Unwrapping Wonder : Finding Hope in the Gift of Nature

Unwrapping Wonder : Finding Hope in the Gift of Nature by Carol O'Casey,Matthew Kondratieff PDF

---

Heeding technology's cry to get connected can result in overloaded circuits of the mind. Frenetic connections cause frazzled lives. Finding Hope in the Gift of Nature will restore the reader's soul as they step outside to cultivate a connection with creation and, in the process, deepen their relationship with the Creator.

This delightful mix of natural history, human story and God's glory found in everyday nature is based on Job's words: By peering within the ordinary, we can learn to see details which reveal extraordinary wonder.

As we unwrap the gift, we discover more of nature, God, and ourselves, one wonder at a time. Unwrapping Wonder is for active men and women and families who enjoy the outdoors or reading about nature, and for those seeking hope in a hectic world. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. The Songs of Trees. The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar. How to Read Nature. The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth.

Chapter one of Ravi's new book Recapture the Wonder

Beginners Guide To Reptile Care: Animals Books For Kids: The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved. An Obsession With Butterflies. How to Take Care of a Guinea Pig. A Naturalist at Large. Science and the Bible: Secrets of Animal Life Cycles. How to Hear from God. The World of Snakes. It's a Jungle Out There! Meditations from a Simple Path. How Have Animals Evolved and Adapted? The Sufi Book of Life. Why Do Snakes Hiss? Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings. Encyclopedia of Domestic Animals. Steps on the Path to Enlightenment.

Homeschooling Tell Me Why: A Forester's Field Guide to Devotion. Be Like a Tree: The Keys to a Fruitful life. The Answers Book for Kids Volume 2. Classic Self Help Book for Inspiration. The Lives Around Us. Why does the enchantment that we long for seem so elusive and almost scandalously complex? Someone once humorously quipped that life consists of four stages.

In the first stage we believe in Santa Claus. At the second stage we no longer believe in Santa Claus.

The third stage is when we find out that we are Santa Claus. The fourth and final stage has arrived when we look like Santa Claus. We know that hopes come and go and that life returns to the common and the repetitive. If that fluctuation and disappointment were only momentary, we could endure it.

But life is not what we thought it would be. The problem with life, then, is not that a man ends up burrowing through garbage looking for something to fill his stomach but that no matter what we have achieved or attained in our life, we still find ourselves burrowing deep within, trying to assuage the hungers of our soul.

Chesterton summed this up when he said that weariness does not come from being weary of pain but from being weary of pleasure. Something troubling emerges from this realization that greater learning diminishes wonder, that the greater the knowledge the more certain the absence of any transcending wonder. Denying the objective existence of beauty and design takes away the necessity of explaining the source of my attraction to beauty and the search for a designer, does it not?

Why, then, do I feel dissatisfied or cheated and what is it that I am pursuing? Philosophers who deny this objective reality trivialize the internal longing. That is why we instinctively dismiss their castigations and bend our ears to artists, thinking they can help us restore the romance of life. Are they not the ones who perpetually dream?

But here, too, disappointment looms, as often these poets and dreamers are more prone to run into pessimism than delight. Everything romanticized seems anticlimactic as one faces the advancing years. Finally, the questioner finds herself being asked the same questions and the predictable answer comes: As I am writing this I am aboard a plane heading overseas.

1 331,33 RUB

She proceeded to tell me that although she was engaged, she was having second thoughts about it because an astrologer had told her that this was not an auspicious time as he could not see their names aligned in the present astrological chart. It was hard to keep from shaking my head in disbelief. Where does one begin to talk to someone who is afraid of destiny yet believes in the world of destiny without knowing anything about who controls that destiny?

To add to the senselessness of her predicament, she herself did not eat because this was the holy month of fasting. In short, philosophers question the dream that life must experience enchantment while romantics dream away the question. Both disassemble the toy only to discover that the search is greater than the discovery and that they are destined to be resigned to the belief that enchantment is merely a subject to discuss, never a state to be attained. Thus, the arts play with our emotions and philosophy toys with our reason, while every fiber within our being cries out that this is not the way it was intended and that we may have robbed ourselves of the greatest of all treasures.

