To listen to the whole unabridged class: Wonder and Gratitude
Beyond Sunday School — The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapters 5 and 6
When was the last time something ordinary stopped you right in your tracks?
Not a polite “oh, that’s kind of cool,” but a real wow. You just had to stand there and take it in.
I asked our room that question, and the answers came fast. Geese flying low overhead, honking away, never gets old. The red trees, aflame with fall, every single time. Light beams breaking through the clouds at sunset on Silver Lake Road — six columns of light against a dark sky. A road lined on both sides with yellow trees, all the way down. One of us made blueberry pancakes yesterday and fed them to the birds and squirrels, and this morning two little birds were sharing a piece instead of fighting over it. “Only Wendy would make pancakes for the birds,” someone said.
That, right there, is the world of chapter 5, “Cormorants and Kittiwakes.”
Wonder is what grace looks like when you’re paying attention
Here is the thought that has been rattling around in my head since I reread this chapter: wonder is a result of a depth of knowledge of grace.
That was a new way of thinking about it for me. We have to keep discovering grace — keep rediscovering it — so that we can move through this world with a sense of wonder and awe. The two are tied together.
Manning tells the story of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who prayed, “I asked for wonder,” and God answered him. He gave it to him. What a prayer. What an answer.
And then comes one of the longest and most beautiful passages in the book. Let me give you the heart of it:
We get so preoccupied with ourselves, the words we speak, the plans and projects we conceive, that we become immune to the glory of creation. We barely notice the cloud passing over the moon, or the dew drops clinging to the rose leaves. The ice on the pond comes and goes, the wild blackberries ripen and wither. The blackbird nests outside our bedroom window. We don’t see her. We avoid the cold and the heat. We refrigerate ourselves in summer and entomb ourselves in plastic in winter. We rake up every leaf as fast as it falls. We are so accustomed to buying pre-packaged meats and fish and fowl in supermarkets, we never think and blink about the bounty of God’s creation. We grow complacent and lead practical lives. We miss the experience of awe, reverence, and wonder. Our world is saturated with grace, and the lurking presence of God is revealed not only in spirit, but in matter.
I have been thinking about that phrase — the lurking presence of God — for two days. The lurking presence of God is revealed not only in spirit, but in matter. In a deer leaping across a meadow. In the flight of an eagle. In fire and water, in a rainbow after a summer storm, in a gentle doe streaking through a forest. In Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In a child licking a chocolate ice cream cone. In a woman with windblown hair.
God intended for us to discover his loving presence in the world around us.
And how quickly we blow through it.
Children don’t blow through it
Someone in our room said the thing that unlocked it for the rest of us: children don’t.
Children see a flower or a bug or a butterfly and they want everything to stop. Everybody, stop. Look at this.
When Jesus pulled the little children to himself and said, “Unless you become like one of these, you will not inherit the kingdom of heaven,” the theology we usually draw out is trust — and that’s right. But I wonder if there is more. I wonder if he also wants us to move through this world with that kind of wonder and awe.
One of us remembered all the dandelions her students used to bring her. Somebody started it, and pretty soon there were dandelions piled on her desk. They loved her — and grace transforms a pile of dandelions into a bouquet.
Another told us about two little hanging baskets of purple and white petunias, three dollars apiece, repotted and stuck out on the deck. God just made them glorious. Every morning they go out and the petunias greet them like a smile — as if they had spent a hundred dollars apiece.
We talked about that Call the Midwife scene where the older midwife starts declining, and the gardener finds her out replanting weeds — dandelions she had seen as flowers, putting them back in the garden. George Washington Carver’s line came up: a weed is a flower growing where you don’t want it. One of us has a neighbor who mows around certain weeds in his yard — because for a while, they were flowering.
I love that man’s neighbor.
The gospel of grace in the world of grace
Manning writes that we must rediscover the gospel of grace and the world of grace. I want to tweak it: we must rediscover the gospel of grace in the world of grace.
