Cedric Pisegna - Live with Wonder (01/23/2026)
Welcome to «Live With Passion». I’m Father Cedric Pisegna. I am so glad that you welcome me into your house or wherever you’re watching this program. I wanna talk to you today about wonder, living with wonder. This comes from Psalm 139. It’s a Psalm of David and he writes, «You have formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,» he’s talking to God. «I praise you, because you are fearful and wonderful; wonderful are your works». There are peak moments in the Bible, especially in the Gospels, for example, when Jesus is transfigured, when he walks on water, when he calms the storm, and then of course at the Resurrection, and the disciples at these peak moments, they are filled with wonder and amazement and joy.
And it’s the same in life, for example, at the birth of a baby. You might see the parents in the hospital laughing and smiling, and the relatives are there full of amazement. I saw a rocket ship that went up, it was called the Virgin Galactic, and it sends people into outer space, not way into space, but just beyond the earth’s atmosphere. And they’re weightless, and I saw the ecstasy and the joy and the wonder in their eyes and on their faces because of what was happening. We have wonders all around us. It may not be outer space or birth of a new baby or the transfiguration of Jesus or the Resurrection of Jesus, but we all have wonders all around us. Life is a wonder. But for some reason, we can live jaded, take things for granted, be oblivious to the miracles all around us and going on in us, and we can live that way and it’s not really exciting and life is just kind of bland and ordinary.
I took a Sunset flight one time and I was up on a jet airliner, commercial airliner, and I knew the sun was setting outside the right window, and I was sitting in the aisle seat and I was craning my neck to take a look to try to see the sunset because I love to watch sunrises and sunsets. And as I was looking out the window, I noticed that many of the windows, people were pulling down the shades, I guess it was getting in their eyes, and I was thinking to myself: How can they pull down the shades? Something beautiful, something wondrous is happening right outside the window. And I think that’s the way it is with life. Oftentimes, people shut the shades of life, they live jaded, they’re not aware, and they’re not living in awe. And I want to help you through this program, not to shut the shades, but to open the shades, to become aware, and to live with awe.
I pray that your eyes will be open, your ears will hear, and your heart will be open to the wonders of God all around us. This saying is attributed to Albert Einstein, one of the smartest people that ever lived of course. He said there’s only two ways to live, as though nothing is a miracle, and the other way to live as though everything is a miracle. And I love that because, really, when you think about it, it’s your choice. You can live as if everything is just everything, or you can live as if things are miraculous. Right before filming this episode, Houston was hit by a storm, it’s called a derecho storm, it’s like an inland hurricane, and we got hit at our retreat center pretty bad. We lost power for five days. A tree fell on our residence.
I’m now displaced for a little while. I’m living at another place at the retreat center. And because of the tree falling on our residence, there’s bugs in there now and there’s all kinds of construction, and as I said, we lost the power, I had to move out for a while. There’s two ways of looking at that. Number one is: this is a disaster, it’s a problem, it’s awful, it caused a million people to be without power. The second way to look at it is, this is the way I’m trying to look at it is, thank you, God, that I wasn’t in that bedroom when that tree fell on our house. And I go into that bedroom quite often, it’s a guest room. Sometimes I eat in there and that tree was right over the desk where I eat my breakfast.
There’s two ways to look at your life. Things are hard and I’ve got a lot of problems and there’s difficulties and there’s tribulations. Yeah, they’re part and parcel to everybody. Or, I’m blessed. God has touched me. He loves me. He’s taking me through. And I want you to think about the way you’re living your life. Are you shutting the shades, or are you looking at the wonders? And there’s so many wonders. The odds of you not being born are far greater than the odds of you being born. It’s like hitting the lottery, being given life. God of course, has called us into life. We saw that from Psalm 139. It was God who formed our inward being. God knit us together in our mother’s womb. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. It’s a wonder just that we’re alive. We’ll start right there.
Wonder is a feeling of awe, of astonishment, amazement, admiration caused by something beautiful or unexpected, like being given life, and awe can lead to the fear of God. The definition of the fear of God is, number one, you’re afraid that he’s gonna judge you or punish you. You’re afraid to do something wrong. But the fear of God takes on another meaning, too, when it comes to amazement and wonder and awe. You have to understand that the fear of the Lord is all that. We want to be pleasing to God and we reverence God for his awesomeness because God is amazing. The human body is a miracle. God created us this way through his wisdom. He had probably many choices about the way he could have created us, maybe with four arms or four eyes, I don’t know, but this is the way he created us and it’s a miracle. There’s so much going on in your body right now and you’re not even thinking about it.
For example, our senses. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. You ever see on YouTube videos or sometimes on television, a deaf person will… they have a creative device and they can hear for the first time and the joy on their face? Or somebody that’s blind was suddenly given sight somehow by a doctor and they are full of joy, ecstatic? We just take these things for granted. How about breathing? We breathe automatically, we’re not even thinking about it. Our heart beats every second. I read that there are, this is hard to believe, I googled it a couple times to make sure, we have 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries in our body. That goes around the earth twice, plus another 10,000 miles.
