Many Christians struggle with disenchantment, but our experience isn't wholly characterized by disenchantment. We're still haunted. Here and there we still bump into the magic. We're interrupted by beauty and ugliness. We're caught up by wonder and awe. We suspect there is more to the universe than the equations of particle physics. We revel in the mystery.

Yes, we have our doubts. But we also, from time to time, doubt our doubts. Belief nags at us, so we crave help with our unbelief.

In his book A Secular Age Charles Taylor argues that modernity isn't a wholly disenchanted space. Modernity is characterized by cross-pressures of belief and unbelief, enchantment and disenchantment, immanence and transcendence. Yes, there are the downward pressures of disenchantment, which collapse the spiritual and transcendent into the physical and the immanent. But here and there in the secular world we also experience updrafts of enchantment, a pull toward the heavens.

As Taylor writes (p. 549), the secular is "that open space where you can feel the winds pulling you, now to belief, now to unbelief."

Of course, each person experiences the cross-pressures of these countervailing winds to different degrees. Some feel the downward pressure of disenchantment more than others. Doubts are heavier, belief is harder. Still, if you're a Christian you're at least haunted by Christianity. And all of us, like I said, bump into the magic from time to time.

So I think the first thing we have to do, if we want to edge toward enchantment, is name and recognize these cross-pressures and then learn to surf the updrafts of enchantment.

Our church retreat is on the Frio River. The Frio has carved out a small canyon in the Texas hills. So when you sit by the river and look to the top of the canyon you can watch the birds circling, riding the rising warm air from the bottom of the canyon to the top. As the air warms in the Texas sun it rises. This rising air is called a thermal, and birds will ride these thermals upward. Like an elevator of air.

These thermals aren't strong winds or updrafts. They are gentle and subtle.

When I think about edging toward enchantment I think about those birds on the Frio river. I think about catching subtle updrafts of transcendence, thermals of enchantment in our day to day lives.

Boiled down to its essence, I think you keep in touch with enchantment by intentionally attending to the thermals of enchantment, subtle as they are, to rest in them and ride them upward. I think a lot of our struggles with disenchantment stem from failing to attend to the updrafts of transcendence in our lives. We binge on disenchantment, ruminating on everything that gives us doubt. But we don't give equal time to the magic and mystery.

For many of us, reconnecting with enchantment will be an intentional, attentional practice.

Enchantment is like a bird spreading its wings to feel and search for that subtle thermal updraft.

In the last two posts I argued that recovering a vision of the immanence of God is a way we might edge ourselves back toward enchantment. This vision of immanence involves embracing a sacramental ontology where we come to experience the world, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, as "charged with the grandeur of God."

Another way to say all this is that we edge back toward enchantment by recovering, in the words of Andrew Greeley, a "Catholic imagination."

Here's how Greeley opens his book The Catholic imagination:

Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. Because these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.

You can make a good argument that disenchantment was the unwitting outcome of Protestantism. Charles Taylor in A Secular Age makes this argument.

For example, one of the impulses of Protestantism was to shift the spiritual load onto the laity.  Holiness was no longer to be the occupation of "spiritual specialists," the clergy, monastics and saints. Everyone was expected to be holy. The domain of holiness and saintliness shifted away from monasteries, convents and cathedrals to the town, the realm of work and family life.  As we know, there are no saints in Protestantism.

These trends also effectively disenchanted the sacred spaces of Catholicism. There is no clearer example of the disenchantment wrought by Protestantism than comparing a Catholic cathedral to the auditorium where Protestants gather to worship. The cathedral is an enchanted, sacred and holy space. The Protestant auditorium is a disenchanted, utilitarian and functional space.

Beyond people and space, time was also disenchanted by Protestantism. The holy days and seasons of the liturgical calendar of the church was gradually replaced by the time-keeping of the town, the secular clocks and calendars of the marketplace and the nation state.  

Finally, the demise of a sacramental ontology was also brought about by the Protestant rejection of the "real presence" of Christ in the Eucharist. The Eucharist became symbolic rather than sacramental, pointing to rather than participating in the life of God.

Things weren't supposed to work out this way. By releasing God into the world the hope was that God would be found everywhere. But the exact opposite happened. By disenchanting people (the saints), space (the cathedral), time (the liturgical calendar) and the Eucharist, Protestantism banished the holy, the sacred and the enchanted.

Basically, when every place is holy no place is holy.

So there is a dialectic here. We need to recover an experience of the immanence of God, an experience of the whole world being charged with the grandeur of God. But in order to cultivate these experiences we must create and experience places, times, people and events as specifically and particularly holy, sacred and enchanted. This is the Catholic imagination.

Edging toward enchantment means cultivating a sacred texture in life, recovering holy time and space. When it comes to hallowing, a disenchanted life is flat and homogeneous. There is no sacred texture.

By contrast, an enchanted life involves cultivating a sacred texture to life, where moments, places and experiences are set aside for wonder, awe, mystery and transcendence.

Enchantment is hallowing, the recovery of a sacred texture to life as witnessed to in the Catholic imagination.

I think a critical piece of the puzzle in recovering enchantment is embracing the immanence of God.

To unpack that very important word, immanence describes how God indwells and permeates creation. Immanence can be contrasted with transcendence, the way God is separate from creation.

Immanence speaks to how God is in creation, transcendence to how God is outside creation.

The irony of transcendence, often celebrated in praise music as the "awesomeness" of God, is how it tends toward disenchantment. With God exalted as King ruling over and above creation, God is subtly pulled out of creation. Rather than indwelling God evacuates creation.

Transcendence also tends toward deism, furthering our disenchantment. When transcendence is emphasized, highlighting God's separateness and Otherness from creation, God's actions in the world are conceptualized as intrusions, miraculous suspensions of the daily flux of cause and effect. But as science has progressed these miraculous intrusions are harder to believe in. And when you starting doubting the miracles of the transcendent God you, by default, find yourself in deism. A God who is out there, somewhere, but a God who doesn't miraculously intrude upon creation.

Basically:

Transcendence + Doubt (mainly in miracles) = Deism

In light of all this, we edge back toward enchantment when we begin to emphasize the immanence of God, God indwelling creation. Miracles aren't the intrusions of a transcendent God but the enchantment of creation itself.  

No one described this better than the Catholic poet 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.

Edging toward enchantment involves emphasizing the immanence of God, experiencing the world as charged with the grandeur of God.

My recent posts about demons--Lilith and Lucifer--bring up a different reflection on how we might edge back toward enchantment.

Recall from a recent post how we might use existential jujitsu with our disenchantment, using the dissatisfactions of disenchantment to edge us back toward enchantment.

Regarding this existential jujitsu, we've talked about our need for hallowing, our need to give sacred "weight" to life.

We've also talked about our dissatisfaction with seeing creation as mere mechanism. Our revolt in the face of things like cancer suggests that there is more to creation than mere mechanism, and this revolt is our implicit longing for a "new heaven and a new earth." Our lamentation edges us toward enchantment.

