"Yet each mystery explained, as the science-loving Pope Francis would say, builds the case for God.  It's a case I came to understand, to feel it and see it, only after I'd allowed myself to be amazed."

     So said columnist and writer Timothy Egan in his newest book,  A Pilgrimage to Eternity:  From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith.  Have you ever been amazed?  To be amazed is to experience that which you did not expect, to bump into something you did not think you would see.  It is to be pushed outside the boundaries of what you thought possible:  to be thrust into a new way of thinking about the possibilities of existence.
     Although we strive mightily in this modern age to forswear any possibility of miracles or the supernatural, we nevertheless live as if we do:  we love being amazed.  We love being startled, enlightened, or overwhelmed with a new insight or experience.  And I wonder what this says about us.  Are we, as Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant might say, creatures of the noumenal daily grappling with the phenomenal, beings of materiality wrestling with presences immaterial?  Or we, as twentieth century philosopher A. J. Ayers averred, people who should ipso facto reject anything that we cannot with language understand?
     To be amazed, it seems, is necessarily to assent to the possibility, perhaps the reality, of a mystifying but comprehensible unseen.  It is to agree that life is more than what it, materially speaking, appears to be.
     And to embrace the wonder of what this holds.