"In peace I will lie down and sleep."

I've struggled with sleep lately. 

I used to sleep like a rock. Not anymore. Worries wake me up. My mind ruminates and won't settle down. 

When I can't get back up to sleep I get up, make a cup of decaf tea, and trying to do something to distract myself. Like writing something for you.

The sleeplessness is not so bad a problem that I need to do anything about it. Just that my sleep has been disturbed enough by an anxious mind that I resonate with the petition of the psalmist. "In peace I will lie down and sleep." I read that petition in two different ways. First, as an expression of trust, that God is protecting the sleeper from threats without. But there is also peace within, the peace of untroubled sleep. Sleeping in peace, from threats without and worries within, is a picture of confidence, surrender, trust, and security. 

I wouldn't say my troubled sleep is symptomatic of some trust issues. 

But I'm also not saying it couldn't be.

Beyond being the arena of moral drama, the soul is also the container of human value and worth.

Physically and materially, there is nothing very valuable about a human person. Reduced to our elemental constituents, the human body is mainly comprised of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Wanting to estimate the cost of these chemicals, I asked ChatGPT to answer this question: "How much do the material components of the human body cost?" The AI's answer gets to the point of this post:

It's not possible to put a precise price tag on the materials that make up the human body, as they are not sold as individual components. However, various estimates have been made in the past to provide a rough idea of the cost.

For instance, a study published in the journal "Chemical and Engineering News" estimated the total cost of the elements that make up an average human body to be around $160. This includes elements such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, which make up the bulk of the body's mass. However, this estimate does not take into account the cost of trace elements and other compounds present in the body.

It's also worth noting that the value of the human body goes far beyond its mere chemical composition. Human life is priceless, and the unique combination of physical, intellectual, and emotional attributes that make up each individual cannot be reduced to a simple sum of its parts.

So, the value of a human person is somewhere between $160 and priceless. 

A purely chemical description of the human person cannot capture what is "priceless" about us. But if that is so, to what within us does this priceless value adhere? Where is this value located and brought into view? What is the container, the receptacle, of human worth?

When we say "soul" we are naming what is priceless about a human person. The chemical elements making up your body and brain might only be worth $160, but your soul is irreducible and valuable beyond accounting. 

Biblically, Christians confess that every human person is created in "the image of God." And while being created in the image of God can mean many different things, one of the things it is generally believed to mean concerns our value. Because humans are bearers of the Imago Dei, we posses value, worth, and dignity. The soul names that which "bears" and "reflects" the Imago Dei within us. When we say "soul" we are pointing to the image of God within a person, along with everything this entails. A value north of $160 among them.

So, what do we mean when we say "soul"?

The first thing I'd suggest is this: The soul is the arena of moral drama in our lives.

Every day and every moment we're in a moral drama, playing a high stakes game. And what is won or lost in this game is our very soul. When we say "soul" we name this fight, this struggle. There's a quote from William James that describes what I'm talking about:

If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.

Where in us does this moral drama take place? You could say this moral drama is taking place in the brain. But that seems inadequate. Because the stakes of this game, we would say, is "for our very soul." Something sacred and integral to my identity is in play and at risk. We fight to save our souls.

The soul is also the place where we experience moral damage. When we act in ways that violate our deeply held and most cherished values, or when we witness things that morally traumatize us, we feel that the soul is wounded, seared, or scarred. Again, the location of this damage isn't biological. The brain isn't hurt by moral wounds. It is the soul that is hurt.

So, this is some of what we mean when we say "soul." The soul names the arena of moral drama in our lives, and the soul is where we experience moral damage. We are in a real fight. We are trying to save our souls.

This is a series about what we mean when we say "soul." 

To start, in this secular and scientific age can we even believe in the soul? And if so, what is our soul? 

In Hunting Magic Eels I talk about the soul. Specifically, I describe how a brute materialistic description of the human person has no place for the soul. The soul is immaterial and invisible and, thus, for modern people, not real. In short, there is a disenchanted way of looking at the human person, that we have no soul, versus an enchanted way of looking at the human person, that we have a soul.

But if we have a soul, what is it exactly?

Before turning to that question I want to linger a bit today on the point I was making in Hunting Magic Eels, as that point sets up how we are going to approach the soul in this series. Specifically, I'm not going to talk much about cognitive psychology, neuroscience, consciousness, or philosophy of mind. This likely will disappoint many of you. But in this series I won't get involved in trying to describe the soul as a "thing" and how it relates to other "things," like the brain. Instead, I want to argue that when we say "soul" we're describing aspects of human life and experience that cannot be grasped by or reduced to a scientific description. Simply put, saying "soul" is to speak about the enchantment of persons. This series will describe what that enchantment looks like.

Speaking of the soul, therefore, is important in resisting the disenchantment of persons in an increasingly scientific and secular age. I want to suggest that when we stop believing in the soul, and reduce human persons to biology, something sacred and hallowed in our humanity is eclipsed and lost, something that needs to be protected and recovered. When we say "soul" we are naming this sacred, enchanted aspect of our humanity.

I will confess that I say a lot of harsh things about science in Hunting Magic Eels. Here is one of the harshest passages, and it has to do with the subject of this series:

As my friend Eve Poole points out, once upon a time, we used to have a word for the supernatural aspect of human beings. We called it the soul. In an age of brain scans and neuroscience, speaking of the soul seems outdated and antiquated, a bit of enchantment that we’ve learned to outgrow. But I bet if you asked your friends and neighbors if they have a soul, they all would answer yes. We still believe in the soul, even in this skeptical age. And we’d be horrified if anyone claimed otherwise. More and more people might doubt the existence of God, but God still haunts us. We crave the magic. We resist reducing our lives to biology. We are convinced that we are “more” than the sum total of our organs, bones, and tissues. Just like reducing redwood trees to lumber, there is something sociopathic about a purely scientific, materialistic description of human beings. When redwood trees lose their sacred magic, it becomes very easy to cut them down. And the same goes for human beings.

When I wrote this passage I dwelt a long time on the word "sociopathic." That's a pretty strong word. Did I really want to describe a "purely scientific, materialistic description of human beings" as "sociopathic"? In the end, I obviously did. 