In this post I want to point out how we are dissatisfied with disenchantment when it comes to evil.

"Evil" is an enchanted word. Evil conjures the devil. Evil is alien and Other, a darkness that invades and violates our world.

Consequently, we reach for the word evil when the language of everyday morality fails us. Hitler was evil. ISIS beheading people is evil. A serial killer is evil.

We reach for the word evil when the wickedness we are describing boggles the mind. Evil can't be explained. Evil means we've reached the edge of our epistemological horizon.

Now, as rational, scientific people we know that there are explanations for people like Hitler, ISIS and serial killers. Historical explanations. Sociological explanations. Familial explanations. Psychological explanations. Environmental explanations. Genetic explanations. Neurological explanations. We know, because we live in a disenchanted world ruled by cause and effect, that there are reasons for these atrocities. Causes. And if we took the time to investigate these causes we would find reasons and explanations. There is nothing evil or diabolical at work. Just the forces of history, sociology, psychology and neurology.

And yet, there is something in us that resists wanting to understand Hitler. We fear that, if we understood Hitler, that we might empathize with Hitler. And if we empathized with Hitler, if we empathized with evil, then what sort of persons have we become?

Now, let me be very, very clear. This refusal to understand and perhaps empathize with those we call "evil" is a huge problem. We drop the "evil" label on our enemies and that justifies the evil we can do to them. So let me be very clear that the adjective "evil" creates huge moral problems and obstacles.

So my point here isn't that the use of word "evil" is good or justifiable, just that we're draw to it in an enchanted way. Something deep within us rejects a disenchanted account of evil. We are drawn to the word evil when we face horror that boggles the mind, along with an associated fear that if we understood the horror that we'd be contaminated by that understanding.

Basically, although it creates huge moral temptations, we experience evil as enchanted, as alien and Other.

So how do we reconcile these tensions?

One the one hand, we experience evil as enchanted, as alien and Other.

On the other hand, we are prone to evil when we label others as alien and Other.

There are a host of options here. And many of these options suggest, for a variety of very good reasons, that we should do away with the word "evil" altogether.

Still, I'd argue that there would remain a deep, visceral dissatisfaction with getting rid of the word "evil." When it comes to horror we instinctively reach for enchanted language. Psychologically speaking, I don't think we'll ever be able to stop using the word evil. We might should get rid of the word, but we will never be able to. Like it or not, humans are Homo religiosus.

So the Christian solution is to shift the word evil away from human beings toward the Devil. We battle not with flesh and blood but against spiritual forces of wickedness. The Devil is the ultimate source of evil.  Humans are evil only insofar as they serve the Devil. Which opens up the possibility for mercy and salvation. Humans who perpetrate wickedness are under slavery and bondage. And they can be set free from this bondage. We seek the conversion of the enemy, not his death. And love is the means of this conversion. "Father forgive them," Jesus said, "for they do not know what they are doing."

In short, the experience of evil edges us back toward enchantment. Problematically so, it is true.

But the trick is to push deeper into the enchantment, to not let the word evil fall, in a disenchanted way, upon human beings.

We push further into the enchantment to see evil as truly, alien and Other, as non-human. As thoroughly enchanted.

As the Devil himself.

Building upon the work of Charles Taylor regarding how disenchantment flows out of a inwardly focused "buffered" self, in the last post I suggested that we can edge back toward enchantment by getting that buffered self to turn outward in expectant receptivity to the world.

Two years ago I wrote about just this dynamic in a series of posts about my experiences encountering the charismatic worship at Freedom Fellowship. Incidentally, my life at Freedom is a big part of my recent book Reviving Old Scratch. See especially the chapter entitled "Holy Ghost Conga Lines," a chapter inspired by that series of posts from two years ago.

In that series I was trying to map out the terrain of charismatic spirituality because I didn't grow up in a charismatic tradition. Consequently, as I recount in Reviving Old Scratch, my first experiences with Freedom threw me for a loop. I couldn't get a handle on what I was experiencing.

A resource that helped me, upon which I based my series, was the book Thinking in Tongues by James Smith, a book in which Smith tries to trace out the contours of what he calls "the pentecostal worldview."

For our purposes in talking about how we might edge toward enchantment by opening up the buffered self, Smith argues that one of the features, perhaps the defining feature, of the charismatic/pentecostal worldview is a radical openness to God, especially God doing something different or new.

According to Smith this radical openness involves "a deep sense of expectation and an openness to surprise." Pentecostal worship "makes room for the unexpected" where "the surprising comes as no surprise."

And key to this experience is a posture of receptivity. As Smith notes, "pentecostal spirituality is shaped by a fundamental mode of reception." This posture of receptivity creates the potential for surprise.

In prior posts we've talked about how Catholic spirituality gives us resources to edge back toward enchantment. But charismatic spirituality is also an enchanted spirituality, so it also holds out for us some insights about how to edge back toward enchantment. And the key insight in my estimation is the charismatic openness to surprise, an openness that combats the ruminating inwardness of the buffered self.

Prior to my life at Freedom I had God in a box. A rational, logical box in my head. That's the disenchanted faith experience of the buffered self. When you have God in a box in your head you lack the capacity to be surprised by God. And when you lack the capacity to be surprised by God you lack the capacity to experience grace.

And if you lack the capacity to surprised by grace all you have to rely on, spiritually speaking, is the junk rattling around in your head, the ruminations of the buffered self.

The charismatic worship at Freedom--in its radical openness to being surprised by God--helped me identify and name something that I've come to think is the key to Christian faith and spirituality.

Grace and enchantment flow out of an openness to surprise.

In the last few posts we've been talking about how a sacred experience of nature can edge us, particularly liberal and progressive Christians, back toward enchantment.

As I noted in my last post, given that liberals seem to experience nature as sacred and holy, liberals, at least on an emotional level, embrace a sacramental ontology, an enchanted world "charged with the grandeur of God."

And while we're on this subject, we really should visit with the elves and hobbits before moving on.

Last summer I blogged through J.R.R. Tolkien's famous essay "On Fairy Stories." Of particular relevance for these reflections are the first three posts from my "The Theology of Faërie" series: "The Enchantment of the Inklings," "The Elvish Art and Desiring Dragons,"  and "The Wonder of Things."

Read those posts to see how Tolkien, and the other Inklings, used fairy stories to help us edge back toward enchantment.

But if you don't have the time to read those posts, just note how the sacramental ontology of Catholicism (Tolkien was a devout Catholic) is observed in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in the enchantments we experience among the elves and hobbits.

And these are different sorts of enchantments. The elves are magical. The hobbits are not magical, but they are enchanted.

The enchantment of the hobbits are the enchantments of home and simple joys.

Love for the Shire. Friendship. Food, drink, and song. And a good pipe.

Common things, but enchanted things.

The hobbits are less magical than the elves but more enchanted than Men. This makes the hobbits perfect metaphors for how we edge back toward enchantment. We don't reach for the magic of the elves but for the enchantments of the Shire.