Fatalism is the creed of a will that is dying to its possibilities and seeks to drag the imagination with it. Just like the bumblebee that flies though it is not aerodynamically fit, so it is that every person who remembers what it is like to be a child gives reason and emotion its due and still seeks for wonder.

The flashes in time where we catch a glimpse of wonder spur us on to attaining it. We have all known that sensation and, like a chord of music that touches the soul, we are possessed by that memory of fullness that transcends words and then with equal mystery is gone. The songwriter captured it well:. Wonder was in that lost chord.

It came and then vanished, leaving a hunger behind. How does one describe such an experience? How does one hold on to it? I strongly suspect that the reason you are reading this book is that you yourself are hoping to find something new and asking whether anyone can deliver on this question. I sincerely believe God has answered, and He has done so in various ways.

I have no doubt whatsoever that finding an answer to this question is worth giving everything a person owns. In this answer lies the wealth of our purpose and destiny. In fact Jesus talks of such a person. He speaks of a merchant looking for a precious pearl who, when he found the pearl of great price, sold all he had previously considered worthwhile in order to buy it. That pearl of great price, pragmatically speaking, is that search for the heart to find its complete fulfillment.

Unwrapping Wonder : Finding Hope in the Gift of Nature by Carol O'Casey (2013, Paperback)

I remember listening to a veteran from one of the recent wars. In the thick of battle, a platoon had lost one of its men and the rest of them wanted to rescue him, even though they knew his wounds were quite possibly fatal. Even the senior officer cautioned that the risk was not worth the returns. At last, two of the men braved the reality and put themselves right in the path of ultimate danger. Dodging the firepower and crawling on their stomachs, they finally reached the side of their wounded comrade behind enemy lines.

Deep within every human heart throbs the undying hope that somebody or something will bring both an explanation of what life is all about and a way to retain the wonder. Yet if we would but pause and first ponder what it is that we already see in this world of wonder we might get a brief taste of the wonder that may be poured into us as well.

Before I even define the term, let me just lift our thoughts beyond ourselves to the wonder all around us. This alone gives us a hint of how God can carry us to His wonderful purposes in discovering the treasure that is within. Chet Raymo is professor of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College in Massachusetts.

He is a convinced naturalist with a strong mystical bent. Few writers in our time are able to open up vistas of grandeur in the world of objects and entities as he does. In his book Skeptics and True Believers: The Exhilarating Connection between Science and Religion , he illustrates in his brilliant and inimitable style the marvels that are all around us in this universe. For example, he presents in enthralling detail the migratory habits of the species of bird called the red knot.

The red knot is a sandpiper that each year journeys from the southern tip of South America to the eastern shores of the United States and beyond and then back again. The birds begin their northward journey in February each year, hundreds of thousands of them, up the coast of Argentina, over Brazil, with periodic stops to feed. From the northern coasts of South America, they take to the air for a nonstop week of soaring above the Atlantic that brings them around mid-May to touch ground on the marshy shore of Delaware Bay at the very time horseshoe crabs are laying their eggs by the millions.

When you consider that during their sojourn in Delaware each red knot might consume , horseshoe crab eggs, you know they need that stop and time it perfectly. Plumped up for the remainder of their marathon across the vast Canadian terrain, they make their final stop north of Hudson Bay.

There, in ideal northern summer conditions, they mate and breed, each female laying four speckled eggs, which she and her mate take turns incubating. Baby red knots build up their bodies soon with the feathers growing fairly rapidly. There is an incredibly scripted schedule for everything in the process.

By mid-July, the females leave the males and their offspring, and start heading south again. The males leave almost exactly one week later. The little ones fend for themselves and then, in late August, they commence their nine-thousand-mile journey to Tierra del Fuego. They begin that flight, their first of such magnitude, without parental companionship. Here, on the balmy beaches of Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America they feast, fattening themselves.

A long molt and ideal temperatures combine to replace their beaten-up feathers so that they are ready for the long journey back north. What it takes a whole crew of highly skilled men and women at a pit stop in the Indianapolis or a coterie of mechanics and ground staff to get a plane ready for its return flight, the red knot does by its own wit and understanding of natural resources. Scientists marvel at such genius in the tiny head of a red knot. Much happens even in their world to remind us of a world steeped in wonder. How does this happen, one might ask?