Some readers didn't like that and other choices in the book. For example, a one-star review of Hunting Magic Eels on Goodreads had this to say:

I love the author's daily blog, but this book is not the same quality. The book makes some good points, but its main arguments are ruined by a truly horrifically naive caricature of science. Yuck.

My guess is passages like the one above, describing "a purely scientific, materialistic description of human beings" as "sociopathic," is an example of what this reviewer felt was "a truly horrifically naive caricature of science." 

Why, then, did I state things so strongly, when I could have written about science in a way would have avoided such reactions from readers? Could I have been more circumspect and conciliatory in talking about science? Yeah, I could have been.

Making things harder was that Hunting Magic Eels was published toward the end of the pandemic, and a lot of people were concerned about the science denialism going on among evangelical Christians. Many readers, along with my editors, feared that the harsh things I said about science in the book would give support to this tendency among evangelicals--from evolution, to climate change, to the effectiveness of vaccines. 

I understand those concerns, and I don't blame readers who were off-put by my "horrifically naive caricatures of science." I wrote some strong things. Still, I'm glad I used the word "sociopathic." If I had to write the book all over again, I'd pick the same word. And this series is a part of why I would do so.

Basically, when it came to science in Hunting Magic Eels came out swinging. My words were fighting words. My sense, then and now, was that one of the reasons doubt and disenchantment have become pervasive among Christians, and why many former Christians have left the faith, is that we've let science become an epistemological bully. Science has put progressive, disenchanted Christians on their heels. There's a perverse tendency among progressive, disenchanted Christians to assume that science is the only legitimate authority in naming what is "real." In Hunting Magic Eels I wanted to push back very strongly against that tendency. When it comes to science, want disenchanted Christians to stop playing defense and start playing offense.

To be very clear, I'm not pushing back on the power of science to describe the material world. I agree with how science describes the material world. I embrace that scientific consensus. When it comes to the material world, science is the best tool we have for gaining knowledge. But I do want to strongly reject the notion that science can delimit the real. The realest things in our lives are not amenable to scientific analysis, and the word "soul" is naming some of those things.

Phrased differently, my attack on science wasn't an empirical assault, it was an existential assault. Notice the care I took in the passage above. I didn't say science was sociopathic. I said there was something sociopathic about a "purely scientific, materialistic description of human beings." The key word there is "purely." To describe, for example, a human being using only the tools of organic chemistry will miss what is most important and real about that human being. Their value, their memories, their dreams, and loves. What is most important and most real about a human being cannot be empirically captured by science. And I think that truth, that science cannot describe all that is real, needs to be shouted. 

I don't think faith needs to be defensive or shy in the face of science. If anything, faith has the better, bigger, fuller vision of reality, and needs to say that clearly, forcefully and often. This series will give one example why.

In Hunting Magic Eels I talk a lot about materiality and sacramentality. In a world where God is increasingly regulated to the invisible realm, and therefore deemed imaginary, we can take a cue from the Catholic sacramental tradition, where material reminders of spiritual realities are used to capture and direct our attention. 

A helpful reflection in this regard is Rowan Williams' essay "The Nature of a Sacrament," in which he suggests that humans make sense of the world by making signs. We create things and re-create things. We renew and transform things. And through this sign-making we come to understand ourselves and our world. This is how we "make meaning."

Importantly, much of this sign-making is embodied and incarnational in nature as we organize and transform the material "stuff" of the world. Williams writes:

[B]eing human, being bodily, and being a user of 'signs' are inseparable. We reflect on ourselves and 'answer' our individual and social past by doing things and making things, re-ordering what the past and present world has given us into a new statement of meaning, self-interpretation and world-interpretation.

In the Christian imagination Jesus was the preeminent sign-maker:

Jesus of Nazareth...It is clear that the tradition of his deeds and words is heavily influenced by the sense that he was a sign-maker of a disturbingly revolutionary kind.

In Jesus's life and actions--in the way he used the "stuff" of material existence, including his physical body--he created signs, signs that directed our attention to God, the one he called Father. More, Jesus was--in his material existence--a sign and sacrament:

Jesus, baptized, tempted, forgiving and healing, offering himself as a means of a new covenant, is himself 'sacrament': it is his identity that is set before us as a sign...the life of Jesus is a sign of God, showing how a human biography formed by God looks.

The nature of sacrament, then, is about sign-making--organizing, transforming and renewing material existence in a way that points toward God. And what is important for Williams here isn't just a focus on holy, sacramental objects, but also engaging in sacramental action:

[T]he primary concern should be for sacramental actions rather than an attempt to focus on 'sacralized' objects.

Sacramental action is a form of sign-making that organizes and re-organizes the material world in a way that brings renewal, refreshment and transformation. The sign-making is "Christian" insofar as it seeks to remember and replicate the sign-making of Jesus of Nazareth, shaping and re-shaping material existence in the manner in which he shaped and re-shaped material existence.

And by material existence, as I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, I mean bread, wine, oil and water. Light, movement, and color. Smells and sound. Standing, kneeling, and dancing. Singing, praying, and preaching. Gathering, listening, and sending. Washing, embracing, touching. Making, re-making, and repairing. Celebrating, commemorating, remembering. Serving, caring, and nursing. Protesting and resisting.

These are material signs and sacramental actions--ways we shape and re-shape our world and bodies--that help us "make sense" as we refresh and renew material existence, over and over, to the glory of God.

"You, O Lord, are a shield around me."

In Hunting Magic Eels, I describe the  lorica prayers from the Celtic monastic tradition. Lorica prayers are prayers of protection. The Latin lorica means "breastplate" or "armor." The most famous of the lorica prayers is the one attributed to St. Patrick, a part of which reads:

The Power of God to guide me,
The Might of God to uphold me,
The Wisdom of God to teach me,
The Eye of God to watch over me,
The Ear of God to hear me,
The Word of God to give me speech,
The Hand of God to protect me,
The Way of God to prevent me,
The Shield of God to shelter me,
The Host of God to defend me,
Against the snares of demons,
Against the temptations of vices,
Against the lusts of nature,
Against every man who meditates injury to me,
Whether far or near,
With few or with many.

As Anne Lamott has written, our prayers gather around three words, Help, Thanks and Wow. Lorica prayers--"You, O Lord, are a shield around me"--are prayers of help, prayers of protection. 

