Part 2: The Path Back to Wonder
In my own spiritual journey, I have discovered that the moments of deepest connection with God often come not when I am trying to figure something out but when I allow myself to not know, to rest in mystery, to trust that there are forms of communication happening beneath the level of my conscious understanding. Prayer, at its most profound, becomes less like problem-solving and more like the way a child might approach a beloved grandparent—with complete trust, open affection, and no agenda other than to be present.
This is where the practice of Sacred Noticing becomes essential. When we begin to pay attention to the spiritual dimension of our everyday experiences—when we notice the way morning light transforms an ordinary room into something luminous, when we feel the mysterious peace that sometimes emerges from silence, when we recognize the sacred in a stranger’s smile; we are recovering our childlike capacity to see with the eyes of the heart.
Sacred Noticing is not about forcing spiritual meaning onto ordinary events but about recovering our natural ability to recognize the spiritual that is already present in all that surrounds us. Children do this instinctively. They see faces in clouds, personalities in stuffed animals, magic in puddles after rain. They have not yet learned to dismiss these perceptions as “just imagination.”
But what if imagination is a form of spiritual perception? What if the ability to see meaning, beauty, and connection where others see only material reality is not childish but deeply wise? What if we have educated ourselves out of precisely the kind of awareness that our souls most need?
The path back to the open eyes of the heart does not require abandoning intellectual rigor or scientific thinking. Rather, it asks us to expand our definition of knowledge to include other forms of truth. We can appreciate both the biochemistry of love and its mystery, both the neuroscience of consciousness and the reality of the soul, both the physics of light and its capacity to serve as a metaphor for divine illumination.
This integration requires what I think of as “both/and” thinking rather than “either/or” thinking. We can be both intellectually sophisticated and spiritually receptive, both scientifically literate and mystically aware, both educated and wonder-filled. The child within us is not the part that needs to be outgrown but the part that needs to be reclaimed and integrated with our adult wisdom.
The practice begins simply: looking at the world around us with fresh eyes, allowing ourselves to be moved by beauty without needing to analyze it, trusting our interior responses to people and situations even when we cannot explain them logically. It means permitting ourselves to be amazed by ordinary miracles—the fact that we can love and be loved, that consciousness exists at all, that meaning emerges from mystery.
When we recover this childlike capacity for wonder, we do not become less intelligent; we become more fully human. We reconnect with the part of ourselves that can receive love without earning it, that can rest in mystery without solving it, that can trust the goodness of existence even when we cannot prove it scientifically.
The divine resides deeply within us all, but it often communicates through channels that our overly educated minds have learned to dismiss. The child within us knows this intuitively. That child is still there, waiting patiently for us to remember how to see with eyes of wonder, how to trust what cannot be proven, how to remain open to the mysteries that our hearts recognize even when our minds cannot comprehend them.
Perhaps today we might risk looking at our world through the open eyes of the heart of a child. We might notice the way light falls across our kitchen table and allow ourselves to see it as a gift rather than merely photons behaving according to physical laws. We might feel the love of someone close to us and trust that this love is as real as anything that can be measured, as true as any scientific fact.
In recovering our childlike capacity for wonder, we do not become naive; we become wise in a different way. We learn to live in both worlds—the world of measurement and the world of mystery, the realm of proof and the realm of trust. And in that integration, we find ourselves home again in the place we never really left but had simply forgotten how to see: the kingdom of heaven that exists wherever hearts remain open to the divine that dances through all things, waiting patiently for eyes willing to see and souls ready to receive.
Image and Reflection Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS