Is this a violin or viola or cello? It's difficult but if you heard it then it would be possible, except when in the hands of a maestro the cello can confuse the ear. But any string player would look and say it's not a violin or viola because the shape is wrong. Just look at the shoulders! The cello is not simply a large violin. It's proportions are dramatically different and if you were to predict its voice from its shape you'd find it deeper and more sonorous than a guitar which is in the same pitch range. But even a non-musician can guess simply because I lean towards and I am inclined to only place pictures of cellos. Your foreknowledge of me provides a context to believe it is a cello.
Somehow today I have continued to talk and think about the presence of God and knowing God and how all this fits into human development with yet another conversation partner. I have been unhappy for a while with definitions of human faith development which focus upon the necessity or value-loaded presumption that movement forwards is always superior and better. In fact Jesus seems to suggest children and the poor seemed to be in a better position to have a relationship with God.
My conversations with a student climaxed in a story of a 2 year child and the wonder in her eyes as she collected leaves and her saying why she had to collect so many ... 'cos they were all different'... We both agreed there is a deep sense of wonder that comes in children which we lose but can catch for a moment.
While I was using the internet as a catalyst to form my ideas, I realised that many believe it is important to preserve a child's sense of wonder. Strangely there seems less material on how adults might recover the sense of wonder that has been lost. In spirituality, wonder seems to be confined to experience and specifically to developing intimacy with God in the aesthetic beauty of the created world. I'm OK with this if this includes a way of seeing and maintains a difference between creator and created. But it feels limited and dry conceptually even if it is rich experientially. Wonder has cognitive dimensions. Wonder in children is a wide-eyedness, they see almost what is there because there is an uncluttered uninhibited clarity which becoming adult removes. But I think adult wonder will have something in common with a child's wonder such as a similarity in seeing but it is not qualitatively the same. A child's wonder is infectious and adults and especially parents can catch a moment of it. But it is rarer for an adult to pass it onto a child or another adult!
This initially seems to run counter to my maxim that sincerity is not enough, proficiency is required. We cannot return to our childhood but we can be like children and learn to look and see in a similar way. Perhaps if our proficiency in wonder could make wonder contagious.