Bishop Robert Barron, taking an insight from Charles Taylor, describes what he calls "knocking holes in the buffered self." According to Charles Taylor, the modern self is "buffered," closed off from external realities, especially spiritual realities. Consequently, the modern self feels itself to be autonomous and secure within itself, lacking the sharp sense of vulnerability intrinsic to finite, creaturely existence. To "knock holes" in the buffered self is to open it back up to larger realities. 

Critical to this, as I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, is recognizing and embracing our neediness and dependencies. Lorica prayers, prayers of help and petitions for protection, are tools that can foster this recognition. Beginning your day with the prayer "You, O Lord, are a shield around me" knocks a hole in your buffered self and places you in a vulnerable posture.

Simply ask for help. Pray for aid and protection. Ask regularly. "You, O Lord, are shield around me." Such prayers restructure your ego and knock holes in your buffered self.

I don't want to paint with too broad a brush with this post, there will be many exceptions people will be keen to point out, but I do want to describe something that's long been going on under the label "deconstruction" among ex-evangelicals.

To start, let me say this: There's nothing wrong with deconstruction as a developmental process. As we mature spiritually we all have to confront beliefs about God, faith, and the church that were immature, in error, or dysfunctional. As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways." Spiritual growth is a developmental process. 

Also, "deconstruction" isn't a new thing. St. John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul, where immature and idolatrous conceptions of God are burnt away in a painful, disorientating process. During the dark night of the soul we feel God-abandoned, not because we are abandoned by God, but because the idol that we took to be God is "deconstructed." This purgation leaves behind a void which we experience, for a season, as the death or loss of God. 

My point here is that "deconstruction" is Biblically, theologically and spiritually legitimate. Vital, even. We shouldn't stigmatize deconstruction out of hand. Every mature Christian has been involved in some deconstruction at some point or another.

And yet, I want to suggest that some (much?) of what is passing as "deconstruction" among ex-evangelicals perhaps really isn't deconstruction but is, rather, people who were raised Republicans becoming Democrats. 

Now, of course, to change your political party as an adult is going to involve some "deconstruction" of the beliefs and values you grew up with. You might, for example, need to "deconstruct" how you once read the Bible literally as a child and teen if you, as an adult, become convinced of evolution. The same as you'd need to "deconstruct" if you changed your views about LGBTQ folks. I'm not denying there's a difficult and challenging journey to be made here if your values shift or you embrace scientific literacy. But at the end of the day, what's driving the "deconstruction" is more political than theological. 

That political dynamic is what I'm trying to name here. Given all the drama around "deconstruction," aren't we mainly just watching former Republicans become Democrats? Because when I look at the ex-evangelical crowd, that's mostly what I see as the end-game of the journey: A change of political parties. You were once a Jesus and John Wayne Christian, and now you're a woke, social justice warrior Christian. 

Now, to confess, as someone who sides more with woke, social justice warrior Christians, I don't think this is a bad outcome. But I am deeply skeptical about calling this journey "deconstruction." 

Why?

Well, if changing from Republican to Democrat is ultimately what we mean by "deconstruction," then God is still trapped by the idolatry of politics. We've changed teams, to be sure, but we're still playing the same game. You can see this in how, among both evangelical and the ex-evangelical Christians, there is little daylight between their faith and their political views. The political views held by evangelicals are not prophetically troubled, criticized, or contradicted by Jesus. Neither are the political views held by ex-evangelicals prophetically troubled, criticized, or contradicted by Jesus. For both groups, Jesus legitimizes their preferred politics. For neither group does Jesus subvert their politics. 

And that's why I don't think what is currently passing as "deconstruction" is truly deconstruction. People are just being angsty about changing political parties, describing a political change as a religious journey. 

If what we are witnessing were truly deconstruction, real dark night of the soul journeys, we'd see a whole lot more people landing in strange, peculiar, and hard-to-define political locations. We'd see evidence of the Holy Spirit blowing people around unpredictably (i.e., not neatly captured by the confines of a two-party political system) rather than people simply shifting from one voting block to another.

Here's a test: When someone says they've "deconstructed" their faith, was the outcome of that journey that were raised a Republican and are now a Democrat? If so, I don't think we've witnessed a true deconstruction. That person just changed political parties. 

Tolkien gave his lecture "On Fairy-Stories" in 1939. When the lecture was later published Tolkien added an Epilogue. Having discussed Recovery, Escape and Consolation in fairy-stories, in this last post of the series we'll turn to the Epilogue.

For Tolkien, the author of a fairy-story is engaged in a task that he calls "sub-creation," the creation of a Secondary World. As we've seen, for this Secondary World to be the world of Faërie it must be enchanted and display all the characteristics we've described: Recovery, Escape and Consolation.

When crafted well the Secondary World of Faërie gives rise to Secondary Belief, beliefs in the enchantments of Faërie, the beliefs we've described in this series.

But all that raises the question, how do these Secondary Beliefs relate to the Primary World, the world we live in? It's all very well and good to have tea with Mr. Tumnus in Narnia. Or go on a quest with Gandalf in Middle-Earth. But what do the enchantments of those worlds have to do with our own?

Put bluntly, is any of it true?

Those are the questions Tolkien tries to address in his Epilogue.

Tolkien begins by arguing that while the author of a fairy-story is creating a Secondary World that world attracts us and moves us because it is, in some form or fashion, participating in the truths of the Primary World. We've experienced the enchantments of Faërie in this world. We experience Faërie whenever we experience the world with awe, wonder and holy surprise. We experience the enchantment of Faërie whenever we look past the violence, brokenness and ugliness of the world to envision a New Creation. We experience the enchantment of Faërie whenever an experience of fleeting Joy renews our stubborn commitment to hope in the eucatastrophe of grace.  

Tolkien writes:

Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of reality,” it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?” The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): “If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.” That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist). But in the “eucatastrophe” we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.

But beyond this, that we find Secondary Worlds believable insofar as they are tapping into a truth about the Primary World, Tolkien goes on to say that something happened in the Christian story that has affected the relationship between Faërie and Reality.

Specifically, Tolkien argues that in the Christian story Faërie became History. The gospel story is the ultimate fairy-story, the ultimate eucatastrophe, but one that happened not in a Secondary World but in this world. Tolkien writes:

The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.

