I wonder, have you ever wondered about anything? And I don’t just mean in the way I have used (or, perhaps, misused) the word—that is, as a mere statement of something I don’t know, like I wonder what her name is, or I wonder how much longer Mr. Gibson is going to keep talking. That’s not really wonder; it’s just ignorance, which is simply something you don’t yet have the answer to.
But the word wonder actually comes from the Old English wundor, which means a “strange or marvelous thing . . . [an] object of astonishment.”1 So, it is a kind of not knowing…but it is the kind that is amazed, that marvels, that is awestruck by the mystery of a thing. You might say it is the state of being just a little bit thrilled with not knowing.
In the Old Testament story of Job, Elihu tells his suffering friend to “stop and consider the wondrous works of God.”
A bit odd, isn’t it? He’s telling Job to think deeply about the stuff that cannot be comprehended, to ponder the imponderable, to contemplate the unfathomable. And he tells him that in order to do so he needs to . . . stop. Have you ever done that? Have you just lingered for a moment and wondered about things: How a tree actually bears fruit? Why gravity works? What makes the sun shine? How language ever came to be? Why civilizations collapse? Where your sense of right and wrong came from?
Whittaker Chambers famously came to believe in God, because one morning at the breakfast table, his “eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of [his daughter’s] ear—those intricate, perfect ears,”2 and he knew that all the scientific knowledge in the world couldn’t explain it.
A lot of people think that you go to school so that you can learn all the right answers. And it is important that you do acquire true knowledge. But let me be clear about something before you head to class: A bunch of knowledge in your head isn’t worth much if you don’t also have a sense of wonder in your heart, if nothing you learn astonishes you, if none of it seems strange or marvelous to you.
What if I told you that we don’t learn so that we can explain everything—we learn so that we can wonder even more at the things we can’t explain? Now, stop and consider that for a moment.
And have a wonderful first day of school.