Without wonder, the world of men turns into compulsive activity and self-sealing systems of thought and social organization, and men, at best, become experts and efficient professionals and, at worst, puppets and functionaries of assorted institutions.
[One part] of the heroic journey involves a rebirth of wonder because our eyes and our perception of the world change as the result of the disillusioning experiences of the inward journey. A man who penetrates beneath his facade loses the illusion that he is a conqueror of life. He no longer sees the world as an arena for his triumph, or nature as a thing that can be controlled.
It is ancient wisdom that true virility is rooted in wonder. The best of men have always sung praises to this fundamental disposition toward life. Plato and Aristotle: "Philosophy begins in wonder." Jesus: "Unless you turn and become like children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." D.H. Lawrence: "The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense. And it is the natural religious sense." Dag Hammarskjöld: "We die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."
To wonder is to open ourselves to the gift of being with a sense of gratitude. Before we can act with integrity, before we can think with respect, we must pause to wonder. Over the last three hundred years men switched their stance from wondering to "knowing." We became know-it-alls, take-charge guys. Do we have the wisdom to be the architects of destiny? Do you trust Lee Iacocca with the future? No question about it, he is a smart man. But is he wise? Maybe what's good for General Motors isn't good for the country, the biosphere, or the future of the planet. To continue the modern masculine habit of using intelligence without wisdom and technology without wonder is a formula for certain disaster.
The virtue of wonder also protects us against the spiritual claustrophobia of living in an overdomesticated world within a narrowly defined self-image. The achievements of science notwithstanding, ultimately neither the world nor the self are knowable. We live within a mystery, at once terrifying and fascinating, that always exceeds our understanding. Any definition of who we are is too limiting. I should approach myself like a country that will always contain unexplored wilderness and unfathomable seas. Who am I? More than I can ever know.