Reading Our Worship, Reading Our Lives: Where Is the Wonder?

In this paper, I explore what it means for us to “read” our worship and to “read” our lives in terms of locating “wonder” (drawing on Sophia Vasalou), that is, those places where God manifests himself to us through worship and life experience. We may read our worship through various means: texts (following philosopher and liturgical theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff), actions (following phenomenologist Christina Gschwandtner), or emotion-filled experiences (following evangelical liturgical theologian Melanie Ross). Ideally we do it through all of them, but read it we must if we are to discover where the wonder is located and thus where the Spirit of God is evident. We must also read our lives for wonder and the signs of God’s presence and movement. This is done especially through spiritual autobiography, whether by telling of a single encounter in a public testimony, offering an oral overview in a small group gathering, or through journal entries or writing a full spiritual autobiography. Places that have marked our worship and life existence in moments of wonder also reveal where we may have encountered the Numinous (drawing on Rudolf Otto’s classic study, with reference to Dale Allison and John O’Donohue). Locating wonder in these two distinctive areas works to bring testimonies of our lived experience into the context of worship and testimonies of our worship into our everyday lives. This implies that our contexts of worship must be opened up to include such testimony (drawing on Alan Kreider and Eleanor Kreider) and that, simultaneously, our lives merit and even demand our focused reflection in order to discern where wonder, and therefore, the presence of God, is evident (drawing on Henri Nouwen, Parker Palmer, and others). The heart—and wonder—of worship and of meaningful existence is where the essence of God is known through Jesus and the work of the Spirit, but it often takes our focused reflection to discern this.