Copyright 2014 Dr. Jennifer Thomson
Non-commercial use encouraged with credit to author and source.
SERMON: "Wonder"
Unitarian Universalist Sunday Service
Linden Ridge Assisted Living Center
Mukwonago, Wisconsin
August 24, 2014
Today’s reading comes from a poem by
English Romantic poet John Keats:
There was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he,
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see-
There he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That
a cherry
Was
as red,
That
lead
Was
as weighty,
That
fourscore
Was
as eighty,
That
a door
Was
as wooden
As
in England--
So
he stood in his shoes
And
he wonder'd,
He
wonder'd,
He
stood in his
Shoes
and he wonder'd.
I know this excerpt from a book that my
mom gave my kids when they were little, a children’s collection of silly
poetry. At the time, I was studying for a PhD in English, so I was delighted to
find a Keats poem among the silly verses. The editors of the silly poetry
book—I think the title was actually A
Book of Silly Poetry—titled this excerpt of the Keats poem “The Naughty
Boy.” Until I googled it while researching this sermon, I didn’t know that the
poem was four times longer than the section from the kids’ book. And I found
out that Keats wrote the verse (he said he “scribbled” it) for his sister; his
title for it is: “A Song about Myself.”
The poem—or, as I have learned, the
excerpt from it—remains in my mind for two reasons: first, I was teaching a
first year English course where I asked students to memorize and recite about
25 lines of poetry from their literature anthology. My kids were about 5 &
7 years old at the time and occasionally came to work with me, so I asked if
they wanted to demonstrate poetry recitation for my classes. They loved the
idea of doing an assignment I gave to college students. Rebecca was less
enthusiastic about performing in front of them (or perhaps just a bit shy), but
Ellen loved everything about it. They chose poems from the silly poetry book
and Ellen chose “The Naughty Boy.” She liked the idea of celebrating
naughtiness, I think. And she recited the poem for me just this past week when
I said I was using it in my sermon.
The second reason the poem has stayed
with me for almost 20 years is the dissonance between the words “naughty” and
“wonder’d” for me. I like the idea of an ode to a naughty boy, too. But the
final lines of the poem, after the boy recounts his realization about running
away: everything he knew of how the world worked at home was no different
despite his adventure to what he had expected to be a strange new land. So he
stood in his shoes and he wondered, he wondered. He stood in his shoes and he wondered.
The earlier sing-song rhythm and rhymes
spur readers to romp quickly through the verse—until those final lines rein us
in. We must slow down, first because Keats ends the long list of mundane
observances recounted in a sing-song rhythm & rhyme pattern. In its place,
we find ourselves stopped in our tracks by a new thought expressed without
rhyme and in a rhythm that makes us slow down and stand in our shoes along with
the naughty boy. Keats transforms a silly list of ordinary observations into the
extraordinary so that the mundane accoutrements of everyday existence become an
occasion for wonder.
That word “wonder” is one of the oldest
words in the English language. It’s basically the same word now as it was
before English even existed over a thousand years ago, borrowed from
Proto-Germanic when the Saxons crossed the English Channel and their language
merged with that of the native Angles to form the Anglo-Saxon foundations of our
language—and of several other Northern European languages.
Clearly, I love this stuff—words and
their histories and the way we use them. I love it because our language tells
us something about who we are. In this case, we are people who have always been
moved by the world around us. The ancient origins of the word “wonder” and the
fact that the word and its meaning have hardly changed in over a thousand years
tell us that wonder is and has been central to our perception of life and our
world.
When we met last month, each of you
recalled a specific moment when you experienced beauty. From the starry night
sky to a tree in your back yard, you described how your encounters with beauty
made you feel peaceful. You experienced wonder at the grandeur of the Milky Way
and at the everyday loveliness of the familiar oak.
That’s one meaning of wonder: the sense
of awe, of astonishment, of marvel. The first time I saw the Grand Canyon, we
had driven up from Phoenix the night before and arrived after dark. The next
morning, I opened the cabin door to . .
