The Wonder that We Are

If anything unites our often bitterly divided world of today, it is love of technology. Alright, maybe not love, but at least wonder and trust and awe. And these at times almost bordering on worship. Now how's that for a modern religion to unite our most religiously combative globe - the worship of the brilliance and inventiveness of our own brains, and of the eventually still greater intelligence of the works of our hands?

But then I look at the unholy whirlwind of confusion our post-Cold War technophilia has made of our world and us. And the more I look, the more certain I am of One Thing concerning man and all his works. And strangely enough, this one thing I'm sure of has nothing whatever to do with some innate or incorrigible human depravity. As if the mere depravation of any thing God made could ever completely suppress - much less exhaust - that creature's meaning, its goodness, its wonder.

No, I'm not trying to play the Calvinist, or otherwise depreciate that strange, fascinating creature whom God self-admittedly made a little lower than the angels. It is simply that our vaunted "wonders" of technology don't begin to scratch the surface of who we humans are, and of what we can do. More inexhaustible, more wondrous even than the things we do is the place where they come from. I have no doubt that if we humans were one day able to plot mathematically every movement in the visible universe, and with such accuracy that every planet and star and floating object in it could be anchored to some new technology, and harnessed to some new productive purpose, it would be a dull thing compared with the knowing of ourselves.

Just think, for a moment, what it would be like to know the incalculable universe which has been planted in each one of us, with all its storied memories and even fragments of Eden (not to mention all its treasures from every other time and place). What would it be to know that, if not a superhuman - indeed a supernatural - feat? Should we be surprised then to find that none but our Maker was quite up to it? Only God can know the goodness - however marred and disfigured - of what He has made. Only Love - with that strange candle at His elbow which is our spirit at its most poor, lowly and receptive - has the power and wisdom to search each page of that endlessly absorbing book which is you or me. And only One (Revelation 5:5) has been found worthy to open it.