During his Tuesday evening sermon Walter had as his text Hosea 11.1-11. It's an amazing text (one of my favorites in the whole of the bible) and Walter gave an amazing sermon. During the sermon Walter talked about Hosea being haunted by God, a haunting that expressed itself in the poem found in these verses. In a way similar to Hosea, Walter called for our consciences to become haunted in a world where moral consciences are increasingly unhaunted, untroubled, and anesthetized. Walter spoke of the need to experience enchantment in a world that has been disenchanted, emptied, and hollowed out by consumerism, militarism, and other forms of social and moral decay. The final words of Walter's sermon:
We must live haunted lives in an unhaunted world.Those words struck me as I'd been thinking something similar. That is, I don't believe in an enchanted world. Rather, I believe to enchant a disenchanted world. I don't believe in a haunted world. I believe to haunt an unhaunted world.
I'm not exactly sure what I mean by saying all that. What I think I mean is that I don't think that belief is, at root, accepting a lot of enchanted cosmology and metaphysics. Most of us begin with a world that is unhaunted, disenchanted, and emptied out, scientifically speaking. In the face of that flat and hollowed out landscape belief seeks to haunt the unhaunted world. This is a haunting that aims to fill the empty world with beauty, depth, weight, meaning, drama, story, art, poetry, comedy, tragedy, mystery, wonder, grace, love, adventure and a sense of open-endedness.
I don't believe in ghosts. Rather, belief is the ghost, the vitalizing spirit that haunts us in an unhaunted world.