. there are no words for what I experienced. The sheer size, the colors—reds,
tans browns—delineated by a dusting of snow; the visual evidence of Earth’s
age—and the tiny river a mile down that couldn’t possibly have carved out so
much rock, yet it did. Oh, wait, there is a word for that experience: wonder.
And it did make me stop in my tracks. I
stood there in my shoes and I wondered. I wondered.
This sense of awe coupled with surprise,
marvelous in itself, is only one aspect of wonder. The surprise and amazement
urges our human minds to speculate, feeds our human curiosity. When we
experience the wonder of the night sky, we wonder how it came to be. The
foundations of religion are built on our curiosity about wonders that we cannot
explain, wonders such as the miracle of life and the mystery of death. We
gather here in community to stand in our shoes—or sit in our chairs—and wonder
about our lives, our experiences, how we came to exist, what will happen when
we die—and what it all means.
The Grand Canyon, the Cosmos, the
beauty of a backyard oak tree—it’s easy to imagine how such sights lead to
curiosity about the world, our lives and what it might mean. The boy in the
poem notices mundane things such as a cherry, wooden doors and even the ground
beneath him. What’s remarkable is that these everyday things lead him to
wonder. Maybe he wonders how a new place can be so familiar; maybe he wonders
what this familiarity means; maybe he wonders whether he’s running away not
from a place, but from something else . . . those are some of the meanings I
think of when I get to the end of that poem.
We want to know the truth about our
lives, about life itself and the universe around us. And people have been
coming up with explanations about those mysteries throughout recorded
history—and probably before. In Europe during the Middle Ages, everyone knew
for certain that the Earth was the center of the universe and the sun and all
the heavens revolved around us. Everyone knew that for certain—until some
people like Copernicus and Galileo started to doubt that knowledge.
Doubt presents a sometimes
uncomfortable aspect of wonder. The minute Copernicus said to himself, “I
wonder if the Earth really is the center of the universe,” he positioned
himself in opposition to both religious orthodoxy and civil authority. As
commonly used, a heretic is one who denies accepted truths, especially those
associated with a particular religion. The origin of the word illuminates a
relationship between heresy and wonder: our English word heretic is based on
the Greek word meaning “to choose.” Religious heretics of the Middle Ages, such
as Copernicus, looked to the skies with wonder and chose to doubt orthodox
beliefs. For centuries, the Inquisition of the Catholic Church existed to
discover such heretics and convince them to recant or burn them at the stake. Doubters
by definition position themselves outside of their communities. Doubt is
dangerous.
It’s also the impetus for scientific
study and the path to greater knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the
universe. In Unitarian Universalism, our quest for meaning often rests on
doubt. In today’s prayer, UU minister Rev. Robert T. Westin encourages:
“Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the attendant of truth, . . . the key to the door of knowledge . . . the
servant of discovery” (SLT #650). Wonder, in the form of doubt, inspires two UU
principles. They are #3 and #4 printed on the back of your order of service.
UUs affirm and promote:
3rd Principle: Acceptance of
one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
4th Principle: A free and
responsible search for truth and meaning.
Unitarian Universalism invites and expects
us to wonder, in all senses of the word: to marvel, to be surprised, to
speculate and to doubt. One of my favorite UU hymns, called “We Laught, We
Cry,” includes the line: “We believe to question is an answer.” It is doubt
that leads to an ongoing free and responsible search for truth and meaning.
We are meaning making animals. We feel a
need to know things. But some things are unknowable, so we speculate. We make
our own meanings. Some things don’t make sense, so we doubt them. We make our
own meanings. Keats and his naughty boy remind me that even the most mundane
parts of our everyday lives can spark wonder and transform our understanding of
ourselves and our world. When you look at the world in wonder, you help create
the world you want to live in.
May you continue to experience wonder
that excites awe, admiration, curiosity—and doubt. May your wonder enrich and
fill your days and transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Sources:
British Dictionary definitions for
wonder. Dictionary.com
"heretic." Dictionary.com
Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 24 Aug. 2014. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/heretic>.
"wonder." Dictionary.com
Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 21 Aug. 2014. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wonder>.
"wonder." Online
Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 21 Aug. 2014.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wonder>. Web.
Comments