On Living in Wonder
Reflections on Rod Dreher's Latest Offering
This Substack space is not intended to be a platform for book reviews. Drawing from the Christian mystics, my focus here is the interior life of the modern seeker—those attempting to trace divine presence in spreadsheets, sidewalk encounters, and the quiet, sleepless anguish of 3 a.m. clarity. But I just finished reading a book that does not disrupt this inquiry but rather clarifies it, deepens it, and in its own way companions it. So, I thought I’d drop a few reflections on this work – Living in Wonder by Rod Dreher – in between essays.
I finished the book just as I’d drafted an essay on how the ‘holy’ is not elsewhere—that God is not waiting for us, not only in the rarefied air of spiritual experiences, but also hidden in the very things we often rush through or ignore. That was my last post. And as I began sketching the next—on the surprising grace of surrendering the intellect (You Won’t Think Your Way to God)—I realized Dreher’s quiet pilgrimage through wonder had, in a way, stitched the two together.
The overarching message is that holy is not elsewhere. It does not reside in a higher stratum of consciousness, accessible only through rigorous mystical ascent. It is here, embedded in the quotidian, shimmering beneath the surface of the most forgettable moments.
The sacramental imagination, long eclipsed by secular disenchantment, is what Dreher quietly rehabilitates. And in doing so, he joins the tradition of those who insist that the world is not profane, only unrecognized. The woman lighting candles in a stone chapel. The father raising children amid the psychic violence of modern culture. The monk in silence, radiating nothing but fidelity. Each becomes, in Dreher’s hands, not a symbol but a sacrament—an instantiated theophany.
Dreher’s book is not a theological treatise, nor is it a political lament. It is a record of metaphysical reorientation. His prose, stripped of polemic and posturing, traces the interior journey of a man who has stepped beyond commentary into contemplation. The shift is not merely stylistic—it is ontological. What Dreher has rendered is less a spiritual memoir than a phenomenology of attention, a sustained act of beholding in a world that trains us to consume, categorize, and move on.
There is something especially intriguing about this turn—particularly for a man whose vocation has, for decades, been to diagnose the metaphysical failures of the West with surgical precision. To be clear, he still does this on his Substack and in the European Conservative. But in this book, he lays down the scalpel. The implication is as theologically profound as it is existentially costly: one must relinquish mastery in order to participate in mystery.
And this reorientation is not purely devotional—it has existential and vocational implications. What would it mean for the modern executive, the entrepreneur, the policy maker, to live this way? Not in false asceticism or pious withdrawal, but in wonder—in a readiness to see God in the difficult colleague, in the day’s failures, in the unglamorous tasks. This is the mystic’s quiet revolution: to choose wonder over cynicism, presence over distraction, silence over noise.
As he leans in to this, Dreher draws unmistakably from the lineage of Christian mysticism—monastic silence, apophatic surrender, the dialectic between absence and presence that animates the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite as much as it does Saint Paisios of his own Eastern Orthodox tradition.
In fact, Dreher's work corresponds deeply with the teachings of the Christian mystics—both East and West—and others referenced in this space. The hesychasts of Mount Athos, who whispered the Jesus Prayer into the silence of their cells, taught that God is not found by fleeing the world, but by becoming still enough to see Him in all things. The Western mystics—John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich—spoke of the soul’s painful detachment from false comforts so it might become vulnerable enough to receive divine presence, even in darkness.
To be sure, Dreher's shift from public intellectual to spiritual pilgrim in this work is not a renunciation of intellect, but a reordering of its place in the hierarchy of knowing. One poignant example: a confessor once advised him, not with lofty theology or therapeutic insight, but with simple, time-worn wisdom—take your prayer rope, and pray the Jesus Prayer over and over again. Not to understand it. Not to feel anything. Just to pray it, like a heartbeat. “It’s to distract your mind from thinking,” the priest told him bluntly.
The line lands like a quiet rebuke to the modern mind, which clutches at thoughts as if salvation could be reasoned into existence. It is a strange medicine, almost offensive in its simplicity. But the old mystics would recognize it instantly. They knew that the intellect, unchecked, becomes a tyrant—looping endlessly in search of answers that only love can deliver. And so the rope becomes not a tool of thought, but a rescue line from it.
It seems like a strange prescription for a man so steeped in ideas. And yet, Dreher obeyed. In doing so, he joined a long line of mystics who knew that the intellect—brilliant as it may be—can become a prison when it is not tempered by love.
The intellect, for all its brilliance, is susceptible to hypertrophy; it inflates itself in pursuit of control, forgetting that God is not an object of thought but the source of all intelligibility. In praying, not thinking, Dreher aligns himself with a long tradition of thinkers who knew precisely when to stop thinking.
