Wonder of wonders

I don’t know how many times in the last week, when asked how I am doing, I replied, “Wonderful!”

And I’ve lied. Not because I’m unhappy, necessarily, but because being “wonderful” implies that I am full of wonder, and so often I’m not.

Buy my cousin “Katie” is.

Because of issues at birth, Katie acts much younger than her 25 years, but she’s got a far better grip on wonder than I do.

When I ask, “What is your favorite color, Katie?” she nearly bursts with excitement, as you might expect a person who lives in a purple-less world suddenly discovering another color in the rainbow. “Purple!” she cries, an ear-to-ear grin splitting her face as she bends in half, her feet pounding the floor and hands clapping wildly. PURPLE!!!!!!! Purple, purple, purple! Katie is more excited about purple than I have ever been about anything. Ever. And not only purple, but also her mommy! And her daddy! And her favorite book, Miss Hunnicutt’s Hat! A single mention of any of these and she’s off clapping her hands and stamping her feet in abject joy.

Katie proves what Emily Dickinson wrote, that wonder “… is not precisely knowing, and not precisely knowing not, a beautiful but bleak condition he has not lived who has not felt.” Sitting with Katie all afternoon, holding her pale hand, her face a mere six inches from mine, expectant gray eyes blinking up at me, I wonder at my lack of wondering. Despite my attempts to be fully alive and awake, am I less like Katie and more like the person who, as G.K. Chesterton said, is “perishing not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder?”

Anne Lamott said it well in a talk she gave in Wichita last week: “You don’t ever go out and look up at the stars and the moon and say, Oh, that’s a medium sky, I mean, it’s … OK. You say, WOW!”

When was the last time any of us said, “Wow!” as we looked up? Would the wise men who found Jesus have done so if they hadn’t said, “Wow!” as they looked up?

As we head into the Christmas season, the usual activities will threaten to distract us from wonder as they always do. Will we work ourselves into a frenzy and slide into Christmas morning tattered and irritable and done with all this wonderment business, or will we find time to be still and on the prowl for moments of wonder? Will we notice our kids’ faces or only our growing credit card statements? Will we even be aware of the many small graces surrounding us, or will we grump and slog through the season as crotchety as Scrooge?

I can’t imagine Katie will be sidetracked by any of that. I can only imagine her on Christmas morning, eyes alight, a grin on her face as big as the sky, hands clapping and feet stomping at the pinnacle of wonder, the indescribable Wonder of it all.