A few years ago I found myself reading the ancient philosophers and stumbling over a strange claim. Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder.
At first, that seemed obvious enough. Of course it begins in wonder. Every child knows that. Children spend half their lives asking “why?” They stare at insects. They collect rocks. They point at the moon. They want to know what everything is and where it came from. But the older I get, the more I think Aristotle was pointing toward something deeper. Wonder begins with a confession.
“I do not know.”
Not the frustrated ignorance of a student who forgot to study for a test. Not the cynical shrug that says nothing can really be known. Rather, wonder begins when we encounter something so rich, so beautiful, so mysterious that we suddenly realize reality is larger than we thought.
We are standing on the shore of an ocean we cannot cross and strangely, that realization fills us with joy.
I think many of us spend our lives trying to escape this feeling.
We want explanations. We want certainty. We want everything neatly categorized and placed into little boxes. We want a world that can fit comfortably inside our minds. The modern world especially tempts us to believe that mystery is simply a problem waiting to be solved.
Given enough science, enough technology, enough information, eventually everything will be explained and yet something in us resists that conclusion.
Why?
Even after we understand something, it remains mysterious.
A husband can spend thirty years learning his wife and still discover something new in her smile. A scientist can dedicate a lifetime to studying the stars and still find himself speechless beneath the night sky. A theologian can spend decades studying God and still fall to his knees in prayer.
Knowledge does not destroy mystery. If anything, true knowledge deepens it.
The great Catholic thinker Hans Urs von Balthasar argued that every created thing possesses an inexhaustible depth. Not because creation is irrational or unknowable, but because everything that exists participates in the infinite mystery of God.
Every created thing points beyond itself. The oak tree is more than an oak tree. The sunrise is more than a sunrise.
The face of a beloved is more than a face.
All of creation is charged with a hidden excess of meaning. This is why the world never quite fits inside our explanations. Reality always gives us more than we can hold.
I have experienced this most often in ordinary moments.
Not dramatic mystical experiences. Not visions. Not miracles. Ordinary moments.
A candle burning in the darkness while I pray in the middle of the night.
My wife laughing at something neither of us will remember next week.
The silence after receiving Holy Communion. The first snowfall of winter.
For a brief moment, the veil becomes thin. The world seems larger, more alive, more meaningful.Then the moment passes or perhaps it does not pass. Perhaps we do.
One of the greatest temptations of adulthood is to stop seeing. We begin to think we already know what things are. A tree becomes lumber. A sunset becomes weather. A spouse becomes familiar. A church becomes a building.
The mystery remains, but we cease to notice it.
J.R.R. Tolkien warned about this. He suggested that things become ordinary not because they have lost their wonder, but because we have “appropriated” them. We think we possess them. We think we understand them completely.
And once we believe we possess a thing, we stop looking at it. We stop receiving it as a gift.
Wonder requires a different posture. Wonder requires humility.
It requires us to stand before reality and admit that there is always more.
More beauty.
More truth.
More goodness.
More God.
This is one reason I think the saints remain so fascinating. The closer they drew to God, the less they seemed to think they had mastered Him. Instead, they became increasingly astonished. St. Augustine spent his life seeking truth and concluded by describing God as “ever ancient, ever new.” St. Thomas Aquinas wrote millions of words about God and then, after a mystical experience near the end of his life, declared his writings to be like straw compared to what he had seen.
The saints did not outgrow wonder. They grew into it.
Perhaps holiness is not the elimination of mystery but learning to live within it.
To rest there.
To trust it.
To love it.
Love, after all, thrives on mystery.
The moment a husband believes there is nothing left to discover about his wife, his love begins to die. The moment a Christian believes there is nothing left to discover about God, his faith begins to stagnate. Love endures because the beloved is inexhaustible. There is always more to receive. More to discover. More to contemplate.
This is true of God above all.
The Christian life is not a journey from mystery to certainty. It is a journey from shallow mysteries to deeper ones.
From partial vision to greater vision. From wonder to greater wonder and perhaps that is why heaven will never become boring.
If God is truly infinite, then eternity will not be a static state where we finally figure everything out. It will be an endless adventure into the inexhaustible depths of divine love. An eternal discovery. An everlasting astonishment.
The older I get, the less interested I am in explaining away every mystery. Not because truth does not matter.
Truth matters immensely but because reality is richer than my explanations.
The world is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a gift to be received and sometimes the holiest response is not analysis.
Sometimes it is simply standing before reality and saying, “I do not fully understand.” Then remaining there. Not in despair. Not in confusion but in wonder.
Resting, as it were, in the abyss of sacred perplexity.
