Wonders and Signs

“Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.” When was the last time you were awe-struck? How often do we see wonders and signs? We have been hearing Luke’s account in the book of Acts of the beginning of the community of Jesus’ disciples. We hear from Acts in Easter tide because the apostles so clearly proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus and showed its impact on the lives of Jesus’ followers. There was clearly something exciting and compelling about the work of Jesus’ earliest followers: they were emboldened by the Holy Spirit, they performed miracles, and they preached a message that left large numbers of people awe-struck and eager to join them.

Miracles, wonders, and signs seemed to have been common in the earliest church. St. Paul had a miraculous vision while travelling on the road to Damascus. As an evangelist of gentiles, Paul later rebuked the newbie Christians at Corinth for over-emphasizing ecstatic experiences of the Spirit. Many first and even second-century accounts of the Way, as devotion to Christ was called, depict miracles, visions, ecstatic speech, and other visible manifestations of the Holy Spirit. However, as the church became institutionalized, especially after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, visible experiences of the Spirit, “wonders and signs,” became much less frequent. Although mystics continued to have intense – and often visible – experiences of the presence of the Holy Spirit, awe at God’s wondrous presence virtually disappeared in most church communities. In mainline Protestant congregations today, including Episcopal parishes determined to do everything “decently and in order,” awe at God’s wonders and signs might even be suspect!

And yet awe is just what we should feel! God is all around us. In God “we live and move and have our being.” God’s wonders and signs are visible everywhere, if we would but open our eyes to see them. More important, contemporary scientific discoveries have given us new ways of experiencing God’s presence, new ways of looking for “wonders and signs” that ancient thinkers and religious leaders could not see. When we contemplate what those discoveries have shown us, truly the only reaction we could possibly have is awe.

I recently read a book entitled Radical Amazement by Catholic laywoman Judy Cannato. In a surprisingly accessible way, Cannato relates all that we now know about the cosmos to our faith as followers of Jesus the Christ. Consider, Cannato says, the vastness of the universe. Where the ancients could only see the sun and the planets revolving around the earth, we now know that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of millions of galaxies, most of which are larger than ours. The distances among all these galaxies are millions of light years. We also know that the beginning of the cosmos, an explosion of matter and energy now called the Big Bang, occurred more than thirteen billion years ago. Scientists also theorize that if the Big Bang had been one trillionth of a second shorter, matter and energy would have collapsed inward, while one trillionth of a second longer would have flung all the matter and energy irretrievably apart. We know that the cosmos is continuing to expand, and at an accelerating rate. Scientists have discovered black holes, dark matter, and dark energy, and theorize that 95% of the cosmos is invisible to us.

Just as astounding is what we now know of the origins of life. Scientists have begun to understand that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, that life arose from light, and that life became ever more complex through a process of self-development and evolution. Although we are intimately – in our very molecules and atoms – connected to every other form of life, even to the rocks and stars – we humans appear to be the most complex form of life. We are also the most self-conscious form of life, able to reflect on our relationship with our creator, in whose image we are made, and our connection with each other and the rest of creation. As followers of Jesus, God’s expression of Godself in human terms, we glimpse what human life might become in the completion of God’s plan. Although God reveals Godself in God’s creation, we acknowledge that ultimately God is incomprehensible mystery, the Holy One of whom we limited humans can say little or nothing.

Wonders and signs! When we contemplate all this, the cosmos, the earth, the miracle of complex human life, how can we not be awe-struck? How can we not resonate with Abraham Heschel’s reminder that awe is “a way of being in rapport with the mystery of all reality?” How can we not agree that, “Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”1 And when we understand our deep and intimate connection to all this immensity and vastness, how can we not be left utterly speechless?

Awe-struck by God’s wonders and signs, speechless at God’s creation, what do we do now? How do we live our lives when we contemplate our connection with all of God’s wondrous creation? Following Judy Cannato’s lead, we can begin by expanding our image of God.2 We can remember that God is both transcendent and immanent. God is more than all of creation. Yet God is intimately connected with creation and reveals something of Godself in all of it, from our DNA to the farthest star. We can embrace a God of incomprehensible mystery. Although we are made in God’s image, we can never assume that God is like us. We can never assume that we have God nailed down, God neatly confined in the box of our own intellect. In his last discourse in the gospel according to John, Jesus reminded his disciples that “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth….” We must always expect God to surprise us and continue to reveal more of both Godself and God’s creation.

If we are made in God’s image, and we believe creation to have sprung forth from God, then we must also expand our embrace of all creation. All life is connected, both physically and spiritually. To see ourselves as atoms, separate and distinct from each other and the rest of creation is, as Albert Einstein called it, “optical delusion.” And yet, for the last several centuries, that is exactly how we have seen ourselves. We have poisoned rivers and lakes, we have created the great Pacific trash island, we have caused acid rain, and we have removed mountain tops. We have even begun to change the climate of “this fragile earth.” In an arresting article on the website of the magazine Sojourners Wes Granberg-Michaelson pointedly asks us, “Who will take personal responsibility for denying climate Change?” Granberg-Michaelson goes on to remind us that, “those who have denied climate change and thwarted actions to prevent or mitigate its effects have not just been mistaken. They are responsible for the increase in human suffering that has resulted now, and will continue in the future, from its effects.”3 Even if we accept the reality of climate change, we are still bound to ask ourselves how we can better care for creation. Can we support local farmers? Plant our own gardens? Decrease our use of plastic? Decrease our trash? Support recycling?

If we are truly awe-struck by the grandeur of God’s creation, we can also work at rising above self-preoccupation and pursue communion and relationship with each other. And perhaps, most important of all, we can open ourselves to God’s presence in silence and contemplation. We can take the time to savor our time and place, to pray through our days, acknowledging God’s presence with us in all things. And we have help in doing this. Celtic prayer, the prayer tradition of Ireland and Scotland, recognized God’s intimate connection with all creation, ourselves, the rest of earth’s creatures, and the cosmos, long before contemporary scientists did. We can offer to God all that we do, and have, and are. We can experience God’s presence not only in formal worship but also in all the “domestic mess” of our daily lives. In all that we do we can gratefully acknowledge God’s presence in, with, under, around, and through us.

And if we need words to express our awe at the signs and wonders of God’s presence in creation, we might turn to Psalm 8:

When I behold your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars which you set in place –
what is humanity that you should be mindful of us?
Who are we that you should care for us?
You have made us barely less than God,
and crowned us with glory and honor.
You have made us responsible
For the work of your hands,
putting all things at our feet….
YHWH, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your Name in all the earth!4

1. God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1955), 74-75, quoted in Judy Cannato, Radical Amazement (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2006), 142.
2. Based on Cannato, pp. 137ff.
3. http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/05/08/who-will-take-personal-responsibility-denying-climate-change .
4. The Inclusive Bible (Plymouth, UK: Sheed and Ward, 2007), 373.