Food for Thought

I have a pile of books that have been staring at me since mid summer. They're books by children's writers, not for children, but for "grown-up" childrens writers (a lovely oxymoron).

I've started The Invisible Child by Katherine Paterson. She's an award-winning children's writer and a woman who's faith profoundly influences her work. This book is a collection of her speeches. The first 24 pages are about wonder.

A quote she shared from Rachel Carson's book A Sense of Wonder: "It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood." Paterson says, "It is the kind of wonder that is drawn to the everyday, the ordinary, and sees in the broken seashell the link to the mystery out of which we are born."

She wonders if our facination with Harry Potter is because it feeds a generation starving for a sense of wonder. We may look to science, either the God-created or man-created world, to satisfy the wonder of curiosity or our facination with gadgets and mystery but we turn to story to explore the wonders of the meaning of life.

"Many, O Lord my God, are the wonders You have done . . . I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings of old which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us. We will not conceal them from their children, but tell to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and His strength and His wondrous works that He has done." Ps 40:5 KJV Ps. 78:2-4 NAS