Eric Clayton’s Book, Where Wonder Leads
If you are a fan of stories, then I suspect you will quickly become a fan of Eric Clayton’s Where Wonder Leads: Finding God Through Fairy Tales, Myth, and Contemplative Prayer.
I certainly did.
Part of the sheer enjoyment of reading this book was discovering what—or who—I might encounter next. Wizards and witches, fairies and elves, knights and orcs, unicorns and dragons, phoenixes and the undead all make appearances. So do magic stones, walking sticks, words of power, and many of the other mysterious objects that have populated myths, legends, fairy tales, and fantasy stories for generations.
But Eric isn’t simply inviting us to revisit stories we enjoyed as children or the fantasy worlds we continue to enjoy as adults. He invites us to step inside them—and then asks us to pay attention to what happens there.
That is where Where Wonder Leads becomes something much more than an entertaining exploration of storytelling.
Across 35 guided meditations, Eric uses the characters, creatures, objects, and situations of the fantastic to awaken our religious imagination. A wizard can become an invitation to consider who is calling us toward adventure. A dragon might cause us to confront what lurks within our own lives. An unexpected object, mysterious creature, or word of power can invite us to notice something about ourselves, God, or the world around us that we might otherwise overlook.
I loved the variety of the stories and images Eric uses because I never quite knew where the next meditation was going to take me. Yet underneath all that imaginative variety is a consistent invitation to Pay attention. Be curious. Allow yourself to wonder.
In a world that gradually hardens us, that invitation is more important than it might initially appear because disappointment can become pessimism, and experience can become cynicism. And familiarity with the people and things around us can cause us to stop noticing the extraordinary hiding within the ordinary. And the result is death to our souls because mystery becomes something to explain away rather than something that is capable of drawing us deeper into the essence of life.
Yet Eric challenges that tendency by asking us to recover something we often leave behind as we grow older—our willingness to wonder.
As I wrote in my initial Amazon review, Eric uses myths, folk tales, and popular culture to help us “break open the hardened shells of our cynicism and pessimism.” That remains one of my strongest impressions of the book. Wonder isn’t presented as an escape from reality. Instead, it becomes a means of seeing reality more clearly.
And this is where Eric’s grounding in Ignatian spirituality becomes especially powerful.
St. Ignatius understood the tremendous capacity of the imagination to draw us into an encounter with God. We don’t simply think about a story; we enter into it. We notice what surrounds us and encounter the characters and are attentive to our reactions. Then somewhere within that imaginative experience, we make sure to stop and listen for what God might be saying.
Where Wonder Leads takes your contemplative instinct and lets it roam through the landscapes of myth, folklore, fairy tale, and fantasy, and the bottom line is that it works.
Dragons, phoenixes, knights, witches, elves, and magic stones might seem unlikely companions for prayer, but in Eric’s hands, they become doorways for us to step through so we can ask questions we might not otherwise ask and explore parts of ourselves we might otherwise ignore. Most importantly though, we are encouraged to become attentive to mystery again.
The result is a book that is playful without being frivolous and imaginative without losing its spiritual purpose. Although I enjoyed the stories themselves, I appreciated even more where Eric allowed those stories to lead me. Because ultimately, they led me WAY beyond the wizard, the fairy, the dragon, or the enchanted object.
They led me toward the places where I had stopped wondering, stopped imagining, and, sadly, stopped expecting God to surprise me. But these stories and meditations reawakened those places and brought me to the very personal journey of transformation to which the Lord continually beckons each of us.
Ultimately, they led me back to my own life—and they can do the same for you, too.
I highly recommend Where Wonder Leads, particularly for anyone who loves stories, fantasy, mythology, or imaginative prayer. But I would also recommend it to someone whose spiritual life has begun to feel overly familiar or predictable.
Open the book. Enter the story. Follow the wizard. Face the dragon. Pick up the walking stick. Listen for the words of power.
And then pay attention to where your imagination takes you. You just may discover that wonder has been leading you toward God all along.
Get your copy of Where Wonder Leads