It’s good to wonder, to look and appreciate and marvel at the sight of something beautiful or awesome. The Psalms and many other parts of the bible demonstrate the importance of wonder, over and over. Wonder refreshes us. It can move us to gratitude. It can take our breath away. It renders us wordless. It draws us into a world larger than ourselves.
Wonder. We need to pause and allow it to overtake us more often than we do.
There is another meaning of wonder: asking questions, being curious, wanting to learn or look at things from fresh angles. With this sort of wonder we can build our base of knowledge and perhaps grow in wisdom. Wisdom grows if we are “open to receive it as a gift” (“Proverbs, Book of,” New interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Vol 4, p 659).
That’s the thing about wisdom: we can seek it, we can be taught about it, and we need to be open to receiving it. Open to new insights, new knowledge, new questions. Then we have a chance to “understand righteousness and justice and equity, and every good path” (v. 9, NRSV), as today’s passage from Proverbs declares. In wisdom, we can rightly seek and discern the ways of God. The ways of Christ’s reign.
Becoming increasingly wise, it seems, involves the totality of a person. Our will. Our willingness to listen. Our mental and emotional capacities. Our spirits. Our hearts—where all things meet. The search for wisdom may begin with wonder in the sense of awe and astonishment. It must also include wondering: curiosity and questions about the world around us, about ourselves in that world, about bringing the world to justice, harmony, equity, thriving.
A whole other matter lurks here, just under the surface. What makes a question fruitful, a tool that generates new insights, an opening to increased wisdom? It’s clear that not all questions tend toward growing wisdom and its fruits of justice and equity. One of our culture’s main questions for centuries has been “How can I make more money?” That question has motivated a vast increase in knowledge, but rarely any wisdom. Examples like that abound.
In this time of crisis on so many fronts we need to ask some new questions. Questions that provoke some new insights and open previously unconsidered possibilities. Some organizations and consultants speak of the need to craft powerful questions. Questions that, “are open-ended and empower the person responding to choose the direction they take. They create possibilities and encourage discovery, deeper understanding, and new insights. They are curious and non-judgmental as they seek to further learning and connection” (lwv.org). Learning and connection. Not just knowledge. Connection to others. Connection to nature. Connection to the Divine.
Reviewing the notes that Ineke and Marilyn compiled about worship over the sabbatical months made it clear that Skyridge appreciates a good, well-crafted question. It remains to be seen whether the questions that came up here and in my own musings over sabbatical will lead us in the direction of fuller wisdom and its fruits. Perhaps some new, powerful, and insight-generating questions have emerged among us. Perhaps they are still gestating. God knows the world needs some new questions. The world needs us to ask them. Jesus asked a lot of powerful questions; we have a great model.
For many years, most of our culture’s questions about the more-than-human world have been pretty much the same: how can we use natural resources? How can we extract them more efficiently? How can we exploit land? How can we control or eliminate what we don’t like about the world? This approach has led to knowledge, but not much wisdom.
In recent years a few people have been asking different questions about the living world around us. One of those questions, broadly speaking, is: what do we need to learn from nature in order to contribute to the thriving of all life?
That question, asked in various ways, has generated some fresh insights and thoughts. For example, an entire field of design called biomimicry has emerged. The idea is that observing natural processes and organisms can help us solve some of our own conundrums—and likely hurt the planet less. For example, an architect in Harare, Zimbabwe, studied termite dens because their structure maintains a fairly constant temperature. He applied what he learned to the design of a 300,000 square foot building that uses 90% less energy to heat and cool than a traditional building (“8 Amazing Examples of Biomimicry” treehugger.com, accessed Aug 5 2023). Promising building designs emerged, all because he was willing to learn from termites.
And in at least one of the worships over sabbatical, those gathered reflected on the principle of reciprocity that Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in Braiding Sweetgrass. This “new” but ancient indigenous knowledge about how natural processes function has found a huge audience among white settler culture. It remains to be seen whether we are open to developing any wisdom from that knowledge.
Likewise, some environmental scientists have begun to study refugia with an eye toward seeing what can be learned that could help us navigate our environmental crisis. And, perhaps, other crises. As a biological term, refugia refers to naturally occurring areas in which organisms can survive through a crisis or major disruption. Biodiversity retreats to refugia, persists there, and might eventually expand again (Rienstra, 56). An English professor from Calvin University, Debra Rienstra, has lately taken the idea of refugia, expanded it into the realm of Christian practice, and applied it in her own life and immediate habitat. The bulletin includes some of the questions she raises: “How can people of faith become people of refugia? How can we find and create refugia not only in the biomes of the earth, but simultaneously in our human cultural systems and in our spirits?” (4)
Although Rienstra’s focus is on the environmental crisis, she suggests that the notion of refugia provides a rich metaphor for many aspects of Christian discipleship. The questions she asks might enrich our own growth toward wisdom. And she certainly shares this congregation’s desire to “understand righteousness and justice and equity, and every good path” (2: 9). So for worships throughout this month, I will be drawing from Rienstra and some other writers to lift up some necessary conditions for creating refugia. I dare to hope that this exploration will hold some knowledge and generate some good questions among us. Perhaps we might even gain some wisdom.
And wonder and wondering are essential to any movement toward wisdom. May we be willing to pause in amazement at the world around us. To stop and let ourselves be awed, then grateful. And may we grope together toward wondering what questions we can ask to move us toward new insights, new connections, paths of wisdom we have not yet explored.
-Rev. Ruth Moerdyk
Scripture: Psalm 65:5-8; Proverbs 2:1-10