And the the enchantments of the Shire are harmony with nature, domestic life and the daily magic of friendship and good food.

One more post about selfhood and enchantment.

Again, in the last few posts we've been talking about the relationships between the buffered self and disenchantment and the porous self and enchantment. As we've discussed, Charles Taylor's argument is that the modern experience of disenchantment has been less a matter of changing beliefs than an intrapsychic change, a change in how we experience the self in relation to the outside world.

In the enchanted experience the boundary between the self and the world is "porous," where the outside world can impinge upon, affect and invade the psyche. The porous self, we might say, is an involved, engaged and relational encounter with the world.

By contrast, in the modern, disenchanted era the self has become introverted, isolated, and closed off from the world. "Buffered" against the world. The ego is now alone with itself, disengaged, withdrawn, and no longer in relationship with the world. And according to Taylor, it is this shift from the porous to the buffered self that drives the experience disenchantment. Taylor describing this:

Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded, buffered self and the porous self of the earlier enchanted world. As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me,” to use the contemporary expression. That’s the sense to my use of the term “buffered” here...

And so the boundary between agents and forces is fuzzy in the enchanted world; and the boundary between mind and world is porous...[A] similar point can be made about the relation to spirits. The porousness of the boundary emerges here in various kinds of “possession”—all the way from a full taking over of the person, as with a medium, to various kinds of domination by or partial fusion with a spirit or God. Here again, the boundary between self and other is fuzzy, porous. And this has to be seen as a fact of experience, not a matter of “theory” or “belief.”

Given all this, in the last few posts I've been arguing that we can edge back toward enchantment by opening up the buffered self to the world. If not making the self more "porous," than at least more open, especially open to surprise. The enchanted self is a receptive rather than ruminating self.

The notion that I'd like to bring into this discussion is something I've written about before, an idea that plays a huge role in my book The Slavery of Death.

That notion is eccentricity, the idea that the "center" of selfhood is located outside of oneself. Our identity is something we receive rather than possess. For example, in the biblical imagination, our lives are "hidden in Christ." That is to say, our identity is not found within ourselves but outside of ourselves, "in Christ" rather than "in ourselves."

The point here, given what we've been discussing the last few posts, is that the experience of enchantment is driven by this eccentricity: enchantment is the experience of the porous self encountering something from outside the boundaries of the buffered self.

Connecting back to our discussions about enchantment and charismatic spirituality, and even with the sacramental ontology of our very first posts where we saw the Holy Spirit brooding over creation, we can suggest that the pneumatological encounter--the enchanted experience of the Holy Spirit in daily life--is an eccentric encounter.

As Charles Taylor argues, the porous self is an experience of risk, uncertainty and vulnerability. Eccentrically open to God, the porous self can be interrupted by the Spirit. By contrast, the introverted and buffered self is "autonomous," impervious to the interruptions of the Spirit and, thus, unable to be surprised by God.

These observations connect with what we noted in James Smith's book Thinking in Tongues, where we described the charismatic experience of the Spirit as being rooted in an openness to God, an openness which "makes room for the unexpected" and where "the surprising comes as no surprise." And again, the key feature of this eccentric openness is cultivating a posture of receptivity.

Phrased differently, to make the connection with The Slavery of Death, an open and receptive self is an eccentric self.

We edge back toward enchantment when we cultivate an eccentric identity, an identity we receive from God.

An identity not found by turning inward to plumb the depths of our buffered psyches--searching for the "real me" under layers of Freudian repression--but an identity received as gift, the enchanted, charismatic experience of the Spirit poured out upon us.

I've suggested in the last few posts that we can edge back toward enchantment by embracing a sacramental ontology. We can do this by recovering a Catholic imagination, coming to see the world as "charged with the grandeur of God."

But as I pointed out in the last post, the paradox here is learning to set aside particular places, times, activities and things as uniquely sacred, hallowed and sacramental. Re-enchanting our days involves adding a sacred texture to our lives.

We can re-enchant time by embracing the liturgical calendar and fixed hour prayer. As a simple example, over the last few years Jana and I have been very intentional to celebrate all twelve days of Christmas, from December 25 to Epiphany on January 6. We keep the tree up through the 6th and keep playing Christmas music. We keep our house enchanted--with music, lights and nativity sets--for the entire liturgical season. We don't tear everything down on December 26, rushing into the disenchanted New Year's day celebrations of football and watching the ball drop in Times Square with celebrities. Personally, from a celebratory stance, I wholly ignore New Year's Day. I find it an unwelcome intrusion into the Christmas season.

As another example, I've also embraced fixed hour prayer. I work hard to pray Morning and Evening prayer each day, along with Compline before closing my eyes to sleep.

Beyond time I also try to enchant space. I do this by using and embracing sacramentals. Sacramentals are material objects that are set aside and/or blessed and are used, in the words of Wikipedia, "to excite pious thoughts and to increase devotion."

Candles, prayer beads, prayer ropes, religious medals, scapulars, statues, kneelers, pictures, icons, oil, ash, palm leaves, water, incense, crosses and crucifixes. 

To help myself edge back toward enchantment I've filled my life with sacramentals. I carry prayer beads and wear a prayer rope. I wear a religious medal (depending upon what I want to spiritually focus on I rotate between St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Michael and St. Thérèse of Lisieux) or a crucifix. Icons fill the walls and shelves of my office. A crucifix hangs on the wall above a prayer kneeler. There are candles. I listen to Gregorian chants.

At Freedom Fellowship we also like to use oil when we pray over people.

And though it's a bit unorthodox, I'd even argue that tattoos can be sacramentals. Material reminders of the sacred.

Years ago, inspired by Nadia Bolz-Weber's liturgical calendar tattoos, I got a tattoo of Rublev's icon of the Trinity on my left arm.

When I finally got to meet Nadia last year I made sure we got a picture of our sacramental ink.

You'll also note in that picture with Nadia the religious medal I'm wearing. And if you could see it, there's a prayer rope on my right wrist. The rings on my left hand also have religious symbolism.

I drip sacramentals.

It's all very intentional. No matter where I look on my person or in my personal spaces I have a sacramental there to remind me of the sacred and holy. Because in my experience, sacramentals help us re-enchant space, edging us back toward enchantment.

This will be the last post in this loosely connected series of posts devoted to edging us back toward enchantment.

An idea that we've been playing with in the last few posts is that of existential jujitsu, using our disenchantment with disenchantment to edge us back toward enchantment. We've also talked about the practice of hallowing--rituals, words, liturgies and actions that give sacred weight and texture to life.

Both of those ideas bring me to a final reflection.

Life demands hallowing. And the necessity of this hallowing edges back toward enchantment.

What do I mean when I say that "life demands hallowing"?

This. There are moments of life, moments of import, that we feel must be "set apart"--made holy and sacred--from the mundane, routine and workaday.

Think about a funeral. Or a birth. Or a wedding. Or a memorial commemorating sacrifice, heroism, suffering or tragedy.