Part of the reason we miss grace — the reason we lose our sense of wonder — is that there is so much of it. We exist in a world held together by God’s providential hand. If his grace were not flowing in and out of everything, holding all things together, this world would fall apart. And so grace becomes… commonplace. We take it for granted. Rediscovering the gospel of grace is seeing again all the little graces all over the place — the sunbeams through the clouds, the dandelion, the red trees we drive past a hundred times a day — and actually taking notice.
One of us read Manning’s line that God is being edged out of his world by science, and it bothered her all the way home. She had been watching a PBS special on the universe — planets, stars, all of it — and every scientist kept saying “science, science, science.” Only one said, “Somebody must have made all of this.” She was ready to throw her slipper through the TV.
I don’t remember which physicist said it, but somebody famous once said that science really ought to lead us to worship. The problem is not science. The problem is that we want an answer and an explanation for everything, and so we lose a sense of mystery. That is where wonder dies.
Think of how Manning opened chapter 2 — the slant of the earth, tilted at twenty-three degrees, producing the seasons. All science. But where do you land at the end of it? That one scientist in the documentary landed at awe. Others land at: okay, solved it — what’s my next math problem? What’s my next equation to crack? Same facts. Completely different landing.
One of us kept coming back to how perfectly everything is set — how a variation of less than a percent and nothing works. And nobody can answer how it got to that exact slant. Not scientifically.
And somebody else sang us a song she’d heard at a youth conference years ago, a line that has stayed with her: “I want to thank you for this day, for the sun that shines this way, for the green against the blue. And I wonder what all the people do who don’t feel grateful, who don’t know how to thank you.”
How sad, she said. How sad not to know how to thank him.
We did the same thing to grace that science did to the world
Here is the hard mirror Manning holds up to the church: we have taken the wonder and awe of grace, and we have made it scientific. We have removed the mystery and turned it into a math problem.
You’re a sinner. You can’t get to heaven apart from God. Therefore you must place your faith in Jesus. QED.
We define grace as “unmerited favor” — and, wow, doesn’t that just capture your heart? (It doesn’t.)
But then you hear a story. Manning tells the one about Fiorello La Guardia, the judge, when a woman who stole bread to feed her children is brought before him. He says, “The law says I have to fine you.” Then he takes out ten dollars and pays it himself — and then he collects fifty cents from every person in the courtroom, “because it is pathetic and sad that we live in a city where a woman has to steal bread to feed her children.” They collect $47.
That is overwhelming grace. That is awe.
But we have taken the story of Jesus and turned it into a series of postulates. Apologetics. We will make a case for Christ. We will present evidence that demands a verdict. We watched the world do the science thing — answer all the questions — and we thought, that’s how they’ll fall in love with Jesus. We’ll just answer all their questions.
It’s not working. Because when we talk about Jesus that way, we leave people feeling the same way we feel when nonbelieving scientists talk about science — no sense of wonder and awe, just mechanics. And we think, don’t they know the One behind it all?
Meanwhile our friends are thinking: if that were true, wouldn’t I see a little more wonder and awe and love and mercy coming from the people telling me about it?
Manning writes, near the end of the chapter, that “troubadours have always been more important and influential than theologians and bishops.” Music reaches people. It affects your emotions in ways cold reason does not. Somebody in the room said of a theologian, “After about thirty seconds my mind goes, oh wow, look at that red tree — but if the first verse gets you, the refrain gets you, you want more.”
I’m Gen X — I quote movies and TV shows. My dad’s a Boomer — he hums. I say a word and he starts singing some lyric from the back of his brain. If I wanted to be a better preacher on Sunday mornings, I’d quote a few more songs instead of just movies. Somebody asked if we could turn Sundays into musicals. I said, please do.
C.S. Lewis understood this. Children need fairy stories, he said, because they live in a world of dragons — and they need to know the dragons can be slain. They learn it in the stories. Those stories grab us, because grace is better sung and storied than it is systematized.