In every human body, seven trillion nerves. Study the human brain sometime and the functioning. Speech, memory, movement, thinking, reasoning, learning, emotions, senses, all controlled by the brain and we don’t know how. We are a walking miracle. And then I was thinking about our environment. We live in a massive, huge, immense environment. Certainly the earth, 25,000 miles around, our solar system is part of our galaxy, and our galaxy is one of a trillion galaxies in the universe. Wow. It’s massive, immense, huge, and we sometimes don’t even think about it. Creation gives us a corresponding idea about who God is. For example, when I look at the ocean, see people surfing, see people swimming, see people fishing, when I look at the ocean, though, I look a little deeper. I see the immense, massive, infinite seemingly ocean.
See, beauty awakens us. That’s why we like to go to national parks or other places, because beauty awakens our senses to the wonders all around us. I love to watch sunrises and sunsets, go to national parks. I’ve been to the Grand Canyon, maybe some of you have too. You look at the immense Grand Canyon and you just stand there with wonder. I remember first time I went there I got goose bumps as I looked out. Those goose bumps are the Holy Spirit. Just the beauty of it all. God has sculpted all this over time. Be a connoisseur of life. It’s all around us. Life is beautiful and sculpted and wonderful in its design.
We call it intelligent design. God designed it this way. For example, I remember some time back I went to the three and a half hours west of us, west of Austin, even, west of Houston. There was a solar eclipse going on and I wanted to be right in the path of it. And I got there and stayed at my friend’s house. And during the solar eclipse, what happens is the moon blocks out the sun exactly, exactly blocks out the light. It’s like the moon was placed right over the sun perfectly and that doesn’t just happen. That’s intelligent design. That’s God winking at us to have faith. It’s amazing. I went online to the James Webb telescope Facebook site, and there’s different people with different views online, and one of them said the massive universe makes religion something obscure.
Religion doesn’t even matter. I think the opposite way. The massive universe proclaims the glory of God, that’s what the Psalm says. The book of Wisdom says that it gives us a corresponding idea about who God is. There’s two ways of looking at life, folks, as I was saying. Saint Thomas Aquinas said, «To a non-believer, no explanation is possible, but to a believer no explanation is necessary». Two ways of looking at life, like nothing is a miracle, or everything is a miracle, and I want you to see your life as miraculous. Sometimes, like I say, you get bored and jaded and shut the shades of life. May God open your eyes and open your ears and open your heart. It was Saint Augustine that talked about us and he said, «People go abroad to wonder at the heights of the mountains, the waves of the sea, the courses of the rivers, the compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, but they pass by themselves without wondering».
When we talk about miracles, yeah, the mountains and the rivers and the oceans and the stars, but what about you? As I said, the odds of you not being born were far more than the odds of you being born. But yet God knit you together in your mother’s womb and gave you life. Went on a retreat one time, it was at Big Sur, California. We’re talking about creation and contemplation and how creation really shows us the glory of God. And I was on retreat when I was there. I remember it was the middle of the night, about 3 in the morning, and I looked up at the stars and I could see the milk of the Milky Way. My mouth just dropped, remember what I said? That beauty leads to appreciation and wonder and contemplation.
And as I looked at those stars, it was as if God spoke to me and he said, «Cedric, I am with you. I can help you». Because I had a dream, and my dream was to reach out beyond the walls of the church, to reach out to people that aren’t going to church. And the way to do that is through broadcast media, through television. But the problem is I didn’t have any money, didn’t have any contacts, and I didn’t have any programs, but I had this grandeur vision of the glory of God and that’s what gave me passion, wonder, beauty, creation, the wonder of my own being. You see, wonder leads to passion. And I say this all the time, don’t just live, live with passion, live with enthusiasm, live with wonder. Closer to earth, wanted to talk with you about flowers. We’re all very familiar with them. I love roses.
I started the program by talking about take time out to smell the roses. How about touching a rose? It feels so nice. Looking at a rose, beautiful colors. Do you know that there are 350,000 flowering plants on earth? That boggles the mind. How about animals? I know many of you have cats and dogs and parakeets and fish and all these different animals. Go to a zoo and enjoy, you’ll see all giraffes and elephants and lions and tigers. There’s 1.5 million species of animals. The earth is, Gerard Manley Hopkins said this, «The earth is charged with the glory of God». Animals and flowers and all these different things. Colors, sizes. I noticed something about a flamingo, a flamingo is a bird. Their knee doesn’t go forward like a human knee, it goes backwards. It’s like God winking at us and saying, «See, I can do anything I want. I can create anything any way I want to do it».
And he has. God is ingenious and has beautiful variety in what he has made in the species of animals and flowers and creation. Then I was thinking about the insect world. Think about it, that here in Houston you gotta be careful where you walk, especially when you’re playing golf, because there are insects everywhere, but they have these little mounds, these fire ants, and if you happen to step on them, those ants can crawl right up and they bite and they hurt. There’s fire ants, there’s mosquitoes, there’s gnats and flies and wasps and bees and butterflies. More than a million insects species, all different sizes and shapes and colors and… I talked a little bit about a flamingo.