Christians believe that Faërie entered into History. As Tolkien writes, Christians believe that in the gospel story "Legend and History have met and fused." Christians read the gospel story as a fairy-story that has entered into the primary world. A story of the greatest eucatastrophe, a story that begins and ends in Joy.

The gospel is Faërie, the Christian enchantment of the world. The enchantment of the gospel is what allows us recover the world anew in wonder, revolt against the violence and ugliness of the world, and hope for, in Tolkien's words, "the Great Eucatastrophe."

For the Christian, the gospel throbs as the Heart of History. There one hears glad tidings of great joy. It is the fairy-story that enchants our world.

Here the Beaver's voice sank into silence and it gave one or two very mysterious nods. Then signalling to the children to stand as close around it as they possibly could, so that their faces were actually tickled by its whiskers, it added in a low whisper -

"They say Aslan is on the move - perhaps has already landed."

In the last two posts we've discussed two of the three aspects of fairy-stories described by by J.R.R. Tolkien in his famous lecture "On Fairy-Stories." These were Escape and Recovery. In Hunting Magic Eels, I used Tolkien's discussion of recovery to describe enchantment as stepping into a sacramental ontology. 

But it's the third aspect of fairy-stories--Consolation--that is featured in Hunting Magic Eels, given a whole chapter entitled "The Good Catastrophe." 

For Tolkien, it's with Consolation where we reach the very essence of enchantment, the "highest function" of the fairy-story. To describe this aspect of enchantment, Tolkien coins a new word:

But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. 

For Tolkien the eucatastrophe--the good catastrophe--is an experience of "sudden and miraculous grace":

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. Importantly, eucatastrophic grace is not a denial of the sorrows and sufferings of the world. Eucatastrophic grace is, rather, commitment to hope, loyalty to hope, fidelity to hope:

It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

Enchantment is a committed watchfulness for the eucatastrophe, the sudden unanticipated turn in the story that brings miraculous grace. In Tolkien's work, we see the eucatastrophe first appear at end The Hobbit as the forces of good are about to suffer defeat in the Battle of the Five Armies:

“It will not be long now,” thought Bilbo, “before the goblins win the Gate, and we are all slaughtered or driven down and captured. Really it is enough to make one weep, after all one has gone through. I would rather old Smaug had been left with all the wretched treasure, than that these vile creatures should get it, and poor old Bombur, and Balin and Fili and Kili and all the rest come to a bad end; and Bard too, and the Lake-men and the merry elves. Misery me! I have heard songs of many battles, and I have always understood that defeat may be glorious. It seems very uncomfortable, not to say distressing. I wish I was well out of it.”

The clouds were torn by the wind, and a red sunset slashed the West. Seeing the sudden gleam in the gloom Bilbo looked round. He gave a great cry: he had seen a sight that made his heart leap, dark shapes small yet majestic against the distant glow.

“The Eagles! The Eagles!” he shouted. “The Eagles are coming!”

We see a similar eucatastrophe at the end of The Lord of the Rings. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the eucatastrophe looks like this, the dawn after the night when the White Witch kills Aslan:

The rising of the sun had made everything look so different - all colours and shadows were changed that for a moment they didn't see the important thing. Then they did. The Stone Table was broken into two pieces by a great crack that ran down it from end to end; and there was no Aslan...

"Who's done it?" cried Susan. "What does it mean? Is it magic?"

"Yes!" said a great voice behind their backs. "It is more magic." They looked round. There, shining in the sunrise, larger than they had seen him before, shaking his mane (for it had apparently grown again) stood Aslan himself.

"Oh, Aslan!" cried both the children, staring up at him, almost as much frightened as they were glad.

"Aren't you dead then, dear Aslan?" said Lucy.

"Not now," said Aslan...

"But what does it all mean?" asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer.

"It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know: Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitors stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards..."

"And now," said Aslan presently, "to business. I feel I am going to roar. You had better put your fingers in your ears."

And they did. And Aslan stood up and when he opened his mouth to roar his face became so terrible that they did not dare to look at it. And they saw all the trees in front of him bend before the blast of his roaring as grass bends in a meadow before the wind.

As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, the issue here isn't wishful thinking, a naive belief in "happy ever after" endings. As Tolkien notes above, belief in the eucatastrophe doesn't "deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure." Lament is welcomed here. What the eucatastrophe denies, continues Tolkien, is "universal final defeat." 

In short, the eucatastrophe is about hope. Which is why my chapter in Hunting Magic Eels starts off with my prison ministry, and the role hope plays in the lives of the inmates I love and serve. For them, hope is a matter of life and death. 

The eucatastrophe is an eschatological and ontological posture. What sort of world are you living in? Is the story of your life a tragedy or a comedy? (And by comedy, we don't mean funny. We mean the ancient Greek distinction that dramas have one of two outcomes, happy or sad.) Do you live your life as a nihilistic fatalist, or are you, ultimately speaking, hopeful? Does nothing matter, or does everything matter?

The power of fairy-stories, says Tolkien, is that they are a pedagogy of the imagination. Fairy-stories inculcate an eschatological and ontological worldview. Fairy-stories are stories of hope, grace, and resurrection. Fairy-stories are tales of the good catastrophe.

As mentioned in the last post, in his lecture "On Fairy-Stories" J.R.R. Tolkien describes three characteristics of Faërie: Recovery, Escape and Consolation. 

In this post we turn to the quality of escape.

Tolkien recognizes that for many of us the word "escape" immediately creates some problems. Fantasy is often considered "escapist," as a flight away from the hard realities of "the real world."

Facing that characterization, Tolkien quickly moves in his lecture to rehabilitate the notion of escape. Taking the gloves off, Tolkien comes out swinging:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer's or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the “quisling” to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say “the land you loved is doomed” to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.

As I noted in the last post, enchantment is resistance. Here we find that resistance rooted in disgust, anger, condemnation and revolt at the ugliness and brokenness of the world.

Quoting Tolkien again from the prior post, enchantment is "seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them." Enchantment isn't "escaping" the "real world" into a "fantasy world." Enchantment is seeing a better world and then returning with a prophetic rebuke. Reconciling oneself to the "real world"--refusing to visit the land of Faërie--is tantamount to the prisoner refusing to escape his cell.

To borrow the phrase of Walter Brueggemann, enchantment is a "prophetic imagination." Faërie is the vision of the New Heavens and the New Earth, the world set free from the consequences of the Fall.

