I Stand All Amazed

I gave a talk on hope five years ago, and near the end of it I said, “If you’re not overwhelmed by the need of the world, then you’re just not paying attention,” which is much more true now that it was then. We’ve all lived through a pandemic, financial crisis, and turbulent and dividing politics. Those of us who have those terrible but general things at the top of our list are the lucky ones. We’re the ones that haven’t lived through displacement and violence, crippling illness, death of loved ones, loss of faith. I haven’t been alive to the world and its pain for very long, but man. The last couple years seem especially rough.

Which is why, I imagine, my friend (hi Kaia!) texted me recently and asked, “How do we let joy coexist with sorrow?”

My first answer to this is I don’t know. My second answer, for the past five years or so, has been hope. I stand by this answer. Hope, which starts as naivete and ends as force of will, is the path I’ve limped during my darkest times. During depression and heartbreak, the belief that things could get better and I could be part of what made them better is what kept me on my feet or, during those times my feet could not bear my weight, on my knees.

The thing is, though, that hope, while vital, isn’t really all that much like joy. Hope is determined and gritty and a light in dark places, but, for me at least, it isn’t necessarily joyful. (Brief aside for the Potterheads among you: hope is like Sirius Black’s innocence in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: the dementors can’t take it because it’s not a happy thought, it’s just real, and that’s enough to keep you sane sometimes.)

So hope is necessary but not sufficient when keeping joy alive in the face of pain. In order to balance the equation, we need wonder. If hope is the belief that things will get better, then wonder is the recognition that the current world, even in all of its brokenness, is beautiful.

The last time I was in my hometown was 2015. I flew in at 1 a.m., so I didn’t see anything on the drive home, but the next morning I got up as the sun was rising and walked to the beach. I grew up fifty yards from the beach. I have spent more time there than most people have spent in malls. It was not new to me—but I hadn’t been home for a while, and the sight of the ocean overwhelmed me. It was so big, way too big to get your arms around, and it felt so new and so old and so much like home. I sat on the beach and cried in the wonder of it.

Hukilau Beach, fifty yards away from where my family used to live (image from Hawaiian Beach Rentals).

I can list the number of times I’ve felt wonder that strongly on one hand, but I feel glimmers of it all the time. When I was sad on college I’d go on walks through neighborhoods. After being surrounded by college students who all had the same worries as me—tests, friends, crushes, crushing existential dread—I loved seeing the little kids playing in front of their houses. They were having water fights or riding on scooters, climbing trees, playing tag, and none of them worried about the things that I was. Eventually their parents would come out, and they weren’t worried about my things either. There were whole worlds that I didn’t even touch, and they were wonderful, and I was small, and everything eventually would be all right. I loved those walks.

Michael Welsch, a professor of cultural anthropology, said, “There’s this really simple mistake we make when we think about what it is to . . . live with wonder. If you think about wonder itself, you think about it as an experience . . . you think about it as something that comes to you. But what I need to tell you is that it’s not unlike love. . . . As you get older, you realize that love is something you do, it’s a capacity, something you can get better at. Wonder is the same way.” Wonder, he tells us, is not an event but a practice. It’s going on a walk or going to the beach and really seeing. It’s choosing to lay on your floor and listen to music or make something wonderful to eat or feeling your feelings instead of numbing yourself. It’s a way of being in the world.

Alma tells us that all things testify that there is a God—when we practice wonder, we’re just better at hearing their testimonies. The sorrow and pain in the world doesn’t go away, but we tap into something even older and more eternal—the beauty and joy that is built into the foundations of creation.

So, of course, Kaia, just like I texted when you asked, I don’t really know how we hold pain and goodness together. I think it is a capacity we develop—the poet Keats called it “negative capability,” and I’m not especially good at it. All I know is that beauty and pain do coexist, and maybe when we seek wonder and hope without shutting our eyes to the world and its pain, we get a little better at it.