We live in a cynical age. Ironic detachment is the norm in popular culture and increasingly in our everyday lives.

Many if not most of us seem to have lost the capacity to marvel at the miracles around us. We are so busy getting through the day that we don’t stop to realize that the fact that we have a day at all is a miracle in itself.

We have lost our capacity for awe – for standing back, as the dictionary says, in “reverence, fear and wonder, caused by something majestic, sublime, sacred, etc.” We are jaded and unimpressed.

Even worse, when we observe someone with a childlike receptivity to the wonders of everyday life, we tend to dismiss that person as hopelessly naive or sentimental.

Surely this saddens the creator of the universe and author of life, who made it all for us to enjoy.

We probably think the word “awesome” has been overused in the modern lexicon, often describing – usually by youthful voices – some pleasant but essentially mundane recognition or realization. But is it really overuse to describe even ordinary dimensions of life and the world around us as awe-inspiring, given their source?

The popular contemporary Christian song, “Our God is an Awesome God” is in the tradition of centuries of hymns that have praised the glory, majesty and grandeur of God and his creation. Such an attitude begins with an open heart and a sense of gratitude, both of which too often elude us.

One of the surest signs that we are not living as God intended is when we have neither the time nor the inclination to ponder the mysteries and marvels of life.

That God wants people to enjoy him and his creation is at the heart of Christian faith and theology. The baptismal service in the Book of Common Prayer asks God to give the person being baptized “the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.” Usually that person is an infant or a child, and the implicit hope is that as he or she grows into adulthood that gift will not be lost.

The Christian writer Frederick Buechner describes the quiet stillness of the people, even previously noisy children, when he first saw the giant California redwoods as part of a tour group. The quiet was automatic – it didn’t have to be directed or enforced – because it was a natural response of awe and wonder. “Oaks and ashes, maples and chestnuts and elms you had seen for as long as you could remember,” he writes, “but never until this moment had you so much as dreamed what a Tree really was.”

What applies to God’s natural creation, Buechner continues, is that much more appropriate when pondering the wonder of God-made-man.

Writes Buechner: “ ‘Behold the man,’ “ Pilate said when he led Jesus out where everybody could see him. He can’t have been too much to look at after what they’d done to him by then, but my guess is that, even so, there suddenly fell over that mob a silence as awed as ours in the forest when for the first time in their lives they found themselves looking at a Human Being.”

Faith, it has been said, is a gift. Some have to work harder at it than others. But faith in an “awesome God” has to begin with the capacity for awe.

The appropriate response to God’s creation is wonder and gratitude. The appropriate response to God’s incarnation in the one true Human Being is the same.

Retrieving the gift and rediscovering the wonder when the world says everything’s a sham is at the core of the Christian journey.