Smiley Faces

Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

“Man is Not Alone” by Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1951

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Dear Alex,

I have not planned on writing tonight but to plan, to speak - and even to think and move - are ways of playing on stage without an audience for the world beyond ourselves to see. We are characters in costumes and truth, partners in drama comic or cosmic, ghosts and guards of ourselves off times, skeletons out of closet, whether for show or sleep, seeking, losing, gathering, sharing and fearing our props and roles in design with omniscient view.

If there is a Word for me now, and if this may be another Word for you tomorrow, it is wonder. I assume your questioning of this Word. And that is precisely the point of wonder.

To reverse our assumption and change to live for the contrary - “that what is good for the world will be good for us” - needs all the more questioning for a show only as good as the question itself. What is goodness? Who gets to decide? Is that utilitarian, consensual, theocratic, instinctive?

And in examining an assumption, maybe the most important question is one that kids pose all the time: Why?

Why should I care what you’ve pointed out or what Wendell Berry wrote in 1969 or Kierkegaard in 1843? Why do I bother to question my own assumptions? Why - and I am indebted to your forbearance - will anyone exert an iota of exposure to inconvenience or ridicule in pausing to ask?

You know we are all busy and inflamed during this ever-present crisis, our groping through the news and shelves for goodness and hope vanishing with ventilators and testing kits. And even if you cry, how will your grief help anyone in New York or New Delhi today or any day? We need solutions and strategies, analysts and plasma donors, not another writer, reader or dreamer.

But if we may wonder a bit about the words of Rabbi Heschel, the ones nestled in his paragraph before the above quote, perhaps we can begin to approach the why's:

“The most intimate is the most mysterious. Wonder alone is the compass that may direct us to the pole of meaning. As I enter the next second of my life, while writing these lines, I am aware that to be swept by the enigma and to pause - rather to flee and to forget - is to live within the core."

Having written these passages, Herschel would have lived for his final third of life, which unravelled in growing wonder, such as his presence with Martin Luther King in the historical Selma-to-Montgomery march shortly after “Bloody Sunday”, a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. He thrived and collapsed in word and wonder, relentlessly undressing assumptions to their bare frame in question, preserving the cries and lives of Holocaust survivors and war victims whose why’s might have gone cold had it not been for the quest to question and wonder.

So I wondered at the supermarket yesterday while looking at a wall of gift cards glazed with promises and answers, all selling useful, purposeful, care-full stuffs like burgers, shoes, make-up, make-believe. Wondrous things, wonderful places. But one thing I could not find: a single gift card for books to my little niece on her coming birthday. I stood for 10 minutes more, searching curiously, admittedly furiously, hopefully praying for one small packet of softcover-bound wonder. I should not have assumed there would be any.

When something unnerves you, when it bugs you more than the “Chinese virus” or death, when it rips you apart faster than rape and bomb, you better wonder about the violence and fear and cash and privileges which play you in unassuming ways eluding the question of smiley faces.

Yours, Kate