The Wonder of Christmas
GK Chesterton, the best 20th Century writer nobody’s ever heard of, was fond of making pithy statements that packed a sermon into single sentence. For instance, this one:
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
It’s a lovely time of year to think about thanks and gratitude, of course. The Thanksgiving holiday just past is an opportunity to count our blessings and thank the Lord for everything we enjoy, especially the bounty of the Earth that feeds, shelters, and clothes us. And at Christmas, we should specifically give thanks for the greatest gift ever given: the Savior of the World.
But the Christmas season is also a great time to think about happiness and wonder—particularly wonder. In the time we’ll spend together today, I’d like to share some thoughts about wonder.
Wonder as curiosity
As we most often use the word these days, “wonder” is close kin to curiosity. Children are full of this kind of wonder, as in:
- I wonder what will happen if I put this Rescue Robot action figure in the toilet and flush! (Answer: God covenanted with Noah that He would never again flood the entire Earth, but that promise clearly doesn’t extend to individual suburban bathrooms.)
- I wonder if sister’s teddy bear is flammable. (Answer: Yes; yes it is. Cuddliest. Torch. Ever.)
Youth also experience curiosity-flavored wonder:
- I wonder if he likes me. (Answer: Probably not, dear. And that’s totally OK, even though I know you don’t think so right now. Someday, you’ll look back on this and… um… ok. I.. gosh. Here’s a hankie.)
- I wonder how I’ll do on this math test. (Answer: if you have to ask…)
And to be fair, adults “wonder” this way, too. For instance:
- I wonder where the weekend has gone. (Answer: You spent it mopping the bathroom floor with the charred remains of a teddy bear, remember?)
- I wonder why years feel as long to me now as months felt when I was a kid. (Answer: Ooh! I’d love to talk about this one. The short version is: because math—specifically, ratios. The long version will have to wait for another day.)
Wonder in the scriptural sense
But Chesterton had another sort of “wonder” in mind when he described it as a magical thing that doubles happiness and transforms it into gratitude. He had in mind the variety of “wonder” we find in the scriptures and the hymns, the sort that the dictionary defines in its noun form—with a surprisingly un-dictionary-like poetic flair—as “a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable,” and in its verb form as “to feel admiration and amazement; to marvel.”
A hymn we often sing expresses this kind of wonder better than any other I know:
O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds thy hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed
Then sings my soul, my Savior, God, to thee:
“How great thou art; how great thou art.”
When I sing this hymn, I’m reminded of Moses’ account of his interview with the Lord atop an “exceedingly high mountain.” He describes the Lord saying to him:
6 ...I have a work for thee, Moses, my son; and thou art in the similitude of mine Only Begotten; and mine Only Begotten is and shall be the Savior, for he is full of grace and truth; but there is no God beside me, and all things are present with me, for I know them all.
7 And now, behold, this one thing I show unto thee, Moses, my son, for thou art in the world, and now I show it unto thee.
8 And it came to pass that Moses looked, and beheld the world upon which he was created; and Moses beheld the world and the ends thereof, and all the children of men which are, and which were created; of the same he greatly marveled and wondered.
9 And the presence of God withdrew from Moses, that his glory was not upon Moses; and Moses was left unto himself. And as he was left unto himself, he fell unto the earth.
10 And it came to pass that it was for the space of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength like unto man; and he said unto himself: Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.
11 But now mine own eyes have beheld God; but not my natural, but my spiritual eyes, for my natural eyes could not have beheld; for I should have withered and died in his presence; but his glory was upon me; and I beheld his face, for I was transfigured before him.
Note that Moses saw only one of the worlds God has created—“the world upon which he was created… and the ends thereof”—on this occasion, and even that experience left wrung out like a dishrag. This was “wonder” indeed.
A wonderful world, but light on the wonder
When we look around us today, we don’t see much wonder. Our world is pretty astonishingly jaded. We’ve lost much of our innocent amazement at—well—everything, from man’s accomplishments to what God has made and given us and done for us.
On the works-of-man side of the equation, consider technology as a handy example. I have in my pocket a thing a little bigger than a deck of cards. But it can do a few more tricks than your average deck of cards. For instance:
- It packs several times the computing power of the massive roomfuls of mainframes that powered NASA’s moon missions.
- It contains a camera that can nearly replace a professional photographer’s studio—equipment that would have cost thousands of dollars by itself just 20 years ago. (Hey: I said “nearly.” Back off, you D-SLR purists.)
