A Sense of Wonder

This is just a snatch from my dream last night – not the whole thing. I am not sure that I remember much of the whole thing but this one scene caught my interest.

It was one of those rare dreams in the third person. It was like watching a movie rather than being personally involved – although if you are anything like me, you do get involved in movies!

The scene was a furniture shop. Around the walls there were cupboards – the kind that you would build into the walls of the home. One of them was made to look like something you would find in a Victorian home, perhaps in a sewing room. There were lots of drawers of various sizes. In some of the drawers, for display purposes, there were rolls of material for making dresses, and there were smaller drawers with ribbons in, and buttons of various kinds. One drawer contained a pair of scissors on a pile of lace.

The shop assistant called over a young girl and showed her the drawer with the scissors in it and told her it was a magic drawer. Things put in this drawer would sometimes disappear. To demonstrate what he meant, he opened the drawer to show the girl the scissors, and then shut it. Maybe he tapped lightly on the drawer, or blew on it like magicians do. When he opened the drawer, the lace was still there but the scissors had gone. The little girl looked really wide eyed.

The main character in my dream was a very pushy woman. She marched over to the cupboard and told the assistant not to be so silly. It wasn’t a magic drawer and there was a very simple explanation. She opened the drawer to reveal the scissors, and then pushed her finger down the side of the drawer. There was a small hook, or button, and a small eye on the side of the drawer. She hooked the eye on the button, closed the drawer, and when she opened the drawer, the scissors had disappeared. It wasn’t magic, just a clever devise to hide the drawer.

Suddenly, the woman’s face changed and she burst into tears. She was distraught – not about finding that the drawer worked by a clever devise, but on realising how determined she had been to find the devise. She had dismissed outright the idea that it could be magic and sought straight away to find the “truth”. She realised that she had lost her sense of wonder. Everything, it seemed, could and should be explained away.

I woke up with tears on my face! How sad that there are some people – not even grown ups – that need to have everything explained. There is no sense of the miraculous. What they can’t see doesn’t exist. I sometimes wonder if my own sense of wonder is being eroded away by the science and reason of the world I inhabit. Then I spend time in worship before God, and it is restored!

Many years ago, when I was attending a creative writing course at college, one of the assignments was to re-write the lyrics to “Raindrops on Roses”….”My Favourite Things” from “The Sound of Music” I thought I would do the opposite – and write about the things that I really didn’t ‘like. Here is one of the verses that came to mind this morning.

Science unlocking the secrets around me
Mysteries solved nothing left to astound me
Looking at stars and not being impressed
These are some things that I really detest.