Skip to content
The Catholic Leader
  • Home
  • News
    • QLD
    • Australia
    • Regional
    • Education
    • World
    • Vatican
  • Features
  • Opinion
  • Life
    • Family
    • Relationships
    • Faith
  • Culture
  • People
  • Subscribe
  • Jobs
  • Contribute
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
    • QLD
    • Australia
    • Regional
    • Education
    • World
    • Vatican
  • Features
  • Opinion
  • Life
    • Family
    • Relationships
    • Faith
  • Culture
  • People
  • Subscribe
  • Jobs
  • Contribute
No Result
View All Result
The Catholic Leader
No Result
View All Result
Home Life Faith Spirituality

What a wonderful world – Christian Brother Brian Grenier gleams God’s gift of wonder and wisdom

byGuest Contributor
27 February 2019 - Updated on 1 April 2021
Reading Time: 4 mins read
AA

Awe-filled: “If, like many of our contemporaries, we are self-absorbed and have a strong tendency to take things for granted, even life itself, we will have little time or inclination to consider the ultimate questions.”

Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Awe-filled: “If, like many of our contemporaries, we are self-absorbed and have a strong tendency to take things for granted, even life itself, we will have little time or inclination to consider the ultimate questions.”

RESPONDING to God’s invitation in a dream, “Ask what I should give you”, Solomon did not seek personal possessions, wealth, honour, the destruction of his enemies or length of days. 

The better to govern God’s people, he asked for wisdom and knowledge. 

He sought an understanding mind, a listening heart (“shama” in Hebrew), to discern between good and evil (1 Kings 3:9-11; 2 Chronicles 1:7-18).

Jesus, who was surely familiar with these scriptural passages, sometimes put a similar question to the people he encountered in the exercise of his ministry. 

To take but one of many examples in the Gospels: he asked a blind man on the outskirts of Jericho, “What do you want me to do for you?”

The afflicted man replied, “Lord, let me see again.”

To this heartfelt plea Jesus responded: “Receive your sight; your faith has saved you” (Luke 18:41-42).

Today and every day Jesus asks us, “What do you want me to do for you?”

Whatever our needs, we can find reassurance in the words he addressed to his disciples: “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Matthew 7:7).

“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” (John 15:7)

Related Stories

The mystery of love is worth saving souls

Christians arrested at coal protest call on Church to recognise climate impact

Mount Isa parishioner Terry Lees writes Jesus is the Good Shepherd and we should all listen to his call

My favourite Jewish writer is the late revered Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel – Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, still sharing his considerable wisdom with an appreciative readership, comes a close second. 

Mindful of God’s continuing beneficence to his people and aware of what, in his heart of hearts, he himself stood most in need of, Rabbi Heschel wrote in the preface to a book of his poems, “Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.” 

It may never have occurred to us to ask God for the gift of wonder or that wonder is a gift at all. 

However, it is indeed a precious gift to be received with gratitude, nurtured by whatever means we have at our disposal and, in a world that needs to rediscover it, shared with others. 

In this connection G.K. Chesterton, always a fount of wisdom, had this to say: “Of one thing I am certain, that the age needs, first and foremost, to be startled, to be taught the nature of wonder.” 

For him the created world was ever “a wild and startling place”. 

He took “fierce pleasure” not only in his experience of the transcendent but also in the most commonplace things. 

“The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud.”

Another writer, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), in an essay on imagination, claimed that all philosophy begins and ends in wonder. 

Ideally, the wonder that is, at first, the child of ignorance will become, in time, the parent of adoration.

In similar vein Heschel asserts that a human being’s awareness of the divine arises from wonder or “radical amazement” at the “grandeur or mystery … with which we are confronted everywhere and at all times”. 

Asked by an interviewer what he believed to be his greatest gift, he replied without hesitation, “My ability to be surprised”.

If, like many of our contemporaries, we are self-absorbed and have a strong tendency to take things for granted, even life itself, we will have little time or inclination to consider the ultimate questions. 

Devoid of a sense of wonder and awe, we will have no urge to sing with Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, “O what a wonderful world!”

Br Brian Grenier is a Christian Brother in Brisbane.

ShareTweet
Previous Post

Cardinal George Pell remanded in custody over abuse conviction; he will be sentenced on March 13

Next Post

Tragedy strikes Surfers Paradise as 23-year-old dies after falling from Church roof

Guest Contributor

Related Posts

St Paul writing his Epistles painted by Valentin de Boulogne
Despatch from a Dominican

The mystery of love is worth saving souls

13 March 2021 - Updated on 14 April 2021
News

Christians arrested at coal protest call on Church to recognise climate impact

19 November 2020
Spirituality

Mount Isa parishioner Terry Lees writes Jesus is the Good Shepherd and we should all listen to his call

13 May 2019 - Updated on 1 April 2021
Next Post

Tragedy strikes Surfers Paradise as 23-year-old dies after falling from Church roof

Health workers across Australia 'overworked and underpaid' as Aged Care Royal Commission heats up

Newly released smart phone app puts 40 days of prayer in the palm of your hand – and more

Popular News

  • Here are the stories of 10 new saints being canonised this Sunday

    Here are the stories of 10 new saints being canonised this Sunday

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Hearts ‘fused’ together living their vocation

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • The Church canonises 10 new saints who shared God’s love

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Queensland election: The pro-life political parties committed to abortion law reforms

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Link between porn and partner violence growing

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
Search our job finder
No Result
View All Result

Latest News

Cleanup begins after floodwaters swamp South East Queensland again

Cleanup begins after floodwaters swamp South East Queensland again

by Mark Bowling
16 May 2022
0

LAIDLEY parishioners in the Lockyer Valley west of Brisbane are relieved after floodwater rose to the top...

Angel’s Kitchen serves hot meals to the hungry in Southport

Angel’s Kitchen serves hot meals to the hungry in Southport

16 May 2022
The Church canonises 10 new saints who shared God’s love

The Church canonises 10 new saints who shared God’s love

16 May 2022
Hearts ‘fused’ together living their vocation

Hearts ‘fused’ together living their vocation

15 May 2022
Link between porn and partner violence growing

Link between porn and partner violence growing

14 May 2022

Never miss a story. Sign up to the Weekly Round-Up
eNewsletter now to receive headlines directly in your email.

Sign up to eNews
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Contact
  • Contribute
  • Jobs
  • Subscribe

The Catholic Leader is an Australian award-winning Catholic newspaper that has been published by the Archdiocese of Brisbane since 1929. Our journalism seeks to provide a full, accurate and balanced Catholic perspective of local, national and international news while upholding the dignity of the human person.

Copyright © All Rights Reserved The Catholic Leader
Accessibility Information | Privacy Policy | Archdiocese of Brisbane

The Catholic Leader acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the First Peoples of this country and especially acknowledge the traditional owners on whose lands we live and work throughout the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
    • QLD
    • Australia
    • Regional
    • Education
    • World
    • Vatican
  • Features
  • Opinion
  • Life
    • Family
    • Relationships
    • Faith
  • Culture
  • People
  • Subscribe
  • Jobs
  • Contribute

Copyright © All Rights Reserved The Catholic Leader

0
    0
    Your Cart
    Your cart is emptyChoose another Subscription
    Continue Shopping