There’s a man named Mike McHarg — the internet knew him as Science Mike — who had been an evangelical Christian, had deconstructed, and was honestly wrestling with whether he believed anything anymore. One day he was sitting on a beach watching huge waves come in off the Pacific, and he was left in a state of absolute wonder and awe — and in that moment, he knew God was real. He wrote a book about it called Finding God in the Waves.
He didn’t reason his way back. Wonder brought him back.
That is what we, the people of God, are meant to give the world: not just better arguments, but lives left in wonder and awe. We need to be the people who point out grace, who point out the beauty of the mystery. When the world sees that, they’ll go, what’s happening over here?
And I’m not saying we check our brains at the door. We’re not doing the “pray about it and feel a warming in your bosom and then you’ll know” thing — that’s heartburn; go take an antacid. I mean people seeing other people captivated by wonder. A little kid walks up to you with a toy telephone and says, “There’s a phone call for you” — I don’t care who you are, you answer the phone. Their awe captivates you. Imagine the church doing that with grace.
Each moment: growing into more or retreating into less
One line near the end of the chapter landed hard with our room: each moment of our existence we are either growing into more or retreating into less.
It’s the Shawshank Redemption line — get busy living or get busy dying. Manning traces it to Norman Mailer. Either way, it’s true. Wonder is the “more.” Preoccupation with self, with our plans and projects, with raking every leaf the second it falls — that’s the “less.”
Grazie, Signore — gratitude as freedom
Which brings us to chapter 6, “Grazie, Signore” — thank you, Lord.
This was the trickier chapter. Manning opens it by talking about the parable of the dishonest steward, and quotes a commentary that I had to read twice:
The unjust steward who, hearing he is going to be fired, doctors his master’s accounts to secure another job, is commended precisely because he acted. The point does not concern morality, but apathy. Here is a man who finds himself in a crisis, and instead of wallowing in self-pity, acts resourcefully. … Immediate response is the mood of the kingdom.
I’ll be honest: when I first read it, I thought, where is he going with this? But then I saw how it connects to gratitude.
Gratitude is rooted in trust. When you truly understand that grace abounds — that it is so broad, so amazing, so beyond comprehension — it frees you to act. You don’t have to wallow. You don’t have to sit there paralyzed, wondering, Is God going to like this? Is he going to like that? You stop trying to figure out the will of God the way a college senior tries to figure out which job offer won’t ruin his life.
I wish I’d had this in my head back when I worked with college kids. Every spring, a fourth-year student would sit down and say, “I’m trying to figure out God’s will for my life.” And they picture God’s will like a shoe size — if you put on the wrong shoe, it’s going to be uncomfortable and hurt for the rest of your life.
That’s God’s will devoid of grace. Here’s the picture I’d give them instead: God’s will is a football field. The sidelines are immoral and illegal — out of bounds. God’s will will never lead you there. The end zones are your strengths and passions, your gifts and abilities — that’s what you’re moving toward. And anywhere on the field is, for all practical purposes, God’s will for your life. One season you might be on this twenty-yard line, another season on that one, sometimes you’re sitting at the fifty. Who knows? What matters is that you’re on the field.
God’s grace frees you to play the whole field.
I can’t tell you how many session meetings I’ve sat in where the elders are wringing their hands — should we do this? But what about this? Or what about that? And it’s like: it’s okay. We can just make a decision. If it’s the right decision, great. If it’s the wrong one, we’ll know pretty quickly, and guess what? We can change the decision. This is how big God’s grace is.
If we don’t live with gratitude for God’s grace, we won’t recognize our freedom to act. The mood of the kingdom is immediate response — and that posture demands a life that keeps saying, Grazie, Signore. I’m so thankful for this grace. Because that gratitude is what frees us to live responsively instead of frozen.
And the parable of the talents backs Manning up. The master wanted his servants to take risks. He wanted them to gamble with his money. You can’t always play it safe.