What about all the birds? Blue jays and mockingbirds and robins and all these different birds, seagulls and eagles, and just the variety. The fish world. Think about the oceans and the rivers and the ponds and the lakes teeming with fish. I love to snorkel. When I go snorkeling, I kind of float. One time I was in Mexico and I was snorkeling, one of my benefactors brought me down there, and I’m just kind of floating in the water and, looking into my left and to my right, there was some barracudas. I was a little put off by that, a little afraid about it, but they didn’t bother me and I didn’t bother them.
And as I was looking down, I see all these different fish of all different colors swimming beneath me. It caused wonder and joy. Beauty does that. See, beauty is truth, and truth is beauty, and it creates wonder. That’s what I’m hoping this program will do to you, that you will realize that your life is blessed. You are living in the midst of magnificence all around you, but as I demonstrated to you, within you, within you. Don’t go by yourself without wondering. You are fearfully and wonderfully made.
And beauty leads to worship. It should. That’s why we create church buildings with color and arches, and stained glass windows that sparkle, with icons and mosaics, with incense and music. For example, there’s the Duomo, a cathedral in Milan, with the most beautiful stained glass windows in the world. I’ve been there, I’ve studied in Italy, and such beautiful churches they have there. And Saint Peter’s Basilica, the major church of the Catholic Church where many of the Masses, midnight Mass comes from, and Easter Mass, the Pope oftentimes presiding there. Saint Peter’s Basilica, so beautiful. Bernini’s columns, Michelangelo’s works like the, «Pietà,» frescoes, sculptures, paintings, all kinds of beautiful works that have been done.
Right next to the Saint Peter’s Basilica is the Vatican Museum. And if you ever go there, there’s all kinds of lines outside because everybody wants to go in and see. And the reason why they want to go in and see is because, again, it creates wonder. The magnificence, the massiveness of it all creates wonder, which leads to worship, which leads to an appreciation of life. Vatican Museum, been there a number of times, 70,000 different works, 70,000. Old Bibles and artwork and statues and galleries of maps, paintings by Da Vinci and Raphael and Caravaggio. Then, right next to it, the Sistine Chapel. It’s where they choose the Pope. Michelangelo’s, «Creation,» up on the ceiling, Michelangelo’s, «Last Judgment,» in the sanctuary wall. It was Maya Angelou who said, «Life is not measured by the Amount of breaths that you take. But by the moments that take your breath away».
I’ve talked about many different wonders, but I’ve also talked about ordinary things like fish and birds and artwork. I’ve talked about insects and I’ve talked about you. The bottom line is, is that wonders are all around us and within us. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Do not shut the shades of life. Don’t be bored, rather, live with passion. People are so bored, it seems. They need entertainment, they’re always on their iPhones, and I’m not against that of course. You’re watching TV, or you’re listening by the radio right now. That’s good. That’s one of the ways that the gospel is transmitted. But the bottom line is, is that some people are spending ten hours a day on their iPhone or television. That’s too much. People are bored.
What you have to do is be curious about life, be interested, live with wonder, think and meditate and read. Reading broadens your mind, opens you up to the world. It’s like opening the shade of the window so you can see what’s really out there. You broaden your horizons. Travel, explore, get interested in different things, and it’s amazing what’s out there. I keep a journal and I write down places where I’ve been, I even write down my golf game, write down my spiritual events, things that I’m doing at that time in my life. That’s a way of treasuring life. Life is precious. The Bible calls it the indescribable gift. Be invested, give yourself to life.
Live with passion. Don’t be bored. Life is too majestic and too wonderful. Be filled with wonder. And wonder should point us to the source of it all. Yes, we are wonderfully made, but fearful and wonderful is the one who made us. Creation proclaims the glory of God and points to God who created it all. So everything in life, really, is pointing to the one who created us, sustains us, and gives us a glorious future. It’s a staggering universe that we’re a part of. Trillions of galaxies, a huge mass of earth filled with all kinds of different things. I haven’t even talked about the molecular world and how the atoms and the electrons and all that’s going on that the eye can’t see. We are part of a miraculous universe. Spend time in praise and thanksgiving.
And I find out that when I give thanks to God and praise to God, it opens me up, it opens that window shade, so that I can see even more. Open my eyes, Lord. Open my ears, open my heart that I may see. And that’s what we’re going to be doing for eternity. We’ll be enjoying the beauty of heaven, everything will be perfect, we’ll be filled with wonder and praise, and we will worship. Beauty and thanksgiving. Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, leads to thanksgiving, and it leads us to be aware and to awaken. There’s an acronym that I want to leave with you and that’s the acronym for AWE: Awareness, Wonder, Enthusiasm. As you are aware of your blessings and the miracle that you are, it leads to wonder, praise, and thanksgiving, and it leads to enthusiasm. You live a life that is fruitful and makes a difference. And that’s my prayer for you, that you won’t just live, but you’ll live with passion. And Almighty God bless you, amen.