It was Elizabeth Barrett Browning that wrote, “Earth’s crammed with Heaven, and every common bush aflame with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes, the rest sit ‘round and pluck blackberries.” Charles Caleb Cotton (English Poet) wrote “He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a very long head or a very short creed.” Even Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.” The essential ingredient in our walk with God is our sense of wonder. Wonder is not an ideal in itself but here are a few things that will rob us off this sense:

1. Option Fatigue.
Scholar named Barry Schwartz wrote a great book called the “Paradox of Choice” he writes “as the number of choices grows further the negatives escalate until it becomes overloaded. At this point; choice no longer operates but debilitates and tyrannize. Choice overload makes us depressed and then dead.”

2. Functional Atheism.
Parker Palmer “Functional atheism is the unexamined conviction within us that if anything decent is going to happen here, I am the one who needs to make it happen.”

3. Pleasure Programming.
America’s first amendment states we can have “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Thomas Keating writes “the Spiritual is a long and hard journey ….we must dismantle ourselves from emotional compulsiveness to be happy.”
Richard Foster adds “there is nothing wrong with good feelings… as long as it does not control us. Pleasure becomes an idol when it controls us and become our absolute right.”

4. Boredom or complacency.
Been there, done that! This phrase began life in the early 1970s, in the short form ‘been there’. This had the same meaning as ‘been there, done that’. An early example comes from the American author Edwin Torres’ novel Carlito’s Way, 1975: “Money is only an object. I’ll get it. Got it, been there.”

5. Reductionist Paradigm.
Reductionism can either mean an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.

Greetings 

PS Rudolph.