- I can use it to instantly access street- and even building-level maps of almost any place on Earth. And if I trouble myself to push a button, it will read me step-by-step directions—in real time and considering current traffic conditions—that can lead me from wherever I am to wherever I’d like to be in the shortest possible amount of time.
- I’ve stashed hundreds of books on it, and if I think of any book or a magazine ever printed that I’d like to read and for some reason I haven’t got it in local memory right now, it can pull a copy out of thin air in seconds.
- I can watch television—both whatever’s on right now and… well… practically any other piece of video ever made by anyone anywhere.
- If I wanted to turn the tables, I could become a television show myself, broadcasting live video of myself in high definition. I know: hideous though. Now, I’d have to come up with something interesting to say or do first. (But maybe I’m missing the point of social media when I think about that as a prerequisite.)
- I can communicate with almost anyone on the planet almost instantly, in seven or eight different ways—sending messages long and short, posting images or video clips, liking, friending, +1ing, or pinning, to name a few options..
- Oh, and I can use this thing to make telephone calls, too, if I’m feeling old-fashioned.
This is an astonishing, staggering, mind-bending device. It is, in every sense of the word, a wonderful object. And yet, I take it profoundly for granted. I expect it to do all of these things flawlessly and immediately, and I get a little grumpy when I discover some little task it can’t do easily or at all. (It doesn’t shovel my driveway, for instance, and I’d gladly trade the broadcast-myself feature for that. Where do I sign?) And perhaps most ridiculous, I’m quite sure I spend more time thinking about what the next version might be able to do for me than about what this one already does.
Spiritual apathy in a world of wonder
Now, my sense of technological entitlement—my pretty shocking lack of wonder at this man-made marvel—is a temporal thing, and it’s tempting to think it doesn’t matter very much. But it’s a handy analogy, because there is a spiritual parallel. Bishop Gerald Causse described it in his talk at the April 2015 General Conference. He said:
There are so many wonders in this world. However, sometimes when we have them constantly before our eyes, we take them for granted. We look, but we don’t really see; we hear, but we don’t really listen.
Personally, I’d have a hard time denying this charge. Spiritual blindness and deafness—spiritual apathy, to put it another way—rests over much of our world like a thick blanket of toxic fog. It smothers perspective, muddles priorities, scrambles our spiritual sense of direction… and deftly robs us of wonder. But what is so important about wonder, anyway—at least the spiritual sort? Bishop Causse continues:
To marvel at the wonders of the gospel is a sign of faith. It is to recognize the hand of the Lord in our lives and in everything around us. Our amazement also produces spiritual strength. It gives us the energy to remain anchored in our faith and to engage ourselves in the work of salvation.
To extend our analogy, then, wonder is like spiritual sunlight, and we are like plants. Like the sun powers the process of photosynthesis in a plant, wonder helps us convert the spiritual nutrients within us to produce—in Bishop Causse’s words—spiritual strength and energy. It helps us grow, especially our roots, which help us remain anchored to our faith and—like trees on a hillside—to do a service to ourselves and those around us by holding onto the soil so that it does not wash away down the slope. We can liken this small service that we can perform to the work of salvation: we can help create and preserve an environment in which we and others can flourish and grow spiritually, but only if we are strong enough to hold our ground.
Bishop Causse continues:
But let us beware. Our ability to marvel is fragile. Over the long term, such things as casual commandment-keeping, apathy, or even weariness may set in and make us insensitive to even the most remarkable signs and miracles of the gospel.
Back to our analogy. The spiritual fog of apathy can settle over us, blocking the precious sunlight of wonder. And like a plant kept perpetually in the dark, we gradually become spiritually pale, sickly, and weak. Our roots shrivel, and we lose our grip on our faith and our ability to hold the soil of salvation around us.
Protecting our wonder
Bishop Causse offers some questions we should ask ourselves regularly to guard against the smothering effect of spiritual apathy. He asks:
My brothers and sisters, is the gospel still wonderful to you? Can you yet see, hear, feel, and marvel? Or have your spiritual sensors gone into standby mode?
He then offers three things we can do to protect and cultivate wonder in ourselves:
First, never tire of discovering of rediscovering the truths of the gospel. The writer Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”4 Do you remember the first time you read a verse of scripture and felt as if the Lord was speaking to you personally? Can you recall the first time you felt the sweet influence of the Holy Ghost come over you, perhaps before you even realized it was the Holy Ghost? Weren’t these sacred, special moments?
We should hunger and thirst every day after spiritual knowledge. This personal practice is founded on study, meditation, and prayer. Sometimes we might be tempted to think, “I don’t need to study the scriptures today; I’ve read them all before” or “I don’t need to go to church today; there’s nothing new there.”
