Surrounded by Wonder

Eleven years ago today I began this blog with a post about finding invincible beauty and joy in the midst of emptiness and discouragement:

johnonefive.blogspot.com/2006/10/little-bit-of-green.html

In some ways, that’s been the theme of this blog all along; its title “JohnOneFive” is a reference to the fifth verse of the first chapter of John’s Gospel, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” After well over a hundred posts since then, even I am somewhat surprised at how many of them present this theme.

And this one will too. It’s been more than two years since I last posted, and I think that now a lot of attention has turned from blogs to Facebook and other social media. But there are still a lot of blogs, and I hope to continue this one now more regularly. Many things have changed in my life in the past few years, more than I ever thought they would or could, and probably fewer people will read this blog than used to, but maybe it’ll be good for me to get back to blogging anyway. I have a backlog of lots of ideas, and it’ll be good to write them up.

Well. Surrounded by Wonder. I now have a daughter. She’ll turn two in December. She lives in a house with several walls of books. She’s had books of her own just about since she was born, and she loves them. First we read them to her, then she learned to read them on her own, and recently she’s read to others. They’re mostly pictures, of course, but she knows the alphabet and can pick out a few words, and can identify probably over a hundred illustrations like clouds, lampposts, turtles, lions, and balloons.

Watching her sit and read a few days ago, I thought about how many hundreds of excellent books there are in the house that she’ll be able to read in a few years. They are there now, and she even takes them off the shelves on almost a daily basis, and has learned to take care of them. But of course right now they are inaccessible to her—no more than marks on a page.

And then I thought how the whole world must be like that to everyone. Electricity was around before Benjamin Franklin began the process of harnessing it, but no one knew about it except to watch lightning. Only in the past century or so have we begun to understand the nature of atoms, molecules, and the wonders of quantum mechanics, though everything is made of atoms. Mystery has always been all around us, unknown and unrecognized; the Unified Theory is still a theory, tantalizing us with mysteries yet unknown. The more we learn, the more mysteries become evident.

This is all obvious to inquiring minds, and nothing very profound. But maybe it’s a good place to restart a blog after a two-year hiatus.

“Many things greater than these lie hidden, for we have seen but few of his works” (Sirach 43:32)