I don't show up in flip flops at funerals. I don't look at my iPhone when my child is being born. I don't talk loudly to my neighbor when the couple is exchange their vows. I don't laugh or joke around when visiting Auschwitz. I don't litter in national parks.

Some events and places are set apart as holy ground. And as we enter these times and places we become hushed, solemn, still, reflective, attentive and reverent. 

Life demands this sort of hallowing, a hallowing that pulls us out of the entertainments and consumptions of capitalistic culture. We want more from life than fun. We want life to be holy. We want life to be sacred.

And it is this demand for holiness that makes us human. This religious instinct--the human and humanizing need to live in a holy, sacred and enchanted world--is universal, shared with the religious and the irreligious.   

We are disenchanted with living in a disenchanted world. As human beings we have a need to hallow life.

Everyone of us wants and needs to live in an enchanted world.

We've been talking about edging back toward enchantment by recovering the sacred and holy aspects of creation. In the last post I mentioned the enchantments of the hobbits, much of which is rooted in a love and care for a particular place, the Shire.

We can't really move on from that point without bringing in another resource. Wendell Berry.

It's perhaps Berry's most well known poem, but it's always worth revisiting:

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

--from the collection The Mad Farmer Poems

A couple of observations about the poem for our reflections about edging back toward enchantment.

First, you see in the poem a recovery of the enchanted, sacramental ontology:

Love the Lord. Love the world. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion. Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Be like the fox.

In addition, similar to Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur" poem, this embrace of nature and place is contrasted with disenchanted consumption and production:

If you love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay, and want more of everything ready-made, your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won't compute.

Our hearts thrill to these lines. But what else is there in a flat, hollowed out, disenchanted world? Just working and buying things. Week after week. Year after year. We feel the lie in this, the cheapening, numbing and deadening of life. We know there are holy, sacred and enchanted things. True, as skeptical, doubting and modern Christians we struggle with doubts and disenchantment. But we know that we must learn to give our approval to all we cannot understand. As smart, educated and sophisticated Christians we must learn to praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. There is sacred mystery. We must ask and embrace the questions that have no answers.

We must practice resurrection.

That is how we edge back toward enchantment.

When you first start struggling with doubts and disenchantment you enter into a phase of deconstruction. You start sifting through and analyzing everything you believe with the goal of stripping faith down to the stuff you really, truly believe.

Trouble is, you can go so far down this path that by the time you're done there's nothing left. You keep whittling faith down until, eventually, all that is left is scraps on the floor.

But deconstruction is important. Faith must and will go through the fires. In the words of Paul, when our faith was a child it talked like a child, thought like a child and reasoned like a child. Faith has to grow up and put childish things behind it. But that can be painful. There are attractive things about a childish faith. It's simpler. It's consoling. It's certain. To grow up in faith is to step into complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and anxiety. And there are times when we wish we could turn back the clock of faith, to go back to simpler times.

But you can't go back. I often tell my students that there is a threshold of doubt, that once you start asking certain sorts of questions there is no going back. When it comes to faith there is a class of questions that, once you get to them, just don't have any answers. When you reach these questions you'll live with them for the rest of your life.

During a season of deconstruction it makes sense to read a lot of stuff that tests and pushes your faith. Stuff that lightens the load of faith but keeps you hanging on in the face of your doubts and disenchantment. For example, there was a season of deconstruction in my life when I was attracted to death of god theology and its spin on religionless Christianity. Hey, I thought, maybe I can be a Christian without believing God!

Now, if you don't struggle with doubts you likely don't understand the attraction of that idea. A Christianity without faith in God seems ludicrous to Christians who are devout, certain and orthodox. But if you're struggling with faith the notion of a religionless Christianity seems like a gift, a way to lighten the burden of faith while keeping connected to the faith. Often the tether is behavioral, a focus on orthopraxy (the right practice of the faith) than on orthodoxy. Doing things rather than believing in things.

The thing I'm trying to point out here is that people are attracted to these strange notions because they are a form of coping with doubt and disenchantment. For the most part, Christians aren't attracted to things like death of god theology, religionless Christianity or Christian atheism because they are trying to be radical, progressive, cool, relevant or avant-garde. No, they reach these ideas because they are the final stages in the journey of deconstruction, lightening the load of faith to make it easier to carry in the face of doubts and disenchantment. This constellation of ideas--a faith without faith, a religion without God--is just about as light as faith can get before it completely evaporates.

And when you get to this point something has to happen.

In my experience, a radically deconstructed faith just isn't sustainable. It can be for a season, even a long season. This is a place where you end up after you have journeyed through the fires. Faith here is in its lightest, most insubstantial state. But over time the unbearable lightness of faith starts taking a toll.

The first place you'll start noticing the unbearable lightness of faith is in your attitude about going to church. What's the point of rolling out of bed on Sunday morning? You hardly believe in any of this stuff, so the entire experience of church is just one, massive doubt trigger. Church is too faithful--all the songs and sermons so full of conviction--to be tolerable. Our faith has become so wispy and insubstantial that we experience full-bodied expressions of faith jarring and uncomfortable. Even unseemly. A lyric of a song makes us wince. A sermon illustration slaps us in the face.

It's hard to go to church when your faith has become so light. So you stop going. Now you have a faith without God and without a church. It's just you, alone, with all the doubts in your head.

Many of us have been in or are currently in this exact spot. It's a fine, perfectly predictable spot to reach. Having been there myself hear no judgment on my part. I get it. My point is simply that I don't think you can stay in this spot forever. Perhaps some can. I do think a lot of people can be there for a very long time. I was in this spot for many years. But eventually, the unbearable lightness of faith becomes intolerable. This being betwixt and between belief an unbelief is just not sustainable.

Something has to give. If you want to maintain a hold on faith the season of deconstruction has to be followed by a season of reconstruction. But a lot of doubting and disenchanted Christians never make the decision--and it is a decision--to commence with the work of reconstruction.

In the lament psalms the season of deconstruction is followed by a season of reconstruction. A turn is made. A jarring turn, but a turn nonetheless. Lament, doubt and disillusionment is followed by doxology, praise and thanksgiving. Faith has a rhythm. At some point, doubting Christians must force themselves to read the psalms all the way to the end. We need to practice making the turn.

Same goes for the prophets. The prophets rage and despair. But a steady diet of rage and despair is not sustainable. So the prophets are also poets of grace and hope. Like the psalms, the prophets make the turn. Deconstruction is followed by reconstruction. Faith must find this biblical rhythm if it is to be vibrant and sustainable.

Edging back toward enchantment is a part of this journey toward reconstruction. Edging back toward enchantment is the intentional practice of reading the lament psalms and the prophets all the way to the end. It is the intentional commitment to let mystery, and even faith, season our diet of questions. The intentional commitment to not let our doubts and objections be the primary intellectual and emotional filter of Christian community and worship. The intentional commitment to check our doubts and cynicism at the door.

Edging back toward enchantment is practicing faith. Not practicing as faith. But just what I said: practicing faith.

During the winter the adult Bible class I help teach on Sunday mornings was doing a study of the Elijah and Elisha narratives in 1 and 2 Kings.

