A TIME TO TRANSFORM
How Christmas lets us rediscover enchantment
Let there be one night when things grow luminous from within … G.K Chesterton
Once the worshippers were gone, I slipped through the heavy door. It was a bright, cold day and I’d been walking through Centretown, heading home after spending the morning Christmas shopping, when I passed the church. Maybe it was the sight of churchgoers laughing and chatting as they came out through the wide doors, or maybe it was just the thought of the interior, a warm and comfortable place to rest, but I suddenly wanted to go inside.
I stood in the vestibule for a moment, my eyes adjusting to the dimness. A few stragglers lingered, talking as they slipped on their coats. I set my shopping bags and knapsack on the floor just inside the entrance of the nave. Without thinking, I peeled off my gloves and dipped the fingertips of my right hand in the font and crossed myself. The coldness of the holy water on my forehead caught me by surprise. It had, indeed, been a long time and I had to smile at myself, conscious of how I’d been caught in the ritual gesture without even thinking about it.
Taking my packages, I walked down the centre aisle, deliberately pausing to genuflect toward the sanctuary before cutting between two rows of pews to find a spot where I could set my parcels and sit unnoticed. I pulled off my parka and scarf and draped them over the shopping bags, gazing around as I lowered myself to the polished oak bench. I took in the carved and stencilled ceiling, the altar in the sanctuary with more murals on the walls and, overlooking the tabernacle, the big stained glass window. Christmas wreaths with red ribbons hung on the two rows of stone pillars that marched through the nave. The brightness of the day poured through the stained glass windows, polishing the long rows of oak benches to a dull glow.
It was soothing to sit quietly, absorbing the stillness. It was all so familiar, yet somehow strange, like when you return to a place you haven’t seen for a long time to find that, even if it hasn’t changed much, it still feels different. The slightly musty blend of candle wax and stone and polished wood stirred memories of childhood.
I remembered a poem by Philip Larkin, Church Going, where the narrator describes himself visiting an empty suburban church, uncertain about the religious symbols — “brass and stuff/ Up at the holy end” — still feeling an awkward reverence despite his skepticism. The narrator speculates that such places will always lure visitors because “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.”
That got me thinking about something the philosopher Charles Taylor wrote: How even in this secularized, scientific era our “desire for eternity” remains deeply embedded in our psyches no matter how we dismiss or deny a religious faith.
Perhaps so, but sitting in the silence, looking at the big murals of Christ on the sanctuary walls, I couldn’t help but wonder how a sense of the sacred was even possible in an age of disenchantment such as ours.
AN ERA OF DISENCHANTMENT
The idea that ours is a time of disenchantment comes from the German sociologist Max Weber. Almost a century ago, at the height of the First World War, he despaired at the consequences of modern technological society. “The fate of our times,” Weber famously wrote in 1917, “is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’”
Historian Morris Berman summed up this world view in an influential study of the “progressive” attitudes of western intellectuals. “The view of nature which predominated in the West down to the eve of the Scientific Revolution was that of an enchanted world. Rocks, trees, rivers and clouds were all seen as wondrous, alive, and human beings felt at home in this environment ... The story of the modern epoch, at least on the level of the mind, is one of progressive disenchantment.”
The pre-modern world was “enchanted” because it was linked in a great chain of Being to a transcendent source — God, to use the Christian metaphor — that gave ultimate meaning to human life. Modernity, with its scientific explanations of natural phenomena, has eroded this sacramental view of the world.
Every year we transform our homes with strings of lights. We drape trees with beads and baubles and angels. And, somehow, the familiar space of a living room becomes a place of enchantment.
A solar eclipse is not a sign of divine wrath but merely the moon interposing itself between the sun and the Earth. Chemical imbalances, not demonic possession, explain psychological maladies. Darwin’s theory of evolution rendered it untenable to believe in a God-created world that was only a few thousand years old. Add to this other forces — religiously pluralistic societies, the sway of civil “religions” like communism and fascism, the surrender of morality to the conveniences of technology, the acceptance of science as the only legitimate arbiter of what constitutes knowledge — and you have a situation in which religious traditions and institutions become less important in people’s lives.
Charles Taylor considers all this in his monumental study, The Secular Age, arguing that modern science — or scientism, to use Taylor’s term — allowed people to look elsewhere besides the church and God to satisfy their needs and aspirations, spiritual and material. In a secular age, people believe they have alternatives to God in finding meaning in their lives. Thus, over the last three centuries a faithbased, God-dominated moral outlook gave way to a science-based, humanist perspective that allows new conditions of belief (and disbelief ).
Of course, a completely secularized world has never materialized, even in the West. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Darwin blew big holes in theological accounts of the world, but the idea that science defeated religion because it “proved” God’s non-existence does not tell the whole story, says Taylor. Indeed, billions still hold to a religious faith. Moreover, the emergence of religious fundamentalism, not only in the Muslim world but in western countries, raises the possibility that our future may not be so secular, for good or for ill.