I know of a church right now that met with a consulting company — they’re between pastors — and the consultants said, “We’re not going to help you find a pastor. Our assessment is that you’re viable for eighteen to twenty-four more months.” It’s about money. A handful of people, not much coming in. And they have a few million dollars locked up in endowments from wills given back in the 1970s — when there were 700 people in the church — that they can’t touch to do things like hire a pastor. They were so safe with their money. Now they’re sitting there going, we have money and we can’t use it.
Someone in our room answered that story with one of our own. Years ago, we had a financial person who was constantly saying, “The church is going to die because we don’t have money. The church is going to die because we don’t have money.” We’re still here. And she’s not.
Our pastor at the time finally said, “I don’t want to hear about money one more time. We’re failing as a church — not because of money, but because we can’t get past money.”
Safe isn’t faithful. The mood of the kingdom is immediate response.
Guilt that frees you instead of freezing you
Manning’s other big move in this chapter is on guilt — the difference between the healthy kind and the kind that disdains grace.
When we wallow in guilt, remorse, and shame over real or imagined sins of the past, we are disdaining God’s gift of grace. Preoccupation with self is always a major component of unhealthy guilt and recrimination. … The image of the childhood story Chicken Little comes to mind. Guilt becomes the experience in which people feel the sky is falling.
That internal dialogue — demanding, accusing, blaming, condemning, reproaching, scolding — most of us know it by heart. Unhealthy guilt becomes bigger than life. It closes us in upon the citadel of self, and it preempts the presence of a compassionate God.
But healthy guilt acknowledges the wrong, feels remorse — and then is free to embrace the forgiveness that has been offered. Healthy guilt focuses on this: all has been forgiven. The wrong has been redeemed. Once again, it is gratitude for grace that sets us free — free so we don’t wallow, free so we don’t freeze.
Small steps of awe
One of us said there’s another sense of awe she keeps noticing: how, in all these little teeny steps, God has taken care of us. When Doug and Amy came to visit Peace, there were twelve to fifteen people, and they thought, will it last? When I said yes to coming, I told Amy, “I’m here to be the closer.” I’m about as good at closing as the Detroit Tigers bullpen.
Twenty-four hours after I said yes, my home church in Michigan — the church I came from — went through something that protected me from ever having to navigate. During COVID they imploded with conflict so bad they couldn’t hire a pastor, got subsumed as a branch campus of a larger church, and within the last twelve months the larger church sold the building and closed it down. Gone. And here we are. Here we remain.
Someone else, a veterinarian, said: if you want proof of God’s existence, he stopped telling clients the odds on their pets, because he saw animals that should have died live, and animals that should have lived die. “God will decide,” he said. “You don’t have any control over that at all. And it had to be some power far above me.”
Churches have life cycles too. There comes a day when every congregation dies — it just happens. (And nobody should underestimate the willpower of stubborn old Germans. Or stubborn old Dutch. Wait till you meet a stubborn Irishman. Then you’ll really see.)
But in the meantime, there is all this little awe. All these small steps of providence. Not done with us yet.
The leap in trust
Manning closes the chapter with one of his best lines:
Only love empowers the leap in trust, the courage to risk everything on Jesus — the readiness to move into the darkness, guided only by a pillar of fire. Trust clings to the belief that whatever happens in our lives is designed to teach us holiness. The love of Christ inspires trust to thank God for the nagging headache, the arthritis that is so painful, the spiritual darkness that envelops us, to say with Job, “If we take happiness from God’s hand, should we not take sorrow too?” To pray with Charles de Foucauld: “Abba, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you. I am ready for all. I accept all. Let your will be done in me and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my spirit. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and I give myself, I surrender myself into your hands without reserve, with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.”
That’s the prayer of gratitude. That’s the mood of the kingdom.
So here’s what I want us to take with us: keep rediscovering grace, so the wonder never dies. And let the gratitude do what gratitude is meant to do — not freeze you, not bind you, not make you safe. Free you.
Grazie, Signore. Thank you, Lord.
Heavenly Father, I pray that we would indeed be a people who commend ourselves to you, who entrust ourselves to you, who gratefully give ourselves to you — because we love you, and we know that you are indeed our Abba, our Father. Amen.