One Sunday my assignment was to teach through 2 Kings 6. The story that opens Chapter Six is another miracle story in a string of miracle stores from the preceding chapters. In 2 Kings 4 we see Elisha doing a series of miracles: Expanding a widow's store of oil (2 Kings 4.1-7), raising the son of the Shunammite woman from the dead (2 Kings 4.8-37), neutralizing some poisoned stew (2 Kings 4.38-41) and multiplying food to feed a hundred prophets (2 Kings 4.42-44). In 2 Kings 5 we have the healing of Naaman the leper. And then in 2 Kings 6 we get to this story:

2 Kings 6.1-7
The company of the prophets said to Elisha, “Look, the place where we meet with you is too small for us. Let us go to the Jordan, where each of us can get a pole; and let us build a place there for us to meet.” And he said, “Go.” Then one of them said, “Won’t you please come with your servants?” “I will,” Elisha replied. And he went with them.

They went to the Jordan and began to cut down trees. As one of them was cutting down a tree, the iron axhead fell into the water. “Oh no, my lord!” he cried out. “It was borrowed!” The man of God asked, “Where did it fall?” When he showed him the place, Elisha cut a stick and threw it there, and made the iron float. “Lift it out,” he said. Then the man reached out his hand and took it.

What do you do with a story like this in a Bible class full of educated, modern, Western Christians? Of course, from a narrative and literary perspective we can discuss how the miracle functions within the story. But what is the lesson in this story for us?

Do we think that axeheads can float in our own lives?

Do we expect miracles?

I asked this question of my Bible class because one of the things I've noticed over the years is the difference between my Sunday morning experience and my Monday and Wednesday night experiences.

On Sunday mornings I worship at the Highland Church of Christ. Highland is a mixed bag, demographically, but we are a pretty educated bunch, with lots of college professors in attendance. And by and large, the conversation about God at Highland tends toward the moral and therapeutic rather than the miraculous. God wants us to be good, moral people. Compassionate and concerned about injustice and suffering. And during times of struggle, stress, loss or tragedy we call upon God to give us peace, comfort, wisdom and strength. But we don't, by and large, expect miracles.We're much more likely to pray for comfort over the loss of an axehead than to pray for the axehead to float.

My experience on Monday and Wednesday nights is very different. As regular readers know, I teach a Bible class on Monday nights out at a prison. And on Wednesday nights I worship at Freedom Fellowship, a Highland church plant in a poor part of our town.

Out at the prison and at Freedom we expect miracles. There isn't any intellectual embarrassment about praying for axeheads to float. Shoot, people have experienced axeheads floating. Miracle stories are very common at the prison and at Freedom.

In short, my experience on Sunday mornings tends to be disenchanted while my experience on Monday and Wednesday nights tends to be enchanted.

For example, when I read the story of the axehead in Sunday morning Bible class we're all a bit embarrassed and puzzled by the story, more likely to think about the story in a literary sort of way than expecting anything like that to happen in our own lives. By contrast, if you read the story of the axehead out at the prison or at Freedom people there would say, "Totally have seen something like that happen."

This division between enchantment/disenchantment across socioeconomic and educational lines isn't anything new. Vatican elites are embarrassed by the magical and superstitious beliefs among poor Catholics worldwide. Religion is on the decline in the rich, secular West but charismatic and pentecostal spirituality is exploding in Third World contexts. And in my own town I step across the threshold when I move from worshiping with college-educated people to worshiping at Freedom or at the prison.

All this is to bring us to the point I made to my Bible class about the floating axehead story.

"Basically," I said, "our church tends toward disenchantment. Because of our education and wealth. Beyond a literary analysis, we don't know what to do with a miracle story like this. But my experience out at the prison and with Freedom is very different, much more enchanted. I don't know what to do with that disjoint. I just want to make the observation that the disjoint exists. It's my opinion that this is one of the least discussed fractures in the church, the fracture between the enchanted church and the disenchanted church, which is often correlated with education and socioeconomic status. Is it possible to overcome this divide?"

We didn't get much past me making these observations and putting this question to the class. But afterwards a few in the class encouraged me, at some point, to return to this subject. They expressed struggling with disenchantment. And they had also bumped up against the enchantment/disenchantment divide in their own lives--within a marriage, within a friendship, within the church. One person living with an enchanted Christianity where axeheads float clashing with another person whose disenchanted Christianity is discomfited by stories of floating axeheads. Did I, these class members asked, have any suggestions about how to overcome this divide? Or any thoughts about how disenchanted Christians might recover or edge toward a more enchanted Christianity?

I'd like to devote some posts to pondering these questions. While I'll be gathering these posts under the title "Edging Toward Enchantment" I won't be using "Part 1" or "Part 2" as we go. I'm not going to be building toward anything with these posts. Just collecting thoughts, ideas and impressions I have.

I want to ramble through some ideas and insights in a desultory way. Thinking out loud about enchantment and how we might recover it.

In the last two posts we've been talking about how, in our modern, disenchanted world, the self is experienced as "buffered," closed off and isolated from the external world. The disenchanted, buffered self contrasts with the enchanted, porous self that is affected by and vulnerable to the outside world.

In the last post we raised the question of Ross Douthat, that the buffered self might be affecting modern perceptions of the world. Having turned inward on itself the buffered self might be ill-equipped or unable to see or experience the enchantment of the world, a world charged with the grandeur of God.

If this is true then disenchantment and doubt is associated with an introverted experience of faith. Enchantment, by contrast, would be associated with an outward facing, receptive and expectant posture.  

The Latin phrase incurvatus in se--curved inward upon oneself--has often been taken as a classical description of sin. Being curved inward upon yourself was to be prideful and self-focused.

But in our conversations here about disenchantment and enchantment we can think about incurvatus in se in other ways as well. Incurvatus in se describes the faith experience of the disenchanted, buffered self, a faith that is excessively introverted and ruminative, separated from the world and preoccupied with the sorting through the contents of its own mind.

Cognitive rumination are hallmarks of doubt and disenchantment. Introverted, cognitive rumination--mental wheels obsessively spinning and spinning in the mind--is the buffered self's experience of faith. 

I think that is true. Disenchanted, doubting Christians tend to be preoccupied with their own thoughts about faith, working hard to get it all sorted out in their minds, getting the answers to all their questions about faith and the bible. The buffered self's experience of faith isn't an outward posture of receptivity but thinking a lot. Questions about God rather than experience with God seem to dominate the faith experience. For example, questions about prayer are more likely to be entertained than actually praying. Criticisms of praise songs are raised over singing praise songs. Concerns about the Bible are voiced over reading the Bible.

All this seems to suggest that edging back toward enchantment may involve getting us out of our heads.

Enchantment is a faith experience that is not incurvatus in se but is, rather, excurvatus ex se.

In opening up the disenchanted, buffered self, enchantment involves being "curved outward" in expectant receptivity to the faith and God's presence in the world.

