The unknown evokes wonder. If you lose your sense of wonder, you lose the sacramental majesty of the world. Nature is no longer a presence, it is a thing. Your life becomes a dead cage of fact. The sense of the eternal recedes, and time is reduced to routine. Yet the flow of our lives cannot be stopped. This is one of the amazing facts about being in the dance of life. There is no place to step outside. There is no neutral space in human life. There is no place to go to get out of it. There is no little cabin down at the bottom of the garden where the force and familiarity of life stop, and you can sit there in a space outside your life and yourself and look in on both. Once you are in life, it embraces you totally.
This is most evident in the mystery of thinking. You cannot step outside your own thought. As Merleau-Ponty says, “There is no thought to embrace all thought.” Most of the time, we are not even aware of how our thinking encircles everything. When we wake up to how our thoughts create our world, we become conscious of the ways in which we can be blind and limited. Yet even when we decide to be critical and objective about our own thinking, thinking is still the instrument we use in the practice of this criticism. We live every moment of our lives within this relentless reflexivity. Even when we are tired and weary of the patterns of our own thinking, they still shape our vision and guide our actions.
Wonder at the unknown also calls forth prayer. The unknown is our closest companion; it walks beside us every step of our journey. The unknown is also the place where each of us has come from. From ancient times, prayer is one of the ways that humans have attempted to befriend the unknown. Prayer helps us to build an inner shelter here. Nature is the kind surface, the intimate face of a great unknown. It is uncanny to behold how boldly we walk upon the earth as if we are its owners. We strut along, deaf to the silence in the vast night of the unknown that lives below the ground. Above the slim band of air which forms the sky around our planet is the other endless night. Wonder makes the unknown interesting, attractive, and miraculous. A sense of wonder helps awaken the hidden affinity and kinship which the unknown has with us. Ancient peoples were always conscious of the world underneath. Special sacred places could be doorways into that numinous region. Odysseus and Aenaeas, the two mystical voyagers of classical antiquity, knew where to go in order to enter the world underneath. In Celtic mythology, this is where the Tuatha de Dannan secretly lived. They were residents at the roots of the earth. They controlled all fertility and growth. Offerings and libations were regularly made to them. In ancient culture, nature always had an elemental divinity which demanded respect and reverence. While holding its reserve, the unknown revealed dimensions of its numinosity. Places can be numinous, but so can people.
The Celtic tradition was powerfully aware of the numinous power of the unknown. It had refined rituals for approaching it. The Celts had no arrogance in relation to mystery. The people who mediated the unknown were called Druids. They helped the people to understand that the elemental divinities were not anonymous or impersonal. The earth was a Goddess and all the elemental forces took on personality. The Druids offered gifts to the Gods and the Goddesses. They interceded for the people and initiated them into the rhythm of belonging that the Celtic deities required. The Druids often worshipped in sacred groves. They are associated with sacred trees, especially the oak. They were also skilled in the art of interpreting the dreams of the people. They frequently undertook shamanic feats. They were able to change into different shapes, and they could enter smoothly into the air element and escape from all force of gravity. They lit the sacred fires and watched to see how the flames would turn. In this way, they were able to divine the future of the people. The Celtic world had a deep sense of the appropriateness of approach to the unknown. The lyricism and sacredness of the approach drew from the unknown the blessings that the people needed.