But the gospel is a fountain of knowledge that never runs dry. There is always something new to learn and feel each Sunday, in every meeting, and in every verse of scripture. In faith we hold to the promise that if we “seek, … [we] shall find.”5
Bishop Causse continues:
Second, anchor your faith in the plain and simple truths of the gospel. Our amazement should be rooted in the core principles of our faith, in the purity of our covenants and ordinances, and in our most simple acts of worship.
A sister missionary told the story of three men she met during a district conference in Africa. They came from an isolated village far away in the bush where the Church had not yet been organized but where there were 15 faithful members and almost 20 investigators. For over two weeks these men had walked on foot, traveling more than 300 miles (480 km) over paths rendered muddy by the rainy season, so they could attend the conference and bring the tithes from the members of their group. They planned to stay for an entire week so they could enjoy the privilege of partaking of the sacrament the following Sunday and then hoped to set out on the return trip carrying boxes filled with copies of the Book of Mormon on their heads to give to the people of their village.
The missionary testified how touched she was by the sense of wonder these brethren displayed and by their wholehearted sacrifices to obtain things that for her had always been readily available.
She wondered: “If I got up one Sunday morning in Arizona and found that my car wasn’t working, would I walk to my church only a few blocks away from home? Or would I just stay home because it was too far or because it was raining?”6 These are good questions for all of us to consider.
Bishop Causse’s third suggestion follows:
Finally, I invite you to seek and cherish the companionship of the Holy Ghost. Most wonders of the gospel cannot be perceived by our natural senses. They are the things that the “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, … the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”7
When we have the Spirit with us, our spiritual senses are sharpened and our memory is kindled so we cannot forget the miracles and signs we have witnessed. That may be why, knowing Jesus was about to leave them, His Nephite disciples prayed fervently “for that which they most desired; and they desired that the Holy Ghost should be given unto them.”8
Although they had seen the Savior with their own eyes and had touched His wounds with their own hands, they knew that their testimonies might dwindle without being constantly renewed by the power of the Spirit of God. My brothers and sisters, never do anything to risk the loss of this precious and marvelous gift—the companionship of the Holy Ghost. Seek it through fervent prayer and righteous living.
That the Holy Ghost can sharpen our spiritual senses brings clarity and context to a scripture that can otherwise seem like “hard doctrine.” In 2 Nephi 9, Jacob (who wasn’t shy about dealing in hard doctrine) says:
And wo unto the deaf that will not hear; for they shall perish. Wo unto the blind that will not see; for they shall perish also.
The key is in the “will.” Spiritual blindness and deafness aren’t like physical disabilities, which the Lord allows to fall, like the rain, on the wicked and the righteous equally. Those who will, those who want to see and to hear spiritually badly enough to put in some effort, can be freed of spiritual blindness and deafness through the power of the Holy Ghost.
So, to summarize Bishop Causse’s three suggestions for protecting and cultivating the wonder within ourselves:
- Never tire of discovering and rediscovering the truths of the Gospel. Remember: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
- Anchor your faith in the plain and simple truths of the Gospel. There’s nothing wrong with exploring the mysteries of the Kingdom, but we must never, ever neglect our study of the foundational principles of the Gospel. They can be evergreen for us, a never-ending source of wonder, if we read and study them.
- Seek and cherish the companionship of the Holy Ghost. It is at once one of the greatest and one of the least-appreciated gifts of our Father in Heaven to us.
Conclusion
Let’s conclude by rediscovering one of the simple truths of the Gospel: the fact of the mortal birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. President Joseph Fielding Smith said:
There is no story quite as beautiful, or which can stir the soul of the humble quite to the depths, as this glorious story can of the birth of our Redeemer. No words that man may utter can embellish or improve or add to the eloquence of its humble simplicity. It never grows old no matter how often told, and the telling of it is by far too infrequent in the homes of men.
The story is told most clearly and simply in the book of Luke:
Luke 2:1-19
1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judæa, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
5 To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
6 And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
7 And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
12 And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.
15 And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
16 And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.
17 And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.
18 And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
19 But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
I know God lives. I know he sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to live and to die for us. I know that, through Christ’s atonement, we can return to live with Him and His Father with our families.
One of my favorite Christmas songs that isn’t a hymn runs:
I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus the Saviour did come for to die
For poor on'ry people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander out under the sky
That we, like Mary, may keep the Savior’s birth and ponder it in our hearts; and that in the coming year, we may each do at least as much wondering as wandering, is my prayer.
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Such good things to think about. Merry Christmas everyone!