As Tolkien writes,

But there are also other and more profound “escapisms” that have always appeared in fairy-tale and legend. There are other things more grim and terrible to fly from than the noise, stench, ruthlessness, and extravagance of the internal-combustion engine. There are hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death. 

In short, Faërie stands in judgment of the world. Faërie is glorious treachery against "the real world."

We join the prophetic cry of the elves with St. John in the Book of Revelation, "This land you love is doomed. Come out, come out, my people."

Or as Gandalf might have said it, "Fly, you fools!"

"Why do the nations rage?"

The reign of God is an irritant. Something in us rebels, rejects, and rages. 

Friction. Contradiction. Scandal. Conflict. Abrasion. Offense. Confrontation. Agitation. Opposition. Exposure.

I feel this within myself. The shadow in me. The shadow in the world. A darkness that hides from the light.

Why do the nations rage?

Madness is my only answer.

According to J.R.R. Tolkien in his lecture "On Fairy-Stories" the enchantment of Faërie is characterized by three particular qualities. Tolkien calls the characteristics of Faërie Recovery, Escape and Consolation. Two of these--Recovery and Consolation--I described in Hunting Magic Eels. 

In this post, we'll start with the first aspect of Faërie: Recovery.

What is the enchantment involved in what Tolkien calls "recovery"?

Life in "the real world" is often burdened by boredom and weariness. As it is said, there is nothing new under the sun. We move numbly from entertainment to entertainment, pleasure to pleasure, screen to screen.

Worst of all, our relationships with others becomes affected by this "taken for granted" feeling. We feel the tragedy of this, a feeling of monotony even among those we love most dearly, but we struggle to regain contact with wonder, surprise and awe.

The enchantment of Faërie, according to Tolkien, helps us recover these lost feelings. What was old becomes new. What was boring becomes surprising. What was grey becomes bright. What was dead comes back to life again. Tolkien writes:

Before we reach such states [like boredom and tedium] we need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. In that sense only a taste for them may make us, or keep us, childish.

Enchantment is not a fanciful fleeing of the world. Enchantment isn't "pretending." Enchantment is the recovery of the world. Enchantment is looking at green again and being startled anew. 

Enchantment is "re-gaining the world," recovering "the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle." A long paragraph of Tolkien describing recovery, but so rich it is worth quoting in full:

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiars are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of “appropriation”: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their color, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them. 

Many things to unpack here. Enchantment is less about a realistic "seeing things as they are" than "seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them." Enchantment is an act of resistance. Enchantment is the daily work of "cleaning the dirty windows" of both our perceptions and affections so that the familiar again surprises us with joy and gratitude. 

And why do the windows get dirty in the first place? What causes the familiar to become trite?

Tolkien gives a surprising answer. Triteness is the penalty of appropriation. Boredom is the price of possessiveness. Monotony is the cost of taking, acquiring and hoarding.

And the possessiveness here is fundamentally epistemological in nature, thinking we "know" these things. Mentally "taking" something. Cognitively and intellectually "acquiring" the object.

This temptation to mentally appropriate the world--which has been source of modern disenchantment--is driven by the mechanistic view of the universe that emerged during the Enlightenment. The world has come to be viewed mechanistically and objectively, as raw material to be controlled and shaped into useful technologies. A disenchanted world is no longer hallowed or sacred and, thus, becomes neutral "stuff" to be manipulated for our own purposes.

According to Tolkien, the posture of skeptical and scientific "adulthood" is to adopt this mechanistic view of the cosmos. Which is to say, to see the world as an "adult" is to adopt a posture of domination over the world. And it's this posture of domination that disenchants the world, stripping it of its enchanted, sacred character.

And we can extend this into the social realm as well. Wherever there is domination over others the view of human beings had become disenchanted, people have been stripped of their sacred and hallowed nature.

By way of illustration, in The Lord of the Rings we can see how Mordor incarnates a disenchanted, mechanistic view of the world. Mordor uses the world as fuel for domination.

In contrast to Mordor is the enchanted imagination of Faërie, epitomized by the elves and the humble people of the Shire.

And speaking autobiographically, if Tolkien desired dragons with a profound desire I desired Lothlórien with a profound desire. I wanted to walk with the elves through the trees of that forest. And to this very day, whenever I see fireflies dancing among trees, this deep and profound ache--what C.S. Lewis named as Joy--fills my soul. I desire the woodland paths of the elves with a profound desire.

Enchantment is the recovery of the world as "a thing apart from ourselves," as something we cannot take or own, as something alien and therefore strange and wonderful.

And if that stance is childlike it is because children remain surprised by the world, experiencing it as enchanted and miraculous. Enchantment is the sacramental experience of the world, where common and ordinary things become symbols and signposts. Inbreakings of the divine. Gateways to heaven.

And this might be enchantment at its most basic, cultivating the ability to be surprised, interrupted and arrested--again and again--by the world. And especially by each other.

As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, fairy-stories help us recover a sacramental ontology. As Tolkien writes, Faërie recovers "the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine."

Shall we leave the final word to Gerard Manley Hopkins?

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
       It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
       It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
       And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
       And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
       There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
       Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
       World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Enchantment is experiencing a world seared by trade as still charged with the grandeur of God, to see this bent world with fairy-eyes, where the Holy Ghost broods over us with bright wings and warm breast.

In his famous essay "On Fairy-Stories" Tolkien begins, in good scholarly fashion, with definitions.

Specifically, what makes a story a fairy-story?

According to Tolkien, a fairy-story isn't a story that contains fairies or elves or other sorts of fanciful creatures, the insertion of a fantastical element into our world. Rather, a fairy-story is a story about a world, the realm of Faërie. Middle-Earth and Narnia are examples here.

Tolkien writes:

[F]or fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

That last is key, Faërie is an enchanted world. 

What, though, does it mean to accept the invitation of enchantment? Specifically, are we "pretending" when we enter Faërie? When we accept the invitation of the elves are we engaged in "make believe" and playacting? Are we adults indulging in the whims and imaginations of children? Tolkien recounts in his lecture how he corresponded with a man who said that fairy-stories were "Breathing a lie through Silver."  

