The Loss of Wonder: Rollo May's Final Article (2025)

One of my earliest posts for the Rollo May Consortium consisted of a very brief piece entitled “The Mystery of Being” commemorating both May himself and, to the best of my knowledge, his last published article. Now that the consortium is attracting somewhat more readers (significantly more, it would seem, than subscribers to this point in time), I am reposting my essay along with a very late draft of May’s final article, The Loss of Wonder. This article was originally published in Cathexis, a student/faculty publication of the California School of Professional Psychology where I first met and studied with the man who became, almost at once, a revered mentor and eventual friend. This essay is included here as a PDF insert complete with Rollo’s handwritten notes affording a glimpse of a writing and interactive style reflective of what he had called “the joy of thinking”: a final reverie of a sagely man who knew his days on the planet were numbered. Rollo May was an extraordinarily complex human being. His essential largesse (a largesse inseparable from significant inner strife) and concern for the greater world is on full display in a parting meditation I have always found exquisitely moving.

The Mystery of Being

“Not understanding although they have heard, they are like the deaf. The proverb bears witness to them: ‘Present yet absent.’”—Heraclitus

“Let us then know our limits; we are something, but we are not all. What existence we have conceals from us the knowledge of first principles which spring from the nothing, while the pettiness of that existence hides from us the sight of the infinite.”—Blaise Pascal, Pensees

“Every mystery is itself like a river, which flows into the Eternal, as into a sea.”— Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being

In his final paper, author, psychoanalyst, and existential-humanist therapist Rollo May chose to address the loss of wonder in the modern world, not least of all in the helping professions. May was a revered friend and mentor of mine, and I find myself thinking oftentimes about this final message of his. If his usual eloquence somewhat faltered in his waning years upon suffering a series of minor strokes, May’s vision and depth of feeling did not. He was on cue as always as he pondered the increasingly technical and self-absorbed nature of things as the world approached, simultaneously, both the end of the twentieth century and the 100^th anniversary of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—the work which, perhaps more than any other, had launched the official project of depth psychology. May remembers Freud (along with Adler, Jung, Rank, and others) admiringly in his article as he laments the vacuity of a relentless march of avowed progress and opines: “Are we training technicians or professionals?”

It was always May’s supreme gift to yoke the temporal to the sublime; “paradox” was the word he chose for this, following the inspired genius of Kierkegaard, admiringly remembered by many as “the melancholy Dane.” May was true to form right down to the end as he made the leap of faith between the overwhelming onslaught of technical prowess and the loss of wonder typifying our modern experience and global consciousness:

“The blocking of one’s capacity for wonder and the loss of the capacity to appreciate mystery can have serious effects upon our psychological health, not to mention the health of our whole planet.”—Rollo May, The Loss of Wonder

When was the last time you addressed such an item with your local health care provider or guru? And when did your resident professional organization last seriously consider the loss of wonder and its implications for the health of patients and providers alike? It has been some time, I imagine, and this is why so many stridently outgoing spokespersons and their oftentimes fawning minions are as dull as they tend to become. “Boredom,” states May in his essay, “is the loss of the capacity to wonder.” Even the degraded language of a mental health enterprise in which words are reduced in meaning to their lowest common denominator is indicted insofar as “the crippling of language” is held responsible, at least in part, for the “lack of wonder” in human experience.

May’s final paper set me to thinking about a series of lectures by Gabriel Marcel, a convert to Roman Catholicism who is nonetheless said to have maintained a fierce independence from the Church’s official dogma. Marcel’s talks, originally rendered as the 1949-50 Gifford Lectures in Scotland, were entitled, fittingly, The Mystery of Being. In these eloquent meditations, Marcel takes up just those themes that occupy May’s heart and mind in his final years: the heightened sense of estrangement that results from exaggerated reliance on empirical/pragmatic approaches to life while holding out the possibility of a reintegration of awe. Marcel describes a world in which “that which is most uniquely human—the individual’s sense of the mystery of [one’s] own being and of [one’s] encounter with Being—disappears in the unreality of rationalistic concepts, scientific generalizations, statistical averages and norms. In short, in the completely impersonal anonymity of publicly verifiable knowledge.” You will recognize the world so depicted, as it is our own.