One marvels at such credulity for it defies every basic principle of reasoning in an intelligible universe. President Theodore Roosevelt had a routine habit, almost a ritual. Every now and then, along with the naturalist William Beebe, he would step outside at dark, look into the night sky, find the faint spot of light at the lower left-hand corner of Pegasus, and one of them would recite: It is as large as our Milky Way.

It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It is seven hundred and fifty thousand light years away. It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our own sun. You have set your glory above the heavens. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers. When I ponder the wonder that is around us and see the vastness of its splendor, I also remember what the poet John Donne said: It is what Jesus was saying in Matthew 6: Are you not much more valuable than they? See how the lilies of the field grow. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field.

That, I believe, is at the heart of what this search is all about. As I stated earlier, Plato believed that all philosophy began with wonder until it was replaced by knowledge. He argued that there was a world of difference between belief and knowledge.

Belief, he said, was the position of a child; knowledge was that of an adult. The Greek word for wonder is thaumas. The world of fantasy and of the fantastic was captured in that word. But this is where it becomes very intriguing. In his Republic, Plato relates a conversation between his brother Glaucon and Socrates.

Socrates is explaining to Glaucon that human understanding of ultimate reality is more like seeing the shadows than it is grasping the substance. To illustrate his point he imagines a cave in which he sees human beings chained from childhood, facing a wall with their backs to the opening of the cave. The light coming into the cave from the outside casts shadows of all that is happening on the outside onto the walls of the cave.

There is no way, says Socrates, that anyone looking at the wall would be able to distinguish what is real from what is not. They would only know the shadows. If they could be freed and released from the cave, at first the light would blind them, so much so that the most painful thing would be to see the source of the light itself. But over time, they would get used to it and see reality as it really is, including the light itself. Through its central aperture, light is processed so that we see the grand tapestry of colors so magnificently present in this world.

I cannot help but wonder if it might be the root word from which we get the Anglo-Saxon name Thomas. It was the apostle Thomas who wondered whether Jesus had really conquered death. And when he saw and touched the Lord, the encounter completely redefined reality for him, which had to that point been prejudiced against the miracle. Can it not be our hope as well that the shadows and beliefs of childlikeness become only greater and more wonderful when dispelled by knowledge? Can there not be a reality where the mere world of fantasy is superceded by the fantastically true?

Can the rainbow not be the wonderful reminder that we can see beyond the storms? After all, what really is wonder? First, what it is not. Wonder is not merely the same as happiness. Wonder is that possession of the mind that enchants the emotions while never surrendering reason. It sees in the ordinary the extraordinary, and it finds in the extraordinary the reaffirmations for what it already knows. Wonder clasps the soul the spiritual and is felt in the body the material. Wonder interprets life through the eyes of eternity while enjoying the moment, but never lets the momentary vision exhaust the eternal.

Wonder knows how to read the shadows because it knows the nature of light. Wonder knows that while you cannot look at the light you cannot look at anything else without it. It is not exhausted by childhood but finds its key there. It is not at all surprising that of the seventy usages of the word wonder in the Old Testament, nearly half of them are by David, the sweet singer of Israel.

Wonder and music go hand in hand. Wonder cannot help but sing. Even nature recognizes that. There is a story I have told before that I would like to tell again here, because there is a marvelous sequel to it.

The people I mention are true heroes. They make our world a better place and show the world what wonder is all about, blending reality with a sacred imagination. They live in Connecticut and several years ago, they read of a little boy in Romania who was born without arms, not even an appendage on both shoulders. When he was about one year old they visited the orphanage where he was being cared for because his parents were unable to, and their hearts went out to him. Through discussion and contacts, this couple asked if they could adopt this little one.

I have heard that they do that in America. They just wanted to give him a home and a chance at life. Sharon had had the foresight to bring a Romanian Bible with her, and opening it to Psalm , she gave it to the Romanian mother to read for herself:.

• FIVE SIMPLE WAYS TO SAVE COSTS IN YOUR BUSINESS TODAY
• My List of Sins - 1. Lust: 1. Lust
• Poetry To Make Your Day Smile
• Mothers with Broken Hearts: God’s Miracle
• Die Erben der alten Zeit (2): Der Thul (Die Erben der alten Zeit - Trilogie) (German Edition)
• April in Paris