I wonder about a lot of things, some of them worth writing about, most of them not. I wonder a lot about people (myself and others). I wonder about our place in the rest of the created order. I wonder why we think and act as we do. I wonder about our relationship with God. For that matter, I wonder a lot about God … whatever God is.

I’m content to wonder. I find it easy. Certainty has never served me well. It requires a lot of effort – effort, first of all, to arrive at it – all the sorting and judging and prioritizing. And then there’s the defending that certainty takes – always checking that I’ve not missed something; that I’ve garnered sufficient arguments to adequately protect the absolute rightness of my position. It’s exhausting. And I never seem to be able to do it sufficiently well.

But wondering – now there’s a liberating activity. I can join those who are certain and come alongside them in their world view without having to embrace what they think or believe. I can be genuinely curious about who they are and what has brought them to the understanding they have. I can find them fascinating and see them as my potential teachers. I can befriend them, though I may tend to disagree with them.

But if I engage with others who think or believe differently from me, and I do it from a position of certainty, it’s easy for the dynamic between us to be something other than friendly. If I don’t find myself needing to defend what I “know” to be true, I may feel a need to convince the other person of the rightness of my position. Wondering is a softer way to relate.

I wonder how it is that humans (along with all the rest of creation?) are imbued with something we tend to think of as “other.” I wonder if maybe that spark isn’t different from us … just not the whole of us. And that makes me wonder about the nature of God and where and how God is. Is God “person” … an entity with character in the same way we think about humans – the way most Christians were taught? Or, might God be consciousness itself … or pure information? Or, as we Christians say, might God actually be Love … not someone or some thing that loves, but Love itself at the heart of the Cosmos? And what does that mean?

I wonder a lot. Come to think of it, I wonder if wondering is all I’ve cracked it up to be. Maybe a little certainty wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I do know it matters to how we treat one another. Or maybe I’ll keep wondering and just try to be a kind person/self-giving person/compassionate person … the sort of person I happened to be raised knowing about from the stories of Jesus.

Leigh Waggoner is priest at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. She can be reached at 565-7865, or [email protected].