In my last post we shifted away from talking about sacramental ontology to selfhood as we continue to explore how we might "edge toward enchantment" as people of faith in a secular, disenchanted world.

As Charles Taylor has argued it, the disenchanted self is "buffered" against the outside world. In contrast to the enchanted, vulnerable, porous self the buffered self is experienced as being inviolably separate from the external world.

There are a couple of different reasons why I want to ponder how the experience of the self can edge us toward or away from enchantment.

The first reason has to do with a question raised by NYT columnist Ross Douthat in post he wrote entitled "Religious Experience and the Modern Self."

Read the whole column to get Ross's full argument, but the gist of it is this. We often think that the disenchantment of secularism is caused by our tendency to "explain away" weird, uncanny, numinous and spiritual experiences. And given that our selves are "buffered" against the external environment, we tend to look for these explanations within our psyche--these experiences are fantasies, perceptual tricks, mental breakdowns or odd turns of the mind. Your duty in the modern world is to ignore and shake off these perceptual ephemera. Because the origin of these experiences is found within your head rather than in the world. That's the buffered self.

But Douthat's worry about the buffered self runs deeper.

Here's his worry in a nutshell: What if the buffered self isn't simply explaining away perceptions but is changing perception itself?

Phrased another way, what if the buffered self isn't simply involved in intellectually dismissing our experiences of enchantment but is eroding our ability to experience enchantment in the first place?

As Douthat rightly points out, this latter is much more worrying. If you're explaining away experiences of enchantment at least you're having those experiences, you're still bumping into the magic from time to time. And those experiences provide the raw material for religious experience in the modern, secular age. These experiences provide, to go back to an earlier post, updrafts of transcendence as a countervailing breeze against the downdrafts of disenchantment.

But if the buffered self is changing our perceptions and experiences of reality then we're not explaining away the magic, we're no longer experiencing the magic, no longer seeing or bumping into enchantment in day to day life.

And that's a deeper problem.

In the last few posts I've been talking about existential jujitsu, using the dissatisfactions of disenchantment as material to edge us back toward enchantment.

In my experience the issue that causes the most doubt among Christians is the problem of suffering. The massive amounts of suffering in the world, currently and historically, cause us to doubt the goodness, power and/or existence of God.

If faith has a Number One Problem it's the problem of suffering.

But even here, when faith is facing its most severe trial and test, I think we can find resources for enchantment. More existential jujitsu.

Last spring I was doing a chapel talk for biology majors at ACU. I started off talking about how we tend to integrate faith and science in the field of biology (along with the other sciences). We tend to do this by speaking about our wonder and awe at the intricate design and beauty of biological organisms, structures and processes. The Christian biologist finds resources for faith in the wonder and awe of creation.

In the language of apologetics, creation is an intricate Watch, and as we study the design of the Watch we behold the mind and work of the Watchmaker.

The Watch and Watchmaker argument is familiar to most of us. It's an argument that still has a lot of traction in Christian apologetics. But what I pointed out that day to the biology students was that the Watchmaker argument unwittingly exacerbates our disenchantment, undermining our faith in subtle ways we don't appreciate until its too late.

Let me say that again, appeals to wonder and awe at the design of creation can undermine your faith in the Watchmaker.

How so?

First, and most obviously, Darwin discovered other mechanisms that can create design. That's what I pointed out to the biology majors. Most Christians don't understand the issue with Darwin. Most Christians reject Darwin because they reject the notion of common decent, that our ancestor were "monkeys" or "apes." Darwin, in the hands of these Christians, offends our dignity, vanity and narcissism.

But that's not the real challenge of Darwin, an assault on human uniqueness within the animal kingdom. The deeper challenge of Darwin is his assault on the argument from design. What Darwin showed with natural selection was that you can get biological design--a Watch--without a Watchmaker. 

So we can debate the origins of design. Still, most Christians will posit a Watchmaker. But even if you posit a Watchmaker there's still a problem, a subtle problem but an insidious one few Christians notice or pay attention to.

As I shared with the biology majors, the deeper source of disenchantment from the Watchmaker argument is that it turns nature into a mechanism. And it's this mechanistic view of creation that deepens our disenchantment as it radically breaks from the sacramental ontology where the world is alive and charged with the grandeur of God.

True, the mechanism might be intricate, giving evidence of a creative Mind and Intellect. But the mechanism, once designed, no longer needs the Watchmaker. The Watchmaker just winds up the Watch and then steps away. The mechanism runs all on its own, driven by the deterministic laws of cause and effect.

Basically, the Watchmaker argument tricks you into adopting deism, the belief that God wound up the universe at the start and then walked away. The Watchmaker argument might be good in the short run, helping you score a point or two in a debate about the existence of God, but the long run consequences can be disastrous to faith. True, the design of the universe might give evidence for an originating Creator, but the universe as a mechanism, as a Watch, is thoroughly disenchanted. You might score a point with apologetics, but you've stepped into a worldview that is going to radically alter your experience of God in day to day life, an experience that will slowly dry up your faith.

This is why I said that wonder and awe at the Watch--the argument from design--can actually undermine you faith in the long run. The Watchmaker argument, by reducing Creation to a mechanism, tricks you into adopting a deistic view of the cosmos. And once you've adopted deism--a distant God who stepped away from creation and doesn't intervene--your disenchantment radically deepens.

So that's the point I made to the biology majors. When we teachers point out the intricacy and design of biology I think we're actually hurting your faith in the long run. We're turning you into deists because we are implicitly asking you to look at Creation as a cold, dead mechanism--a beautifully designed mechanism, yes, but still a mechanism--rather than as something alive, sacred and crackling with the Presence of God.

So where do we find room for existential jujitsu with the Watchmaker argument?

Here's the question I asked the biology majors:

Is cancer beautiful?

It's a hard question. Maybe at the level of pure mechanism you can find beauty in how cancer cells replicate. At the cellular and molecular level the intricacy of the design is beautiful.

Cancer is the Watch.

But at an existential level we recoil at the notion that cancer is beautiful. We've seen cancer eat away at and take the lives of our loved ones. We stand at the graveside of a child who has died of leukemia and say, "Maybe the Watch is beautiful. But I hate the Watch."

The problem with the Watchmaker argument, I told the biology majors, is that it doesn't account for our deep, deep dissatisfaction with the Watch. The Watch may be intricately designed, and when we look at the Grand Canyon or at the stars we might call these parts of the Watch beautiful. But there also parts of the Watch that we experience as ugly, horrible and tragic. Design doesn't always produce wonder. Cancer isn't beautiful.

It might seem, though, that I've argued myself into a corner, right back to the problem of suffering. Why, we ask, did the Watchmaker make a Watch with cancer in it?

I don't have an answer to that question. But I do find resources for enchantment here. How? Because I don't like Darwin's view of the Watch either.

When I stand by the graveside of a child who has died of leukemia everything in me tells me that this is wrong, that the world shouldn't be this way. And that feeling of wrongness edges me back toward enchantment. For some deep reason, a reason rooted in the foundations of what it means to be human being, I think about cancer moralistically. Cancer, I'm convinced, is wrong.

