Curios and Recovery: Is the World Short on Wonder?

A Cabinet of Wonders

Lucy stands before the wardrobe, fingers grazing the coats, something just beyond her understanding pulling her forward. Belle runs her hand along the spines of books, as if each one holds a world waiting to be opened. Harry watches as a brick wall gives way under careful taps. A small hobbit gathers maps and pipes and quiet treasures, not knowing they will lead him far beyond his door.

Across pages, across worlds, the stories we love begin on the threshold of wonder. 

And though a grand adventure lies ahead, it’s ushered in humbly – through a wardrobe, a library, some bricks, or even a trinket. Ordinary things. Things someone noticed and then gave themselves permission to pursue. 

These little marvels – what Tolkien called curios –  are rarely valuable in themselves, and yet they are rich with meaning. If you’ve kept a collection or a box of mementos, you know this to be true. These items contain multitudes. 

When we return to our cabinets of wonders, our curios become thresholds again – small openings into a deeper reality we so often overlook.

Our imagination.

The Sanctuary of Small Things

If you don’t already know her, she’s your soon-to-be favorite mystic. Teresa of Ávila, says the quiet part out loud:

“It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.”

Think of curios as entry points into your imagination – not an escape, but a doorway into a deeper reality. 

We do not cross over into this interior sanctuary by grasping. If you’re at all creative (and you exist, so you are), you already know this. Inspiration cannot be forced, it must be received. The muse awakens something in you, but only if you allow it. 

It is much the same in our relationship with the Lord. We cannot manufacture encounter. We simply receive it – a sudden, miraculous grace.

And more often than not, it is through the smallest things that this grace first arrives – just ask the Church. 

Curios form our capacity for wonder; the Church fulfills that capacity with truth. She does not merely preserve meaning, she bestows it. 

Sacramentals, relics, blessed objects – these are not merely meaningful because we have noticed them, but because grace has touched them. They do not simply point beyond themselves; they participate in what they signify.

If curios teach us how to see, sacramentals teach us that what we are seeing is real. Holy water. The Sign of the Cross. Rosaries. And so many more. 

And then there is the Eucharist. 

Set apart from curios and sacramentals alike. 

With curios, we assign meaning. With sacramentals, God gives meaning through the Church. In the Eucharist, God gives Himself – the truest sanctuary, not for a thing, but for a Person. 

Recovery

God chooses what we overlook. He hides Himself in the Ordinary. 

Bread and wine – simple sustenance – become Body and Blood. Not by discarding what they are, but by fulfilling them completely. 

And this is our calling too. The soul is invited into this same transformation – not by striving, but by allowing the Lord to enter fully, making something more of us than we could ever become on our own.

So, why don’t we see it? 

Perhaps because we have seen it too often. Like curios stuffed into unopened drawers, what once stirred wonder has been reduced to function and stripped of mystery. On this, Tolkien writes, “...we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.” 

This is why we need what he calls Recovery – a regaining of sight. 

And this is where story quietly enters in. Though it may seem paradoxical, we can best tell the truth with fiction. 

Fairy-stories – what we’d call fantasy – have a way of bypassing resistance. They slip past that part of us that wants to overanalyze or explain away what lies before us. They restore vision by making the ordinary extraordinary, awakening senses dulled by habit. They give form to invisible realities – good and evil, loss and redemption – and in doing so, incarnate truth. 

They engage imagination, not just intellect, inviting us into a secondary world so that we might return to our own with clearer sight. 

If you think about it, this is not a new method at all. It’s exactly what Jesus does in his parables. He used story – both veiled and revelatory – to share how exactly the Kingdom of God was at hand.

He Himself reached for ordinary objects as curios for the Kingdom. 

In mustard seeds that grow into something far greater than expected. In pearls of great price. In treasures hidden in fields and in leaving the many sheep to find the one. 

His parables do not simply explain truth, they allow us to encounter it. He draws us into experience before teaching us a lesson. He engages the imagination for the purpose of restoration. 

Let’s substitute “fantasy” for “parable” as Tolkien reflects: 

“Fantasy…does not destroy or even insult Reason…On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.”

Perhaps the world is not short on wonder after all. Perhaps we are all simply in need of recovery. 

A Sudden Miraculous Grace

Eucatastrophe. A sudden miraculous grace. 

Wholly unearned, this shift happens when wonder gives way to recovery – and then to Truth. 

Even our wonder is a gift, not something we generate. Our capacity to recollect, to imagine, to create, to perceive beauty is itself already grace at work. 

We would not even lift our gaze to God without grace first moving. Even our ability to respond to God is already a response to grace. 

And so, when we read stories and reach fairytale endings, it can be tempting to dismiss them as naive. But through the lens of eucatastrophe, something deeper is happening. 

There is a reason these moments feel both unexpected and strangely familiar. They echo something within us – a recognition that joy can break in, that what seemed lost can be restored, that things may actually turn toward the good. These endings do not deceive us; they remind us that God does act. 

We feel something when we read these endings – why? 

Because we are made for that kind of ending.  

A Place to Return 

Curios encourage us to grow into wonder – to not just eat at the table, but to suck the marrow from the bones. To glean life for all it has to offer. To see, smell, hear, taste, and touch the true nature of things. To enter into wardrobes and expect adventure. To pass through brick walls into magic worlds. To collect books, trinkets, and rings – knowing in our bones that the way they call us is only just the beginning. 

Our imagination is one of our most powerful God-given faculties. It is the sacred space where we become a child again; where encounter soars out to meet us. We haven’t lost wonder, God reaches out to us with grace again and again – to recover our vision, to transform it. 

The world is full of hidden altars – both ordinary and sacred. 

It is a full kitchen sink and the sky at dusk. The pause between finishing one task and beginning another. It is sunlight through trees and bare feet on grass. It is grief over gravestones and vows over rings. 

It is re-reading an old journal entry. A song heard anew. It is the midnight hour, holding a child in need of attunement. 

It is forgiveness. 

It is prayer books stacked on nightstands, only half-read. It is that single moment of clarity when an idea strikes, like it came from somewhere else entirely (because it did). 

It is rearranging a space, sensing something shift – it is allowing God to rearrange something in you. 

Hidden altars are not defined by the place itself, but by the posture we bring to them. Recovery is the art of kneeling at them once more – allowing, ultimately, for God to encounter us in our posture of receptivity, right where we are. 

The world has never been short on wonder; but, perhaps since the fall, with our vision distorted, we did lose our reverence. Curios teach us to notice. Recovery teaches us to return. Grace teaches us to receive. Hidden altars teach us to kneel. 

And so, this is the great invitation of the curios, the fairytales, the ordinary: God breaks through and we are called to respond. 

Love always invites a response.