Astonishing
Friday, November 8, 2019 at 08:14PM My stepmother is 93, and one of the words she uses most frequently is ‘astonishing’.
Recently, she used it in response to the selection of holiday snaps I emailed her each week on a trip my husband and I took when we stayed at a series of tiny, exquisite places. ‘It really is astonishing,’ she would reply to each missive (and I could just picture her in her corner chair, tapping away on her iPad) ‘the beauty of the places you have found to stay’.
Her astonishment can be over all manner of things. A breakthrough in medical research. An act of altruism. The efforts of the volunteers at a local community garden, her new great-granddaughter, the fact that we can hop on a plane in Melbourne and be at her place in Edinburgh 24 hours later.
A person of deep Christian faith, she is far from naïve. As a young woman she drove an ambulance in the war; she worked in Kenya, and raised four children in the days when mothers did the lion’s share of parenting. Twice widowed, she’s lived a long time and seen most things. The state of current world politics brings her to the brink of despair. Brexit and Trump and Syria and global warming and inhumanity to refugees: she is well informed about all these issues, discusses them intelligently, rages and prays.
Still she comes back to astonishment - another word for wonder. If her thoughtful engagement with current events keeps her brain ticking over, her attunement to wonder keeps her heart open and generous and young.
Wonder is what artists of any kind should awaken us to. Wonder is incompatible with apathy or violence, judgementalism or hate. Wonder keeps alive a sense of mystery, stops us becoming cynical and jaded and despairing and will always be part of a faith in an unstintingly loving God.
We need to continue our protest marches and writing of letters to politicians and pouring our heart and soul into our job and family, our church and community. Wonder, however, is what fills our tanks and reminds us that the God we worship created the universe and all the diversity and beauty therein.
When I am weary and the future of everything from my husband’s life to the survival of our planet is uncertain, I recall Jesus’ words in Matthew 6, verse 28 – a passage usually thought to be a call away from anxiety, but which could just as easily be a call to wonder. ‘Consider the lilies of the field… they neither toil nor spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.’
And I think of my step-mum, who has seen so much and yet retains her childlike sense of the marvellous in the everyday. When I am 93, I hope I continue to wonder at the goodness and beauty in people and in the world. I hope that I will be saying to those generations behind me, ‘Isn’t it astonishing!’
This was published in the November edition of The Melbourne Anglican
Reader Comments (4)
I love this tribute to Anne, an astonishing woman! Thank you!
Ohhh so beautiful and inspirational! Thank you Clare 🙏
Beautiful!
Wonderfully crafted. Two astonishing women, author and subject. Thank you! Ex