Now, biologically speaking, scientifically speaking, I know that this is a ridiculous feeling. Cancer can't be wrong. Cancer is just a mechanism--a dumb, beautiful mechanism.

A Watch can't be wrong. A Watch just is. And yet I hate the Watch.

If all is mechanism and deterministic clockwork, it's irrational to hate cancer. It's like hating a bicycle or a tree or the sunset.

But I'll never, ever, let go of my feeling that cancer is wrong and ugly. To let go of that feeling is to become untethered from my humanity. Which means that I'll always be tethered to faith. 

Yes, my lamentation at the graveside fuels my doubt about God. But the hot sting of lamentation also edges me back toward enchantment, back to faith, back to God. Because if I'm lamenting, if I'm objecting, if I'm screaming at the universe, I'm viewing the Watch as broken, as wrong. As more than mechanism. Which means that I think things should be--notice that moralizing should--otherwise. And that's a ridiculous, sentimental notion if there is no Watchmaker. I should just stoically resign myself to the facts--that cancer isn't right or wrong, that cancer is beautifully designed.

Yes, my tears around the graveside erode my faith. But those tears, and the revolt they express, are at the very same time the tears the edge me back toward enchantment

I ended my last post with a provocation.

I said, let us become disgusted with a disenchanted view of creation.

I chose my words carefully. I specifically wanted to use the word disgusted.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as many of you know, has posited that human societies tend to work with five "moral foundations" to decide if something is right versus wrong. The the moral foundations are: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity.

One of the early findings of this research was that liberals and conservatives appear to use these foundations differently. Specifically, it was argued that liberals tend to restrict their moral judgments to the foundations of Care and Fairness. This gives liberals that "social justice" impulse, a sensitivity to injustice (violations of the Fairness foundation) and oppression (violations of the Care foundation).

By contrast, it was argued that conservatives appeal to all five foundations. Beyond issues of harm and injustice conservatives also care about in-group loyalty/solidarity, obeying authority and honoring the holy/sacred.

But is that true?

For example, do liberals and progressives really eschew the Sanctity foundation?

This is important in that the Sanctity foundation is the fount of enchantment, as it is the experience of what we've called a "sacramental ontology," a world experienced, here and there, as holy and sacred.

By and large, liberals tend to be a pretty disenchanted group, more modern and secularized than their conservative counterparts. And the same holds true among liberal and progressive Christians. Liberal and progressive Christians tend to be the Christians who most struggle with doubt and disenchantment.

But if progressives and liberals also makes appeals to the Sanctity foundation, as conservatives do, then we've found here some other resources that might help doubting and disenchanted Christians edge back toward enchantment.

So, the question: Do liberals make appeals to the Sanctity foundation?

Contrary to what was first thought, it appears that they do. Liberals just use the Sanctity foundation for different sorts of things. What we are now realizing is that it's not that conservatives appeal to Sanctity and liberals do not, but that each group considers different things to be sacred and holy.

For example, in a 2015 study entitled "Liberals Condemn Sacrilege Too: The Harmless Desecration of Cerro Torre" psychologists Jeremy Frimer and Caitlin Tell, along with Jonathan Haidt, observed that liberals condemned the alteration of the mountain Cerro Torre by mountain climbers. (The mountain climbers had placed permanent bolts in the mountain and left them there.)

But here's the key point. The researchers observed that liberals condemned the alteration of the mountain by making an appeal to the Sanctity foundation.

That is, the bolts were condemned as a desecration of the mountain.

In short, liberals also make appeals to the Sanctity foundation.

And that is why I chose the word "disgusted" in my last post. Disgust, as I describe in my book Unclean, is the emotion that regulates the Sanctity foundation. Disgust is the emotion of defilement and desecration.

Liberals, it seems, experience nature as sacred and holy. Liberals appeal to the Sanctity foundation to condemn the desecration of nature. Which connects back to my last post, the sacred experience of creation becomes a resource for liberal and progressive Christians to edge back toward enchantment. 

In short, while they might not theologically believe it, liberals emotionally experience the world as being "charged with the grandeur of God."

That's why in the last post I called this a "romantic Christianity." Intellectually, liberal Christians struggle with disenchantment.

For liberal Christians enchantment is emotional, less theological and more romantic.

During the Spring semester at ACU I gave three guest lectures about recovering enchantment for my friend Paul's Faith and Science class.

In that class I talked about, borrowing from Charles Taylor, how our experience in a "secular age" isn't wholly disenchanted. As I talked about in an earlier post, in a secular age we also, from time to time, bump into enchantment. While perhaps fragile and fleeting, we still experience transcendent moments. We still step into the sacred.

Consequently, while for the most part we live in a disenchanted world we are dissatisfied with that world. We suspect that a wholly disenchanted world isn't being true to our lives.

Basically, we grow disenchanted with disenchantment.

We become doubtful about disenchantment. We are dissatisfied with disenchantment. Disillusioned with disenchantment. We might even get disgusted with disenchantment.

And what I suggested to the class in my lectures is that this "disenchantment with disenchantment," this "doubting your doubts," can become material for enchantment.

Flip the script, I said. In a secular age we use disenchantment to doubt enchantment. So turn it around. Cultivate doubts in the other direction.

When, where and why do you become disenchanted with disenchantment?

When, where and why do you doubt your doubts?

Think on such things. Linger here, and you'll starting edging back toward enchantment. 

One of the key practices that help us edge back toward enchantment is existential jujitsu.

Yes, belief is hard in an an age of doubt and disenchantment, in this our "secular age," to use the phrase of Charles Taylor. And yet, we're dissatisfied and disillusioned with doubt and disenchantment in various ways. And that dissatisfaction and disillusionment can be used and leveraged back upon doubt and disenchantment. As in the martial art jujitsu, you use the momentum and energy of the attacker against himself. Doubt and disenchantment erodes belief, but doubt and disenchantment create all sorts of dissatisfactions that can be leveraged right back upon doubt and disenchantment, causing us to doubt our doubts and edge back toward enchantment.

So in the next few posts I want to walk through a couple of locations where I think this existential jujitsu is effective.

In this post I'd like to consider meaning, significance and purpose in life.

Specifically, we'd like for our lives to have meaning and significance. We want our lives to matter. We want our lives to have purpose.

But in our disenchanted and secular age the transcendent and metaphysical structures that gave the lives of our ancestors value, direction, purpose, significance and meaning have all been dismantled. All that we are left with, in a thoroughly disenchanted world, is the preferences and choices of the lone individual. But when I'm confronted with the fact that the great, grand goal and purpose of my life is the product of my own momentary choice and preference the fabric that makes up the meaning of life seems thin and insubstantial. I'm a fickle human being. Who says the "meaning" of my life, the meaning I chose for myself today, isn't going to be different tomorrow when I decide to change my mind?

