in this new space. Yet amidst all the doing, we adults so easily might forget the real meaning of this holiday and Who is Wonderful and upon Whom we should wonder and watch. May we once again grow into our willingness to wonder, to ponder, to be still, and to meditate on His wonders in this world. Especially in this Christmas season, let us not hurry through our days but savor the moments that are the nourishment our parched souls need right now.
† Clarkson, S. (2024). Reclaiming quiet: Cultivating a life of holy attention, pp. 109-110. Baker Books.