Wonder or Wisdom?

Evening light on a South African Township

I’m caught..... When Aladdin meets the Genie he gets his 3 wishes.
When Solomon meets God, he gets to make his wishes. What to ask for?

Children carrying their precious tray of stones

Until recently it was a no brainer. Go with Solomon and ask for wisdom. Wisdom will always be vital for living life. It is the compass when there are no maps. It is the movement and direction when there are no train tracks laid down. It holds out the  way, when there doesn’t seem like there is a way. Who wouldn’t long for wisdom!



But now there’s a problem. The late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Hershel said, “I did not ask for success, I asked for Wonder”.

And the late Kate Gross talked about, ‘the recovering of wonder’, in her last years when she knew she was dying, aged 36. Is it recovery or discovery? Recovery would suggest that she had wonder as a child and had lost it. I think children do have a natural sense of wonder.



Kate quotes Michael Mayne’s letters to his grandchildren to sum up her feelings................... ”If I could have waved a fairy wand at your birth and wished upon you just one gift it would not have been beauty or riches or a long life: it would have been the gift of wonder”.

Herschel said “The world of things we perceive, is but a veil; its flutter is music, its ornament is science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. Its silence remains unbroken. No words can carry it away”.
What does that mean in reality?

...no words can carry it away

Kate recounts “Today I saw a child in a red coat & I experienced a moment of absolute, pure wonder……these last years have been so strangely luminous, full of exploration, wonder and love”

So the dilemma now is which one should I ask for? Wisdom or wonder? Of course why not dismiss the idea of a choice and just ask for both – wisdom and wonder. But what if you could only ask for one thing? And I’m a believer in 'the one thing’, because it brings focus and with focus there’s much more chance of success.

Kierkegaard says, a saint is someone who ‘wills the one thing’

Does one come before the other? Is there a natural order between the two?

No one ever mentioned ‘wonder’ to me before; or maybe I wasn’t listening. Was it wisdom for Solomon to ask for wisdom, rather than ask for wonder? He said basically ‘sell the farm to get Wisdom. Nothing trumps it”.


The nearest that I can get is that Wonder is about presence and Wisdom is about living.


We need presence and we need to know how to then live. We actually do need both. Wonder connects me with the presence of life – of God within me, of the life force within every tiny micro part of my life, the immortal diamond, the kernel of life within the shell of life. We need presence. I guess it’s the fuel for the day.

But we also need wisdom to live the day. How do I use and synthesise all of my life’s experiences so that I can make decisions each day about how I think, feel and act around the lives of those who surround me. How do I become an alchemist to all of the good, messy, painful, joyful, base-metal experiences of yesterday and make some gold for the steps ahead?

Trevor in the woods above Grabouw, at the Village of Hope, Z.A

Wonder and wisdom, the deeper faces of being and doing.

- TW