Tolkien's response here is Augustinian. As Augustine famously wrote, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Faërie incarnates and expresses our desires, informing us about the world we experience and long for. Here is how Tolkien's describes what drew him to the land of Faërie:

I had no special “wish to believe.” I wanted to know. Belief depended on the way in which stories were presented to me, by older people, or by the authors, or on the inherent tone and quality of the tale. But at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in “real life.” Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded...I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse. And that was not solely because I saw horses daily, but never even the footprint of a worm. The dragon had the trade-mark of Faërie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir [a dragon in Norse mythology] was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.

This argument from desire, for a "richer and more beautiful" world, also features in C.S. Lewis's apologetical works, how his restless search for Joy led him to God. 

The enchantment we find in fairy-stories gives voice to our Augustinian restlessness. Our desires point toward the Real. To walk in Faërie is a longing for God. 

In Hunting Magic Eels I make use of J.R.R. Tolkien's famous essay "On Fairy-Stories" to describe how we might recover enchantment in our secular, modern world. In 2015, I did a series about "On Fairy-Stories", but only used a bit of that material for Hunting Magic Eels. I'd like to re-share some of that series, giving readers of Hunting Magic Eels a deeper dive into the riches of Tolkien's famous essay.

But before getting to "On Fairy-Stories," I want to step back to appreciate how Tolkien's work fits within the larger project of the Inklings, Tolkien's literary companions. 

Philip and Carol Zaleski argue in their book The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings--which focuses upon C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams--that the literary project of the group was an attempt to "re-enchant" the world in the face of modernity. And while the Inklings never formally articulated their shared goals, you could argue that Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories," the Andrew Lang lecture delivered by Tolkien in 1938, served as the group's de facto manifesto.  

Key to the collective attempts of the Inklings was more than the creation of "fantasy." To be sure, the imagination of the Inklings was fanciful and whimsical. But the Inklings also used reason and morality to point the way toward enchantment.  

For example, consider how reason is used as a tool for enchantment in the conversation the Professor has with Peter and Susan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Peter and Susan are trying to puzzle out if Lucy is lying about the wardrobe and meeting a faun in the forest. Hearing their skepticism, the Professor counters with a discourse on logic:

“Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

These are lines that echo a famous moment in Lewis's apology for the Christian faith in Mere Christianity:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

I don't want us to judge here the adequacy of Lewis's famous "Liar, Lunatic or Lord?" trilemma. The key point I want us to note is how Lewis inserted it into a children's story, using logic as a tool of enchantment. This blend isn't unique to the Inklings, but it is a mark of the Inklings's imaginative art. We can also look at Lewis's science fiction novels to make similar observations about how Lewis used reason and science to create enchantment.

Tolkien's use of reason was different. Tolkien was much more of an artist than Lewis, so he didn't go in for Lewis's analytical and logical fireworks. Tolkien's use of reason was focused on creating a dense and comprehensive mythological world, complete with Elvish languages of his own devising. Critical for Tolkien was the inner consistency of this world. Achieving that consistency, given the richness and size of the world Tolkien was creating, was one of Tolkien's greatest accomplishments. It was Middle-Earth's intellectual integrity and richness that made it so believable. Reason, again, became a a tool for enchantment.

Accompanying this intellectual seriousness, the fantasy produced by the Inklings also embodied a strong moral sensibility informed by the Christian faith. As we know, a robust moral vision governs The Lord of the Rings as it pits the forces of Good agains the power of Evil. An appeal to the "moral law" also played a critical role in Lewis's apologetics. For example, Lewis starts off Mere Christianity with an appeal to a shared, common morality:

Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"—"That's my seat, I was there first"—"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"— "Why should you shove in first?"—"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"—"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard...It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed.

All told, then, it was this combination of imagination, reason, morality and Christianity that gave the enchantment of the Inklings its distinctive and peculiar quality.

"But do you really mean, Sir," said Peter, "that there could be other worlds--all over the place, just round the corner--like that?"

"Nothing is more probable," said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.”

One of the big points I make in Hunting Magic Eels is that relationship with God is more seeing than believing. The point isn't to manufacture belief in God but to see God directly.

The response here is predictable: How can you see something that is invisible?

And the answer here is very old, the tried and true path: The way of contemplation. 

God is "invisible" in a strange sort of way. What we're trying to "see" and encounter is the Ground of Being, which is always directly in front, behind, above, below, beside, outside and inside of us. So, if you want to see God, the Christian mystical tradition shows us the way. But few of us ever take the journey. We just spend our days thinking about God, forcing ourselves to believe in Him. We never take the time and effort to see God. 

I think Karl Rahner got it exactly right when he said, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.” As we move deeper into a post-Christian world, belief in God--as a cognitive pursuit--will become harder and harder. Which means we need to train our people to see God. Christians in post-Christian contexts need to become mystics. Our encounter with God needs to become more perceptual than intellectual, seeing over believing. 

To those who have never encountered God, all this might seem vague and woo-woo. What might all this look and feel like? 

To start, it's an experience that comes only in the silence and stilling of your mind. The distorting effects of your ego have to be dealt with, how your perceptions are always being filtered through the scrim of the self which triggers us and creates agitation and desire. Like a dirty lens, the self obscures the view. The self needs to settle down to become transparent, like a window, allowing the light to shine through. And none of this is complicated. It's not rocket science. It's mostly just silence and stillness.

A lovely description of what this encounter "feels like" comes from Francis Spufford's Unapologetic. Across many pages in Chapter 3, too long to quote here in total, Spufford describes his contemplative encounters with God:

We live in a noisy place, inside and out, and the noise we hear pours into the noise we make. It's hard to listen, even when misery nudges you into trying.

Fortunately, the international league of the guilty has littered the landscape with specialized buildings where attention comes easier. I walk in ... The calm in here is not denial. It's an ancient, imperturbable lack of surprise. To any conceivable act you might have committed, the building is set up only to say, ah, so you have, so you did; yes. Would you like to sit down? I sit down. I shut my eyes ...

... [W]hen I block out the distractions of vision the silence is almost shockingly loud. It sings in my ears. Well, no; metaphors are inevitable here but we might as well try to use them accurately, and to prune out the implications we don't want. The silence has no tune. It doesn't sing. It hisses; it whines thinly at a high constant pitch, as if the world had a background note we don't usually hear. It crackles like the empty grooves at the end of a vinyl record ... Which is welcome, because it's the unending song of myself that I've come in here to get a break from. I breathe in, I breathe out. I breathe in, I breathe out. I breathe in, I breathe out ... and so far as I have to have something to concentrate on I concentrate on that ... I breathe in, I breathe out. The silence hisses, neither expectantly nor unexpectantly.

