CALVIN and Hobbes was a newspaper 'funnies' comic strip by Bill Watterson which I grew up reading. Actually, it formed some of my first reading experiences. I remember bugging my parents for a new book (a set of strips) everytime we went out of town and visited the bookstore that carried them. Something about the strip drew me to it in a way which Peanuts or Garfield did not. I almost cried when the last new Calvin and Hobbes strip was printed.
Calvin, if you recall, was a self-centered, bratty child with a vicious imagination and a strangely profound, philosophical reflectiveness. Hobbes, his tiger friend, was a stuffed animal which inexplicably interacted with Calvin like another human being, seeming as alive and exciting to him as any best friend could be.
In retrospect, I realize that one of the major draws of the comic strip (no pun intended) was the ability of Calvin and Hobbes to capture childlike wonder. Many strips revolved around Calvin's rapacious imagination. He took trips to Mars. He envisioned himself as a spiffy space-man. He visited dinosaurs. He transmogrified himself and his furry companion. He fought crime with the aid of superpowers. Summers were filled with inexpicable games of Calvin-ball, terrorizing the girl next door and babysitters, and intrepidly exploring the wildnerness. For the little boy and his tiger, there was always something new. Life was exciting and wonderful.
Looking back, I think to myself "yeah, well wait'll he gets his first job" or "wait'll he has to stand in line at the DMV" or "wait'll he has to pay his taxes". Well, it's entirely unfair of me to think that. Of course Calvin had his moments of undiluted boredom: his schooldays.
Yet even at school, Calvin's mind turned the mundane into the magical.
Calvin's hometown was somewhere on the continental US. Myself having grown up in Hawaii, I was unfamiliar with the things unique to Calvin's life on the 'mainland', such as autumn, snowfall, camping beside a lake and loooong trips to the beach. For me, these things which I had never known served to heighten the magical nature of Calvin and Hobbes, and made that sensation of childlike wonder real.
But what is childlike wonder? Why do we never say adult-like wonder? Doesn't that even sound a little droll--maybe a little raunchy--saying that: adult-like wonder? There's a reason we don't associate wonder with adults. It is a skill they no longer possess, except probably in rare exceptions.
Wonder about the world, the feeling within oneself that everything is magical and special and new, is something that an adult somewhere drops along the path of growing-up, somewhere along a path strewn with college papers, taxes, job hunting, finance managing, work and family and standing in line at the DMV.
We never say adult-like wonder because adults have lost their sense of wonder about the world. To the grown-up, things are no longer new and exciting. We've been there. We've done that. We've seen it before.
When I, at the age of seventeen, moved with my family to the continental United States and experienced the changing colors of Fall, snow on the mountains and actual lakes and long car-rides to the beach... sure, they were fresh and exciting at first. The first time it snowed outside my house, my brothers and I freaked out. It might have been raining money for all the noise we made.
But it wore off.
It put a damper on my excitement the first time I had to drive through snow to get to work. Each subsequent time it snowed outside of my house, my enthusiasm waned. I had already seen snow last year! What else ya got?
In a sense, this can be one of the most depressing things about growing-up. A child can be perfectly content with a simple action figure or toy car. An adult needs far more to even just relax. An adult needs a lengthy vacation or an expensive car or a sizeable flat-screen tv to truly allow themselves to be content, and then only for a little while. As we grow older, not only does excitement come less often, but it's a guest that leaves early, well before the party's over, leaving us wondering where it has gone off to inside ourselves.
But is this a negative aspect of growing-up? Need it be? Is it an unsolvable problem of becoming an adult that somewhere along the way wonder is lost for the sake of a view of the world that is mundane but manageable?
It is not a negative aspect of becoming an adult.
The capacity for a man or a woman to appreciate grows as they grow. A child can appreciate pots and pans banging together to make noise, but he cannot necessarily appreciate an opera, a symphony or free-form jazz. An adult may lose wonder, but that's only because it takes far more of something extraordinary to bring wonder racing back.
This comes around to a Christian thought right here.
Do you ever hear someone say that Heaven sounds a little boring? I mean sure the gift of flight or eternal life might be exciting. But sitting around on clouds all day and playing little, golden harps like the fat babies in all those old 'renaissancy' paintings... boy, that sounds dull. And for eternity? Thanks but no thanks.
I was that person. Oddly enough, when I as a child was excited about the world, I had not yet cultivated an excitement for heaven. When I was eight in Sunday school, I pictured heaven as a dirty room in a cave with a bunch of old pots stashed in a corner. Pretty blah.
And yet, it is precisely Heaven, more specifically the One who makes Heaven what it is--God Himself--which makes for the only ultimate source of wonder once the world has become mundane. The capacity of an adult to appreciate and to wonder increases as they grow older, but God is a measureless depth of wonderment. He is, after all, infinite in knowledge and power, limitless in graciousness and love and forgiveness. He has crafted a plan for all of human history. He has built out of nothing the very particles of space. He is the source of light and truth, of our souls and our minds, of logic and of reason, of everything.
This is where the real crime comes in: if you're a church-goer especially, you hear this sort of God-talk all the time. And if you're anywhere in America, you're inundated in a culture which is full of "Christianese"--Christian vernacular, jargon and phraseology. Part of the culture is the common things that are known about God. And we, crazy we, can talk about God raising His Son from the dead, or God becoming a human being, or God creating everything ex nihilo, out of nothing, without even batting an eye. I mean, what is wrong with us?
That's the most bizarre thing in the world, to speak of the most unique Being in existence as if he is as common a thing as a trip to the grocery store. Heck, I've seen people lulled to sleep by sermons espouting miracles and mysteries the like of which should shock people with their sheer rarity and absolute inanity. People don't walk on water. People don't get up from the grave. People don't ascend into the sky.
Either we don't believe it at all or we're not listening.
How we ought to realize that our long, lost capacity to wonder has not been lost at all. It rather has a place in which it can be found. Or, I should say, it has a Person in which it can be found. A man or a woman can, if they truly allow themselves to, think on God the same way that a child marvels over their first trip to the city or to the ocean. God is so far beyond us. He is not simply some old man sitting up on a cloud somewhere.
Any rational realization about who and what God truly is, if it is believed, will produce a tremendous change in how you view life.
This was the final strip of Calvin and Hobbes Watterson ever produced, printed on December 31st 1995. In it, the boy and the tiger sail away for adventure and wonder, espouting how fresh and magical the world appears.
There is a way in which the Christian can live in this world and a way in which he or she can think about God that will make all of this life seem like an adventure. Jesus Christ once said "Behold, I make all things new" (Revelation 21:5) All things. There's a lot that fits into those two words. Is it possible that He meant our lives as well?
If you're familiar with the Bible, you might remember that Christ's first miracle was turning water into wine. I think that has bearing on what I'm saying. Water gives life but hey, let's face it... water is kinda boring. It's dull. It's flat. Where's the fizz? Where's the excitement? Now wine on the other hand--and please don't presume that I'm approving getting drunk--wine was the excitement of the anicent world. Turning water into wine is just how God is willing to turn our lives from mundane into exciting, from something that just keeps going into something that cherishes every moment. And He can do that through Himself. God's eternal and bottomless nature is the only source left for wonder.
So are you willing to think about God in such a way that life seems fresh and new again? Are you ready to come to Him as a child?
Are you ready to reclaim your childlike wonder?
~norton
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