wonder

 

I read recently about pioneering plastic surgery, a soldier who returned from the First World War with a badly burned face and a surgeon who grafted skin from his back onto his face instead. And it reminded me of Jesus taking living (that is, flowing, stream-fed) water from a mikveh and changing it into wine (John 2.1-11).

It reminded me of the journey from childlike faith to adult faith to rediscovered childlike faith.

It is often assumed, at least when it comes to faith development, that children see the world unquestionably, in simplistic black and white terms. That they simply receive the worldview of their parents, whatever that might happen to be. But in my experience of engaging with school children, of many different family backgrounds, they both ask brilliant questions and offer amazing insights.

It is as we get older that we begin to lose our sense of wonder (long before, in the normal course of things, we begin to lose our sense of hearing or sight or fingertip touch) our innate awareness that our body is intimately connected to all things, from the trees in the forest to the stars in the sky. And as we lose our sense of wonder, even as we continue to be concerned for the well-being of our bodies, we stop asking such brilliant questions, pushed out by a sense of loss of innocence.

This does not mean that we necessarily abandon faith. It may mean that our faith calcifies into hard dogmatic certainty, or empty ritualism, in place of participation in mystery.

And this may, in fact, be a necessary stage, of loss and perhaps growing awareness of what we have lost. For the truly wise among us are those who have wrestled with their discontent and found their way back to a childlike faith, to living with beautiful questions (more than answers) and (the gift of) profound insights.

Jesus takes the living water of water-purification rituals, of the moments we are invited to pause and discover once again that we have a body, that we are embodied creatures in the world, and he turns a certain amount of it into wine. The wine will be consumed, and the stone jars, unchanged by their content, will return to holding living water, will return to providing those moments for pausing and coming back to ourselves as holy, as having a particular purpose to bless the world. But for now, he takes some of this water and turns it into the wine of celebration.

Why? Because we can know that we are embodied, we can even know that our body is holy and yet run out of joy. Our awareness of loss can rob us of our ability to experience joy and express that joy in community.

Just as the surgeon took skin from the back of the body and grafted it onto the face, so Jesus took living water and turned it into wine.

And just as the raw skin on the back would heal, so the living water would continue to flow, but now the water-purification rituals are infused with a memory of celebration. A way back to childlike wonder and childlike faith.

We lose our sense of wonder, and I am not sure we can regain it in any way other than sheer gift, because it was always gift and never something we manufacture for ourselves.

This is the difference Jesus makes. But, like Mary, we must first notice that the wine has run out, and that he, alone, knows what is needed.