Marcel seems almost clairvoyant in his articulation of a world defined by a lack of presence, by “communication without communion: unreal communication.” Like May, Marcel argues for a renewed place for mystery in the modern consciousness. Holding before us the possibility of “ontological mystery,” he suggests that all transmission of objective messages takes place before we have reached the “threshold of being.” We are considering here matters of the finest subtlety, themes with which we feel either an immediate sympathy or perhaps nothing at all in accordance with our natures—according, that is, to “two notions of gathering to oneself, of welcoming and seizing . . . a difference of attitude.” Like May, Marcel traces the thread between what has today become the debased language of speed, technology, and sound bites and the loss of the capacity for genuine quietude or reverie:

“Words perhaps are essentially magical; it is in the nature of the word as such, to evoke a presence. But we have to use words for practical purposes; so little by little this magical evocative power of words tends to disappear. The function of poetry is that of restoring this very power to language, but the conditions in which it can be restored, today, tend to become more and more hermetic.”—Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being

This is a keen observation, one that ties in at once with our thoughts about dullness. (“Language,’ Emerson had written, “is fossil poetry.”) The poetic, issuing as it does from reflection in solitude, as opposed to the objectified, thereby becomes the means of “transcending the plane of causality.”

Even more striking is Marcel’s skepticism concerning the very language of illness:

“How suspicious we ought to be of those lectures on illness which people seem so especially apt to deliver if they have never been seriously ill themselves: what rude health they always seem to enjoy, those bluff haranguers of the sick! Quite literally they do not know what they are talking about, and their smug loquacity has something insolent about it when we consider the terrible reality they are faced with, a reality which they ought at least to respect.”——Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being

It is doubtful that Marcel ever imagined the rapidity of descent into a linguistics of depersonalized/technical/organizational totalism—the gilded, indeed guilded, language of healthcare and normative psychology in which the frail human specimen all but disappears from view. He does not despair, however, but rather points the way toward “a co-articulation of the spiritual and the vital” in which humankind’s religious impulse commingles in inexorable tension with the body. With such perspective, even death becomes “mystery” and not merely “objective event.” Marcel articulates an embrace of the paradox of existence (a dialectic of soma and psyche) rather than one-sided retreat into empiricist absolutism or theoretical contrivance, honoring as ideal the ineradicable bond between “the precarious and the precious.”

Both May and Marcel are speaking to modes of experience that transcend the concretely rational while recognizing their inherently human limitations. Such experience cannot be grasped by the logical mind alone (cannot be “grasped” at all, really) but is rather offered, states Marcel, as a “kind of appeal to the listener or reader . . . a call upon [one’s] inner resources.” When we enter “the inner courts of philosophy” and concern ourselves “with the highest matters, with, if you like, presences, we cannot hope to come across anything at all comparable to the permanent acquisitions of the elementary sciences.” Still, the discussion is urgent and hence taken up by these two great men at critical moments in their lives. Wonder gently, almost imperceptibly, inclines us away from the egocentric preoccupations of the mundane world, from narrow self- and clan-interest, and—through contemplation of the eternal and life’s uncanniness—thus returned to the realm of interconnectedness and the prospects for human decency. Marcel’s eloquence even here does not falter as he suggests “a metaphysics of hospitality,” the “sacredness of the unprotected” that arises as a matter of course out of (the non-act of) contemplation. Rollo May’s words had been equally apt: “compassion” and “care.”

Mystery urges wisdom as we become aware that our best laid plans and strivings are such stuff as dreams are made on, “always liable to collapse like houses of cards under our very eyes, leaving something else in their place, something which the original structures . . . had merely masked from us.” “This something else,” says Marcel, “is not the important, but the essential, the ‘one thing needful.’” He refers, of course, to that awareness that accompanies the experience of wonder at Infinity. And with this we have come full circle and returned to Pascal.

References:

Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being. In The Search for Being, edited by Jean T. Wilde & Mark Kimmel. New York: Noonday, 1962.

Rollo May, The Loss of Wonder. In Dialogues: Therapeutic Applications of Existential Philosophy, 1(1), 1992. (A publication of students of the California School of Professional Psychology, Berkeley/Alameda campus.)