It seems that “enchantment” is having a moment right now — e.g. — and, well, okay, but I’d like to make two points:
- Experiencing the world as enchanted has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that at the end of history every knee will bow and every tongue confess this. That is to say, Christians who have boarded the Enchantment Train should realize that what it promises is often (if not always) something quite different than what the Christian faith — which is often disenchanting — promises, and demands.
- A related point: As I wrote a decade ago, “The porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The ‘showings’ manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only.”
You want to live in an enchanted cosmos? Cool. But be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
Is the cosmos enchanted? Is it disenchanted? Is it standing on one leg and singing “When Father Painted the Parlor”? (Tom Stoppard reference there.) It’s not something I’m inclined to think about much, because for me — YMMV, and it really and truly may vary, you may be aided enormously by such reflections — it’s just another way to avoid thinking about Jesus. I already have a thousand of those, I don’t need a thousand-and-one.
There’s a beautiful moment in the Introduction to Reynolds Price’s Three Gospels, when Price is remembering his childhood encounters with the Christian message:
By then, in the countryside near my parents’ home, I had also undergone solitary apprehensions of a vibrant unity among all visible things and the thing I guessed was hid beneath the visible world — the reachable world of trees, rocks, water, clouds, snakes, foxes, myself, and (beneath them) all I loved and feared. Even that early I sensed the world’s unity as a vast kinship far past the bond of any root I shared with other creatures in evolutionary time, and the Bible stories had begun to engage me steadily in silence and to draw me toward the singular claim at their burning heart — Your life is willed and watched with care by a god who once lived here.
Note that in the young Price’s experience, the perception of the “vibrant unity of all visible things” and the guess that some deeper unity lay beneath and beyond it led to something more surprising, challenging, and specific. That “singular claim” that he perceived is all that I place my hope and trust in, and I am disinclined to pursue avenues of reflection that seem to promise metaphysical comfort without reminding me that my life is willed and watched with care by a God — the only God there is — who once lived here.
