“Be
exalted, O God, above the heavens;
let your glory be over all the earth.” Psalm 57:4
The basic paradigm by which I’ve
always seen the Christian life is a series of ideas that rise from the
Heidelberg Catechism, the handbook of doctrine with which I was raised. Those steps are not difficult. They go like this: “sin, salvation, service.”
The story line begins with sin—our
knowledge of it, as it exists specifically within us. Calvin starts even a bit earlier, with the
heavens, specifically with our sense of God as manifest in his world in what we
see and experience. Because humans can’t
help but see God’s marvelous work in the heavens and earth all around, we there
is something, someone, larger than life itself and much, much greater than we
are—there simply has to be.
When we know we aren’t God, we
know something about sin.
That conviction draws us closer to
him. Knowing our limitations is a prerequisite to knowing God. Sin precedes
salvation, or so the story goes, through the second chapter.
There’s one more step. That he
loves us in spite of our sin makes hearts fill and souls rejoice; we can’t help
but celebrate, and that celebration leads us into gratitude and service, into offering
his love to the world he loves so greatly.
Sin, salvation, service—that’s the
story line, the narrative by which I was raised.
Mother Theresa’s take on a very
similar tale was a three-step process not totally unlike Heidelberg’s narrative
line, but colored instead by her experience in the sad ghettos of Calcutta. Our redemption begins in repulsion—what we
see offends us, prompts us to look away. But we can’t or shouldn’t or won’t; we
have to look misery in its starving face, and when we do, we move from repulsion
to compassion—away from rejection and toward loving acceptance.
And the final step is what she
called “bewonderment,” sheer wonder and admiration. Compassion leads us to bewonderment.
“Bewonderment” is one of those
strange words no one uses but everyone understands, probably because, like reverence, it’s simply hard to come by in
a culture where our supposed needs are never more than a price tag away.
Bewonderment is hard to come by
for me, perhaps because it isn’t so clearly one of the chapters in the story I
was told as a boy, the story which is still deeply embedded in my soul. “Service”
is the end of the Christian life—or always has been—for me, not
“bewonderment.”
Maybe that’s why I’m envious of
David’s praise here. What he says to God in prayer is something I rarely tell
him. I don’t think I’ve ever asked God
not to hide his little light under a bushel, to display his radiant grace from
pole-to-pole. I’m forever asking for favors, but only rarely am I adoring, in
part, in part, I suppose, because I’m so rarely in awe.
Bewonderment is something I’m
learning as I age, and for that I’m thankful—for the book, for the song, for
David the singer, and for the God David knew so intimately that he could speak
the way he does in Psalm 57.
It’s difficult for some of us to be
intimate with God—to be so close to a being so great and grandly out of reach. But intimacy is something a song can
teach—and the heavens too. Bewonderment
is something even an old man can learn, if he has eyes and ears.
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