Living in Wonder is not a manual for the modern Christian, nor is it a lament for the passing of Christendom, though it touches both notes. It is a record of vision—of learning to see again in a world grown numb to mystery. Dreher allows the sacred to shimmer in unlikely places: in the incense-thick air of Orthodox monasteries, in the quiet heroism of ordinary believers, in the whispered echoes of a civilization that still remembers the sound of prayer, though it has forgotten the words.
And it is not a book of theory or argument, but of attention. And what he pays attention to—through candle smoke, silence, repetition, and raw interior honesty—is exactly what I’ve been trying to put language around in recent days.
The book, at its heart, is a meditation on awe—not as an emotional high or aesthetic thrill, but as a disposition of the soul. Awe, Dreher shows us, is not a momentary spark but a way of being, a stance before the world that opens us to the divine. It is, in the language of the mystics, the beginning of real vision. The modern world trains us to see utility, not beauty; information, not meaning. But the mystic sees with another kind of eye—what the desert fathers called the nous, the eye of the heart. Living in Wonder is a book about restoring that sight.
For those of us who live in the so-called real world—in offices, on Zoom calls, in boardrooms where numbers outshout meaning—Living in Wonder offers something radical: permission to see differently. In one striking passage, Dreher describes a friend who, though steeped in finance and secular metrics, has cultivated a practice of praying the hours. The friend marks the day not by earnings reports, but by sacred time. This, Dreher implies, is a quiet rebellion: to remember God in the midst of metrics, to let silence punctuate the algorithm.
Living in Wonder (like The Benedict Option), is no retreatist vision. Dreher is not calling us to flee the marketplace, but to sanctify it. The mystic is not one who escapes the world, but one who sees through it—who learns to look at a spreadsheet and know that it, too, can be part of the divine dance, if offered in love and truth. The Eastern fathers call this theosis—the transformation of the ordinary into the eternal by the presence of grace. In the West, we might simply say: God is here, too.
Again and again, Living in Wonder returns us to this truth: that the holy is not elsewhere. It is here, if we will only see. The old woman lighting candles in a Serbian chapel. The young father raising his children in a hostile culture. The lonely monk praying into the silence. All of them are icons—not in the decorative sense, but in the mystical one: windows through which eternity shines.
This, in fact, was the very point of my last post—the idea that we are always tempted to imagine God as distant, elsewhere, tucked away in monasteries or visions, when in truth, He waits in the fabric of the ordinary. The challenge is not to find Him but to learn how to see. Our routines, our meetings, our burdensome tasks are not in opposition to the spiritual life. They are its raw material. The mistake is not in living in the world—it’s in living blind to the world’s secret depth. Dreher’s book is a kind of quiet trumpet, reminding us that the burning bush has always been near, if only we had taken off our shoes.
Too often we seek spiritual experiences as if they were appointments to be scheduled or mountaintops to be scaled. But the mystics remind us that God’s preferred terrain is low and hidden. The smell of bread, the weight of a child in your arms, the long silence after failure. These are not distractions from the sacred. They are the sacred, in disguise. To live in wonder is not to seek magic but to uncover what has always been shimmering just beneath the surface.
In a time when so many public voices double down on certainty, Dreher does something braver: he opens a window into interior transformation. He does not deny the ruin of the world—but he refuses to let that ruin have the last word. And that refusal, born of wonder rather than rage, may be the most subversive act of all.
Living in Wonder functions as a kind of secular dark night—a text that leads not to answers, but to surrender. Not to control, but to receptivity. The same surrender that Teresa of Avila described when she said that God “walks among the pots and pans,” or that Brother Lawrence practiced when he scrubbed dishes in the monastery kitchen and felt himself nearer to God than in formal prayer.
This is a book for those who have grown tired of strategies. It is for those who suspect, perhaps in their quietest moments, that success will never satisfy, and that the soul was made for more. It is not a loud book. It is not meant to be. But if you let it, it will whisper something ancient and true into the aching modern heart: Behold, He is here. Even now. Even in this.
But perhaps what moved me just as much as the metaphysical resonance was the vulnerability. Living in Wonder is not written from a position of triumph, but of exile. Dreher does not hide his wounds; he writes from them. The book pulses with the unspoken grammar of grief—personal, cultural, ecclesial. And yet, he does not yield to despair. He transfigures it. He becomes, like the mystics and ordinary folks he draws from, someone who walks through loss and emerges not with answers, but with attention. In a world collapsing under the weight of its own cleverness, that is a far rarer and braver gift.
And so, though I don’t intend on pausing here often to reflect on books, this one felt less like an interruption and more like a companion—a voice walking beside me as I continue tracing the thread between seeing God in the ordinary and surrendering the tyranny of overthinking. If my last post pointed to the sacredness of what’s right in front of us, and the next will press deeper into the strange grace of giving the intellect its proper rest, then Living in Wonder might just be the stillness between the two. A quiet middle. A breath. And maybe, like all true wonder, a beginning.