Fickleness isn't the only problem. As I reflect upon my life I see how my visions of success, significance and meaning in life are often driven by vanity and selfishness. Or fear. In Christian language, my vision of success and significance is always being contaminated by my own sin, brokenness and fallenness.

And it's not just fickleness and sin. Sometimes it's just simple inattentiveness. I don't, by and large, wake up each day pondering the deep existential significance of my life. I'm too busy, distracted and superficial. I mainly spend my days moving back and forth from To Do Lists to entertainments. Now I'm working on something that has to get done, then surfing the Internet, then excited to get back to show I'm following on Netflix. Then back to work. So pass my days, life as an producer and consumer in late modern capitalism. My life is rendered superficial by mindlessness. I'm being "productive" and having "fun" but I'm not living deeply.

Such is meaning, purpose and significance when life is left up to me. When it's left up to me the deepest things in life suddenly seem fragile and insubstantial. So we are chronically confronted with crises of meaning. We never escape the haunting question, "What's the point?" Life feels random, arbitrary, and rootless.

All this is to simply say that meaning, purpose and significance is harder in a disenchanted age. And we feel a deep dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. Here's how Charles Taylor describe this fragility of meaning in our secular age:

Almost every action of ours has a point; we're trying to get to work, or to find a place to buy a bottle of milk after hours. But we can stop and ask why we're doing these things, and that points us beyond to the significance of these significances. The issue may arise for us in a crisis, where we feel that what has been orienting our life up to now lacks real value, weight...A crucial feature of the malaise of [modernity] is the sense that all these answers are fragile, or uncertain; that a moment may come, where we no longer feel that our chosen path is compelling, or cannot justify it to ourselves or others. There is a fragility of meaning...

And because of this void of meaning, continues Taylor, "the quotidian [day to day life] is emptied of deeper resonance, is dry, flat; the things which surround us are dead, ugly, empty; and the way we organize them, shape them, in order to live has not meaning, beauty, depth, sense." In our disenchanted world we experience "a terrible flatness in the everyday."

I think we've all experienced this, especially if you struggle with doubt and disenchantment.

So here's the existential jujitsu.

Yes, doubt and disenchantment make it hard to believe in metaphysics and transcendence.

But doubt and disenchantment also make it hard for meaning, purpose and significance in life.

And the dissatisfactions we experience in this regard--"the terrible flatness in the everyday"--can help us edge back toward enchantment. 

Over the last few posts in this series I've been talking about recovering a sacramental ontology where, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, we come to experience the world as "charged with the grandeur of God."

In this post I want to shift the focus and start talking in some posts about how psychology and selfhood affect enchantment and disenchantment.

As argued by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, enchantment isn't just about the world being more spooky or supernatural. Enchantment also involves a particular experience of selfhood.

According to Taylor, enchantment entails a porous self, a self where the boundaries between self and the world are thinner and more open. For example, with things like spells or demonic possession things could enter the self. The porous self is open and vulnerable to the world.

But over the last few hundred years, the experience of the self has changed in the face of disenchantment. The boundary between self and the world is increasingly experienced as inviolable and impermeable. Anything that affects the self must arise from within the self, biologically or psychologically. Nothing from the outside enters in. If we face demons today they are inner demons.

As opposed to the enchanted, porous self Taylor calls this modern, disenchanted self the buffered self, a self with buffers and walls between itself and the outside world.

All this suggests that disenchantment hasn't just affected the world. Disenchantment affects our selves, our perceptions of reality, our experience of being a self-in-relation to the world. Here's how Charles Taylor describes all this:

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.

This is not a mere “subtraction” story, for it thinks not only of loss but of remaking. With the subtraction story, there can be no epistemic loss involved in the transition; we have just shucked off some false beliefs, some fears of imagined objects. Looked at my way, the process of disenchantment involves a change in sensibility; one is open to different things. One has lost a way in which people used to experience the world.

… Indeed, “enchantment” is something that we have special trouble understanding … we tend to think of our differences from our remote forbears in terms of different beliefs, whereas there is something much more puzzling involved here. It is clear that for our forbears, and many people in the world today who live in a similar religious world, the presence of spirits, and of different forms of possession, is no more a matter of (optional, voluntarily embraced) belief than is for me the presence of this computer and its keyboard at the tips of my fingers.

… We have great trouble getting our minds around this, and we rapidly reach for intra-psychic explanations, in terms of delusions, projections, and the like. But one thing that seems clear is that the whole situation of the self in experience is subtly but importantly different in these worlds and in ours.

All of which suggests that we'll have to psychologically reconfigure ourselves if we want to edge back toward enchantment.

But what does that look like? That's what I'd like to explore.

You might be unfamiliar with how we'll be using the terms enchantment and disenchantment, as sociological and cultural adjectives.

We're borrowing these terms from Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age.

As Taylor describes early in A Secular Age (p. 29), "the enchanted world [is] the world of spirits, demons [and] moral forces our predecessors acknowledged." Sometimes the enchanted world is called "pre-modern," as in before the Enlightenment and the technological and scientific revolutions that radically remolded the world and our relationship to the cosmos.

The pre-modern, enchanted world was spooky. Filled with occult forces, spirits, spells, superstitions and things that go bump in the night. Ghosts, witches, demons, devils and monsters.

Our "modern" world, by contrast, especially in the West, is experienced as disenchanted. Due to the amazing advances in science and technology over the last 500 years, instead of a spooky, spirit-filled world we've come to view the world mechanistically. The world isn't haunted, it's a machine. In our disenchanted world it's harder to believe in spiritual, supernatural, heavenly or miraculous things. Christians struggling with disenchantment struggle to believe in heaven, hell, the soul, angels, demons, the Devil, miracles, prayer, the supernatural stories in the Bible (like the resurrection of Jesus), and God.

On this blog and in my new book Reviving Old Scratch I like to use Scooby-Doo to describe our 500 year journey in the West from enchantment to disenchantment.

A Scooby-Doo episode starts with enchantment. When Scooby and the gang first come to a town there's a spook or monster plaguing the town. But as the episode progresses the kids get suspicious. They trap the monster to unmask a human criminal. The story that began in enchantment, with a spook, ends in disenchantment, with a human moral agent.

As I described in the last post, this is the same thing that happens when Christianity becomes disenchanted. The frame shifts away from the supernatural toward the moral. Christianity is about being a good person. Conservative Christians have a vision of what this moral personal looks like. Progressive Christians have a different vision of what this moral personal looks like. Regardless, the focus is the same: Christianity is about morality.

As it should and must be. But a thoroughly moralized and disenchanted Christianity raises all sorts of questions. For example: Why do you have to do religious things, like go to church on Sundays, to be a moral person? And if you don't have to believe in God, the Devil, miracles or life after death to practice the Golden Rule then what's the point of believing in any of these things?

Lots of Christians who are struggling with disenchantment don't have any good answers to these questions, and I think that's one of the big reasons so many Christians are drifting toward agnosticism and atheism.

Which makes me think that a thoroughly disenchanted Christianity just isn't sustainable.

At some point, for Christianity to remain vital and energized it has to reconnect with enchantment.