And in it I start to pick out more and more noises that were too quiet for me to have attended to them before. I become intensely aware of small things happening in the space around me that I can't see ... I hear the door sigh open, sigh closed. I hear the creak of the wood as someone else settles into a pew ... The audio assemblage of the world getting along perfectly well without me. The world sounding the same as it did before I was born, the same as it will do after I'm dead.

I expand. Not seeing, I feel the close grain of the hardwood I'm sitting on ... My mind moves outwards, to the real substance of things that are not-me beyond the church walls. I feel the churchyard grass, repeating millionfold the soft green spire of each blade ... the scratchy roughness of each suburban brick. Out and out ... receding higher and higher ... the limb of the planet, shining in electric blue; the ash-colored moon; the boiling chemical clouds of the gas giants; the shining pinprick of our star; the radiant drift of the Western Spiral Arm; the plughole spin of one galaxy ... Breathe in, breathe out. Yes, time. Expand again, not from this particular place, but this particular moment, this perch on one real instant in the flood of real instants. Breathe in, breathe out. Day opens the daisies, sucks carbon into every leaf, toasts the land, raises moisture in the clouds. Night closes flowers, throws the protein switch for rest in mobile creatures, condenses dew, pulls the winds that day has pushed. Breathe. Dark cycles into light ... this cycle measured in hours spins inside others timed in weeks and years and eons ... The forests ebb and flow. The hills themselves melt like wax. The ice advances and retreats ... This instant at which I sit is as narrow a slice of the reality of the whole as a hairline crack would be in a pavement that reaches the stars ...

But now it gets indescribable. Now I register something that precedes all this manifold immensity that is not-me and yet is real; something makes itself felt from beyond or behind or beneath it all. What can "beyond" or "behind" or "beneath" mean, when all possible directions or dimensions are already included in the sum of what it so? ... Beyond again: but I'm not talking about a movement through or out of shape altogether, yet not into vacuum, not into emptiness. Into fullness rather. Into an adjacent fullness, no further away than the thickness of everything, which feels now as if, in this direction that can't be stated, it is no thickness at all. It feels as if, considered in this way, every solid thing is as thin as a film in its particular being, and is backed onto some medium in which the journey of my attention's been taking, toward greater and greater solidity, richer and richer presence, reaches an absolute. What's in front is real; what's behind is the reason for it being real, the source of its realness. Beyond, behind, beneath all solid things there seems to be a solidity. Behind, beneath, beyond all changes, all wheeling and whirring processes, all flows, there seems to be flow itself. And though I'm in the dark behind my closed eyelids, and light is part of the everything it feels as if I'm feeling beyond, so can only be a metaphor here, it seems to shine, this universal backing to things, with lightless light ... It feels as if everything is backed with light ... And that includes me. Every tricky thing that I am, my sprawling piles of memories and secrets and misunderstandings, float on the sea ... [I]t's not impersonal. Someone, not something, is here. Though it's on a scale that defeats imagining and exists without location ... I feel what I feel when there's someone beside me. I am being looked at. I am being known; known in some wholly accurate and complete way that is only possible when the point of view is not another local self in the world but glows in the whole medium in which I live and move. I am being seen from the inside, but without any of my own illusions. I am being seen from behind, beneath, beyond. I am being read by what I am made of.

On one level I can feel that this is absolutely safe. A parent's safe hold is nothing compared to this ... But on another level, it's terrifying ... Being screened off by my separateness is all I know in my dealings with somebodies who look at me. This is utterly exposed ... It takes no account, at all, of my illusions about myself. It lays me out, roofless, wall-less, worse than naked. It knows where my kindness comes checkered with secret cruelties or mockeries. It knows where my love comes with reservations. It knows where I hate, and fear, and despise ... It knows all this, and it shines at me. In fact it never stops shining. It is continuous, this attention it pays. I cannot make it turn away. But I can turn away from it, easily; all I have to do is to stop listening to the gentle, unendingly patient call it stitches through the fabric of everything there it is. It compels nothing, so all I have to do is stop paying attention. And I do, after not very long. I can't bear it, for very long at once, to be seen like that. To be seen like that is judgment in itself. As a long-ago letter writer put it, someone who clearly went where I've just been, it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. Only, to be seen like that is forgiveness too--or at any rate, the essential beginning of forgiveness...

This is a long passage, and it's only a part of a longer one. In sharing it, however, I don't want you to take this description as normative. Your experiences with contemplation will be unique. For what it's worth, though, Spufford's description is very close to my own experience, which is likely why I've shared it here as an example.

But here's the main point I want to draw your attention to. Well, two points. 

First, notice that this is an experience of seeing, not believing. This is a direct encounter with Reality. This is beholding the Light in which you see light. 

And secondly, you can see this any time you want. The Light backing all things is always there. You just have to look.

"like a tree planted by streams of water"

///

Psalm 1 is famous for starting off the collection with the "two paths" metaphor. This is a frequently used image in wisdom and religious traditions. And also in many talks parents give to their children! Two paths are out ahead of you. Two choices. Two futures. Two lives. Even two "You's." Which will you choose?

In describing the person who "delights in the law of the Lord," who "walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers," we find the idyllic, pastoral and botanical image of being "like a tree planted by streams of water."

Like J.R.R. Tolkien, I have a romantic attachment to trees. There is their size, of course, which provide shade and shelter. It's also their age, how many trees live longer than we do, from centuries to millennia. 

Trees also have both depth and height, making them a perfect spiritual metaphors. Deep, hidden roots supporting branches that soar into the sky where leaves dance in the sunlight. 

Which brings me back to the image from Psalm 1. If I'm a tree, how closely am I connected to the Source of my being? 

I live in West Texas, so trees here are especially precious. This is a semi-arid climate. Our churches pray for rain. The poet lived in similar place, knowing how closely trees had to be connected to sources of water. Images of thirst, dryness, and aridity fill the Psalms. Water was a daily matter of life or death. That need and dependency, that vital tethering, was always in view. 

