Keep Your Eye On Wonder

Then, after teaching them how to pray, he encouraged them by saying: look keep your eyes wide open. Your eyes are like a tunnel into your body. If your eyes are open to all the wonder and beauty and amazement in the world, your whole body fills with light and wonder and beauty and amazement. If instead you squint and see nothing but greed and power and cynicism, your whole body will be full of greed and power and cynicism. What a difficult life that would be. Better I say to keep your eyes healthy, which is to say open to the beauty all around. In this way, your whole life be full of amazement and wonder and beauty.

— In the book of Matthew, Jesus, the radical rabbi, teaches folks how to pray in chapter 6. A famous prayer, the Our Father or the Lord’s Prayer. 10, 15 verses later, he drops this incredible teaching about the importance of being on the look out for wonder and amazement.

— -How much this sounds like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

Keep your eyes open friends. Amazement and beauty and wonder await.

image by Kamila Maciejewska