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I’m so glad to be here, to share a story about a little search I’ve been on since my last sermon. In some ways, this sermon is a continuation of the last one. In that one, I talked about destiny and discovering my great grandmother Ada Alden. I found Ada Alden’s life story written out and stashed inside my father’s desk, which I packed up after he died in 1998. I had lost my father and, at the same time, I had found my great grandmother. It was a beautiful surprise back then. Today I see it as a sustaining gift, a gift that inspired this search I am about to describe.
Before doing that, though, I’d like to show you a picture of Ada Alden. Here, Ada is sitting on the front step of my father’s childhood home, next to his dog Colonel. My great grandmother was born in Virginia just before the Civil War. Without one day spent in a schoolroom, Ada went on to become an award-winning poet. Her poems were made into books and regularly appeared in the big places, publications like Harper’s and The New York Times.
Before I knew Ada as I do now, I loved the way she looked in this picture. She’s about seventy-five, and yet if you look at her eyes and her smile, she seems young, sharp, humored by life and its possibilities. Seeing this image, I saw exactly how I want to be when I get old, or I should say, older.
The book I found is a typed up oral history which my grandmother, Ada’s daughter, recorded when Ada was 78. It’s 340 pages long. The subject of my search appeared on page 41.
Many people touch nothing more than the foam of life and even its iridescence evades them. The sufferings of humanity have lain heavily upon me my whole life and while the miracle of science may in time overcome almost any physical lack, what miracle can help the crippled spirit? I have worshipped the intellect. And yet we have within us if we care to find it, something that far transcends the workings of the loftiest brain. My creed is wonder.
My creed is wonder. That four-word sentence caught my attention. Raised as an Episcopalian, one of the heaviest Sunday prayers was the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed is a proclamation of Christian faith; a creed is serious stuff. But, wonder, what was wonder? And why at the conclusion of such a philosophical paragraph would Ada end with wonder? Why was that her creed?
That’s where the search began, wondering about wonder. Was it a verb, a noun, a mystical state, a state of innocence, an inclination or a stirring in the soul? Was it found in nature, people, creation?
At first I equated wonder with curiosity. I wonder what they’ll name the baby. I wonder where Singapore is. I wonder why my CD is skipping.
As a former journalist, it wasn’t too surprising that my mind took off in this direction. Journalists never stop asking questions. Their job, in a way, is to be professional wonderers.
With Ada as my guide, and thinking of wonder as a noun synonymous with exploration, I got up my nerve and decided, finally, to knock on the door at a house in Winston-Salem that had me wondering for years. In the backyard of this house located in Hanestown, right beside the Hanes Factory, were dozens and dozens of chickens and enough roosters to keep things going. The sprawling homemade coops looked like a crazy quilt spread across the uneven yard.
I rang the bell, tape recorder and camera in hand, and finally met the “chicken people,” JD and Lucy Hamilton. Here’s a photograph of J.D. Hamilton and his chicken. I learned a lot about the Hamiltons, and about the beauty of chickens. It’s a good thing I acted on my wonder because the Hamiltons died about a year after I met them, within three weeks of each other. Lucy and J.D. were married nearly 65 years and kept chickens the entire time. They had a loyal kind of love. I titled this photograph, LOVE BIRDS.
In addition to documenting the Hamiltons, I began reading about wonder. Rachel Carson, our nation’s first environmentalist, wrote a book called The Sense of Wonder. It’s a beautiful book about nurturing in children a lifelong sense of wonder and awe.
“If I had the influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children,” she wrote, “I should ask that her gift to each child be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years...”
The Sense of Wonder. It was clearly more – much more - than being inquisitive. The English author D. H. Lawrence called wonder the sixth sense. Carson raised the question: what is wonder’s opposite? Boredom. Cynicism. Determined stability. Censoring. Memory, even.
I now had a name for my search: The Wonder Project. Still, I felt a little shy about it. My kids teased me Wonder schmunder. And, really, some days – gosh, some months - I would feel so blue or busy or discouraged by the political world that I couldn’t feel a wondrous bone in my body. It seemed futile, even stupid. Wonder? Why bother. I definitely wasn’t wonder woman.
As one writer put it, “Man traded away wonder for reason.” The project was silly; I was silly. But, you know, I never felt that Ada was silly. She was seriously sensational. Wonder was her creed.
I told a friend who is Catholic about my project. She insisted I meet Sister Dennis Eileen, an 87 year old nun who works with HIV positive patients and patients at Baptist hospital. Sounded interesting. The Wonder Project seemed, once again, ripe with potential. Sister Dennis came to lunch. I took her portrait.
“We use the word wonderful a lot,” she said. “We use it quickly. I had a wonderful night. Oh this is wonderful. But there is beauty in wonder. It’s something intangible. God is wonderful. God is good and gracious.”
These comments echoed those of Margo Jefferson, a writer for the New York Times. She wrote that wonder is a word seldom used today. “But to feel wonder,” she wrote, “is to be overwhelmed by things beyond our experience and almost beyond our understanding.” In our rapid fire, 24-hour America, it’s hard to imagine anything good coming out of anything beyond our understanding, beyond our experience. Aside from “wonderful,” our vernacular includes wonder only in the negative: No wonder, Small Wonder, Is it any wonder? Perhaps that is a syndrome of our jaded era. Maybe it isn’t a coincidence.
