The Magnetic Pull of Wonder

 From C.S. Lewis Substack:

For myself, the medium of wonder has often been poetry. As I recently confessed to my friend Miroslav Volf, “I wouldn’t even be a religious person were it not for poetry, which has not only repeatedly brought me into contact with an other, but has seemed to demand something of me in its wake . . . But poetry remains perpetually open. God moves through art but doesn’t get stuck there. I sometimes think he gets stuck in theology—fixed, frozen, and therefore inevitably falsified.”2

Lewis had a way of letting the transcendent move through his art. And for all his reasoned approaches, he left room for awe. He referred to the spiritual dimension as the distinct feeling of “numinosity,” echoing the term coined by German theologian Rudolf Otto. For Lewis, numinosity meant the singular “Other” quality of the divine. In the face of the divine Other, astonishment is the natural human response.

And Christianity is certainly astonishing. In my letters with Miroslav, published in Glimmerings, I reflected, “I often hear secular people marveling at the sheer preposterousness of Christianity—God walking around the world, zapping water into wine, modern people cheerfully eating his flesh and drinking his blood—but, for me, no small part of Christianity’s appeal is that very preposterousness.”3

It is, as I said earlier, an insult to common sense, which I cherish because I am quite sure that what we call common sense is uncommonly wrong. (Read more.)