Wonder Alive

“In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.  They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term---the generation gap.

In the 1960s, kids lost their authority.  It was a decade of protest---church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

In the 1970s, kids lost their love.  It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self. Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion(...)  It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.

In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.

In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world.

In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.”

― Ravi Zacharias, "Recapture the Wonder"

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Dear Kate,

I am never as acutely aware of my mortality as now.

It partly has to do with a couple of months vanishing into thin air like magic, black magic, leaving me with trails of deep reflection about life, braiding together strands of thought and experience--all have to do with human relationship close and far--that used to move along my years in parallel universes.  I can see more clearly now.  There is a strangeness to the clarity of this anti-distancing.  "What God has joined together, let no one separate."

Then there's my hero Ravi Zacharias dying, beside me as I feel him, a lion put down by his master.

This is not the kind of stuff I like to write about.  Once I've found a way to articulate I am sure to have already vandalized it.  It being what?  I can't get myself to say either.  I know I feel sad and mad.  I know his dying is making me jump off bed every morning like a lion.  I know I've been reading and working so much that my neck and back hurt.  It is not about raging against the dying of the light, not a battle cry of carpe diem either.  It is about recapture the wonder.

"The tragedy with growing up is not that we lose childishness in its simplicity, but that we lose childlikeness in its sublimity."  Oh, I am going to miss Ravi like death missing life.  I wonder what my hero is thinking now?  Maybe about his hero, G. K. Chesterton?

"What has really happened during the last seven days and nights? Seven times we have been dissolved into darkness as we shall be dissolved into dust; our very selves, so far as we know, have been wiped out of the world of living things; and seven times we have been raised alive like Lazarus, and found all our limbs and senses unaltered, with the coming of the day."

Every morning is resurrection morning.

Yours, Alex