How far away am I from water? How far are you? Life demands a pressing, necessary proximity. More and more, my spiritual life is haunted by this desert mentality. I don't know about you, but I have a felt sense of scarcity within myself, a dryness that is always close at hand. I am thirsty and dehydrated. 

I am reading through the Gospel of John this year, over and over again. I am struck by how Jesus repeatedly describes himself as water and light. 

I think that is the secret to the spiritual life.

Water and light.

In a conversation recently about the problem of evil, it occurred to me that the Biblical story is, quite simply, a theodicy. 

Now, we don't tend to think about the Biblical story this way. We tend to think of theodicy--the problem of evil--as a particular theological issue rather than the grand plot of Scripture. Theodicy is a niche subject, a specialized conversation, not the whole story itself. But really, the drama of the Biblical story is, in its entirety, a theodicy. The Bible tells the story about why evil exists and what God is doing about it.

Why is there evil? The Bible starts off with an answer, what we call "the fall" of Adam and Eve. There's another fall in the background as well, the fall of the rebellious angels and cosmic archons, the "principalities and powers." This "double fall" is the explanation given by the Bible for the question "Why is there evil?" 

As to what is God doing about evil, well, that's the main plot of the rest of the Bible, isn't it? Facing the ruin of human and angelic rebellion, God acts in history through Israel and Jesus to eradicate evil now and in the eschatological healing of the wounded cosmos. 

My point is that the questions raised by "the problem of evil"--questions like "Why is there evil?" and "What is God doing about evil?"--simply are the story the Bible is telling. Now of course, we might have a lot of follow up questions. For example, why did God create the angels if he foreknew their rebellion? Or, why does God chose to deal with evil through Israel and Jesus instead of just acting directly against the evildoers? These are valid follow-up questions, but my point is that they are follow-up questions. The Bible has already given you an answer to the problem of evil. You might not like the answer, or have a lot of questions about the answer, but you do, in fact, have an answer. 

Maybe all this seems obvious to you, but maybe it doesn't. For example, I've heard theologians say, "The Bible doesn't provide us with a theodicy." But given what I've just pointed out, that's a very strange thing to say. Because the Bible, in fact, does provide us an answer to the problem of evil, or at least a story about where evil comes from and what God is doing about it. Again, you don't have to like the answer, but you have an answer. You've been given an explanation.

I think we often miss this point because we tend to fixate "the problem of evil" on the word "allow." As in, why did God allow evil to enter the world? And, why does God continue to allow evil to exist? Unfortunately, answers to the "allow" questions we just don't have. 

We do, though, have answers about the origin of evil, God's response, and the final destiny of evil. Perplexities persist, of course, but the Bible does give us answers to many of the questions we ask. I'm not saying that we like, understand, or can believe in those answers. I'm just pointing out that many seem to assume that the Bible is either silent, dodgy, murky, or mysterious on the topic of evil when, in fact, it's sharing answers with us loud and clear. 

Framed this way, the "the problem of evil" isn't the lack of a theodicy but, rather, our posture toward that theodicy. The "problem" is that we just don't like or believe the story.

Long-time readers will know that, years ago, I went down the William Stringfellow rabbit-hole. Stringfellow's work has played a huge role in shaping my vision of "the principalities and powers," and featured prominently in my book The Slavery of Death. 

I haven't written about Stringfellow for many years. But today one of his quotes came back and interrupted me:

"In the face of death, live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst Babel, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the Word of God. Know the Word, teach the Word, nurture the Word, preach the Word, define the Word, incarnate the Word, do the Word, live the Word. And more than that, in the Word of God, expose death and all death's works and wiles, rebuke lies, cast out demons, exorcise, cleanse the possessed, raise those who are dead in mind and conscience."

The poem "Enemies" by Wendell Berry:

If you are not to become a monster,
you must care what they think.
If you care what they think,

how will you not hate them,
and so become a monster
of the opposite kind? From where then

is love to come—love for your enemy
that is the way of liberty?
From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go

free of you, and you of them;
they are to you as sunlight
on a green branch. You must not

think of them again, except
as monsters like yourself,
pitiable because unforgiving.

Everyone has their favorite books and moments in The Chronicles of Narnia. After The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, my favorite book in the series is The Silver Chair. And my favorite moment in The Silver Chair is Aslan's instructions to Jill before he blows her into Narnia.

For those who have not read the book, some context for the quote below. Running away from some school bullies, Jill and Eustace find themselves in Aslan's country, high, high above and far, far away from Narnia. The pair are dramatically separated, with Eustace ending up in Narnia. Aslan sends Jill on a quest to find Eustace and inform him of a quest both of them must undertake.

Before sending Jill to Narnia, Aslan shares with Jill "four signs" that will guide her and Eustace on their quest. Jill must remember these signs if they are to be successful. Much will go wrong should Jill forget. So Aslan drills Jill, asking her to repeat the signs over and over, until she's got them firmly memorized. Having accomplished this, before sending Jill down into Narnia from the heights of his country, Aslan gives Jill this final encouragement and warning:

“But, first, remember, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs. And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.”

As with so much in The Chronicles of Narnia, there are rich biblical and theological resonances in a passage like this. 

First, Aslan's whole speech echoes Deuteronomy 6:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

When the Lord your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

We see the call to remember the "signs" and "commandments" by making them a part of our daily routine. Aslan tells Jill to "Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night." Deuteronomy tells the children of Israel to "Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates."

The concern here, the reason for all this memory work, is the risk of forgetting. As Deuteronomy warns, "Be careful that you do not forget the Lord." Aslan gives Jill the same warning: "Remember, remember, remember the signs...Nothing else matters."

There are also New Testament echos in Aslan's description of why Jill may forget. Forgetting is caused by confusion: "Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind." In the New Testament, the work of the devil is described as confusing minds and clouding perceptions: "The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God." (2 Cor. 4.4.)

A large part of the spiritual life, it seems to me, is resisting this confusion. We forget the signs, grow confused, and become lost. And much of this is due to a lack of spiritual formation. As Aslan says, it is important to know the signs "by heart." Clarity of mind is achieved by rehearsing the signs "when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night." Otherwise, we'll forget the Lord.

All that to say, I think about this passage from The Silver Chair a lot. Each day, as I step out the door to start the day, I hear Aslan say to me:

"Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.”