Sister Dennis doesn’t believe in coincidence; there are, she says, no accidents. She told stories about her patients, including a teenage boy who was dying. His family begged Sister Dennis to stay with him. Every time she prayed, the boy’s vital signs improved. There was an older woman in a lot of pain, close to death. Sister Dennis whispered, “Jesus is waiting for you” and the woman died.
What seemed most striking, though, was when Sister Dennis openly wondered about her own death. “Will I see my friends up there?” she asked. “Are we all sitting around? Do you have to be reintroduced? What is the glorified body?”
Her questions seemed so pure and childlike. Children ask questions like what does God look like? Where do we go? How do trees grow tall, spiders eat food, what is oil? Answers become complicated, so we stop asking, we think we should know, we close the shade on wonder. But here was an 87 year old nun, a religious person her entire life, saying things like, “It’s hard to think of heaven as a place, because it isn’t a place. It doesn’t have walls and windows.”
About this time I discovered a photographer, a Texan named Keith Carter. He captures the drama of the land and plays with focus and depth of field in artful, surprising ways. He’s also hooked on wonder. “I believe in wonder,” he said. “I look for it in my life every day; I find it in the most ordinary things.”
Inspired, I began looking. My appreciation for life grew. I felt the midst of wonder during my most basic experiences: cooking, reading in bed at night, looking out the office window, working in the darkroom. I can’t say whether I was stepping just a little outside the moment to see it and appreciate it, or whether I was stepping more deeply into it. Either way, when I feel wonder, the air seems sweeter, something buoyant enters in, and there is a keen awareness of the moment itself.
I mentioned the project to our very own Jan Detter. She squeezed my arm, “Oh my goodness, you just have to meet Dempsy Calhoun.” This was before he and Susie slipped into the Parkway fold.
I drove to Mocksville to make pictures and find out more. I entered Dempsy’s studio full of metal and bones, feathers and lots and lots of rocks. “How you doing Wonder Woman?” he asked. I smiled. We sat down and began talking.
Dempsy, as many of you know from his sermon, is deeply connected to wonder. He sees wonder as related to awe and amazement. To quote him directly, “It’s there all around you. In you and outside. It’s that and not that. It’s hard to quantify. I can take off on any tangent and find wonder. It’s there all around you.” More than anything else, though, he said, wonder is in people.
This idea of wonder in people resonated. Since searching for wonder, I am much more easily overcome by the feeling of awe in the presence of people. In the classroom, for example, I am struck by my privilege to be with students, to help them locate their creative potential. In these photographs, I see students brimming with wonder. Who are they? How would they describe the world, what matters to them, how will their life unfold? Our lives together intersect for a slice of time and I am so grateful for that meeting. We take a trip together that’s exciting and full of discovery.
With my husband and children, I am in awe that we are a family, that somehow we are joined together by time and biology, history and love, accidents and good luck. It seems amazing. It sounds simple, obvious, even...here’s that word again...silly. But when a child is born, don’t you wonder who they are, who they will become, how this miracle came about? Since working with wonder, I’m able to return to this state of awe more often.
If nothing else, wonder is a great tool to fight complacency, to resist taking anything, anyone, for granted. But, tool is probably too hard-nosed a term for something that centers you on being alive, on life itself, on what one writer calls “primitive consciousness.”
The final story of wonder I’ll share today involves my friend, the composer, Ken Frazelle. Making music, thinking in notes, writing with your ear, has always seemed intriguing. Music is moving metaphor and it can pull me in such surprising ways, ways that make me wonder how it happens.
According to Ken, “Wonder is like one of those states of being that are out of your control, like grace or forgiveness.” In his music, wonder enters in after a lot of hard work. He sees wonder as related to pursuit; after making one-hundred sketches of a few notes or rhythms, a shape appears, asking to be pursued.
“You’ve got to be ready to make a mess if you’re going to experience wonder,” he says.
And, like Dempsy, Ken feels wonder most profoundly with people. Ken’s friends, and his partner, enable him to feel wondrous and full. I realized while working on this sermon, Ken needs to be photographed with his friends, not just playing the piano surrounded by his composition notebooks. I will go back and make more photographs.
This project on wonder is evolving and will, perhaps, never end. Aristotle said all knowing begins in wonder. I know a lot more about wonder than I did the first time I read my great grandmother’s life story and came across her creed.
There is a lot more to know. I look forward to meeting and photographing more and more people along the way. Gardners and preschool teachers, students and retirees, biologists and mothers. Wonder is like a red mini-van, once you buy one, you notice all the other red mini-vans on the road.
I have a lot of questions. Is there wonder in sadness, in crime, in illness, in death? Is wonder satisfied? Is wonder the place where we feel God and connect with the holy, with something elemental and larger than ourselves? Is wonder, as Ada said, within us? I don’t know these answers, but I am ready to say yes, yes to wonder. Will I become like my great grandmother and proclaim wonder as my creed? I don’t know, but I do wonder.
Rachel Carson said that by getting involved with wonder, you can gain magical release for your thoughts. This certainly has been my experience working on my project, and for that I thank my father and my great grandmother, and, most of all I thank God, the creator of all that is wonderful, meaning full with wonder, even chickens.
ABSOLUTION
When the wonder so long hid
Comes forth at a mighty will,
Shall the shreds of its chrysalis
Cling to the spirit still?
Ada Alden |