Certainly, we are unlikely to return to the overarching religiosity of the past. Nevertheless, the desire for some sort of spiritual reconfiguration — a re-enchanted world, if you will — appears increasingly widespread. Besides the fundamentalists, the emergence of new religions and the “alternative spiritualities” of New Age movements betray a burgeoning desire for reenchantment. What this suggests, says Taylor, is that the secularization of the West over the last couple of centuries reflects a spiritual transition, not a rejection of the sacred.
He argues that the secular, humanist and atheistic world view, with its unquestioned assumptions that only empirical knowledge borne of rational calculation provides valid knowledge of reality, does not suffice to account for the full panoply of human behaviour, including, as he says, the “desire for eternity.” Not everybody has “settled into comfortable disbelief,” much less abandoned our innate longing for contact with a source of meaning other than our own subjective values and egocentric projections.
Indeed, despite the success of western societies in terms of economics, politics, science and technology, it is hard to deny a lingering sense that something is missing. Essayist Eric Cohen sums up our predicament this way: “The modern age is tremendous for its accomplishments: wealth, comfort, more equal opportunity, scientific discovery. But despite its achievements, modernity lacks answers to man’s fundamental questions; it lacks the transcendent vision that makes life joyful and death meaningful ... And its very success often undermines its virtues. Wealth degenerates into indulgence; tolerance degenerates into unthinking relativism; science without philosophy reduces man to a laboratory study; technology without humility tempts him into dangerous projects ... and the illusion of divinity and immortality.”
We are, it seems, spiritually starving amid material abundance. The question, of course, is how might we slake our spiritual hunger, recover a sense of enchantment, without surrendering our scientific heritage.
FINDING ENCHANTMENT IN NATURE … AND ZOMBIES
It’s a question even devout atheists ask. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher no one can say lacks atheistic credentials, begins his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, by asking, “is nothing sacred?” He admits to nostalgia for the kind of “reassuring … vision of life” found in the “sentimental declaration” of a God-created world.
Another dedicated atheist, physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, likewise admits to a longing for the sacred when he acknowledges feeling “nostalgic for a world in which the heavens declared the glory of God.” It would be wonderful, he writes in The First Three Minutes, “to find in the laws of nature a plan prepared by a concerned creator in which humans played some special role. I find sadness in doubting that it will … The more the universe seems comprehensible (to science), the more it also seems pointless.”
Both Dennett and Weinberg acknowledge that belief in a divine order once provided most people with a sense of meaning and solace in the face of death. But they also think the well of transcendence, the idea of a reality beyond our earthly realm, has been drained dry. So, where do they find the sacred? The short answer for both is nature, writ large and small.
Dennett finds sacredness in nature at the cosmological level, or, more specifically, in the “wonderful wedding of chance and necessity” that has produced “an utterly unique and irreplaceable creation” such as the universe. “Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.”
Weinberg finds the sacred in the small scale. “I have to admit,” he writes in Dreams of a Final Theory, “that sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary. Outside the window of my home office, there is a hackberry tree, visited frequently by a convocation of politic birds: blue jays, yellow-throated vireos, and loveliest of all, an occasional red cardinal. Although I understand pretty well how brightly coloured feathers evolved out of a competition for mates, it is almost irresistible to imagine that all this beauty was somehow laid on for our benefit.”
It’s an understandable sentiment, but nowadays claims about enchanted nature — those “wondrous” rocks, trees, rivers and clouds — cannot be taken as anything more than fanciful imaginings suitable for the movie industry. No sane person would want to return to a pre-modern world of animal spirits and haunted forests; it was a world where poverty and disease, ignorance and superstition, slavery and savagery, were the common fate. It would be perverse nostalgia to wish for a re-enchanted world if it meant no medicine to treat a sick child or food to feed a starving family.
That doesn’t mean that millions aren’t trying in some fashion or other to re-enchant the world regardless of how scientistic world view has emptied nature of a divine and wondrous essence. Devotion to vampires and werewolves, fear of aliens and zombies, nostalgia for Dark Age stories — everything from television series such as Game of Thrones and Vikings to The Walking Dead, True Blood and Lost Girl, and movies such as Star Wars, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings — they all speak to a longing for release from the “iron cage,” to borrow Max Weber’s phrase, of technological imperatives. As political scientist Dominic Green notes, citing a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, the decline in traditional religious affiliations had led “to a greater incidence of belief in supernatural experiences involving contact with, or apprehension of, an immaterial living personality.” Put in plain language: many of those who left the church, synagogue or mosque believe they can re-enchant their lives through chats with the dead or the touch of an angel.
But what about those who find no enchantment in visitations from the dead or encounters with the undead; are we confined to the iron cage when it comes to a recovery of the sacred?
THINKING OUR WAY TO A MEANINGFUL WORLD
I want to approach that question by asking another: Is the modern world really disenchanted? What if it is our way of thinking, our way of seeing the world, that is the source of our disenchantment. Theologian David Brown, writing in his study, God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, responds to Weber’s disenchantment thesis with the argument that nature and culture can still enchant the world — if properly perceived.
Brown devotes most of his book to delineating those forms, places and human experiences that have the “potential to function sacramentally” — everything from homemaking, gardening and church-going to poetry, painting, pilgrimages and even a long walk. The disenchanted world view holds that our reasons for engaging in such activities can be “explained” in psychological, historical, sociological or political terms. They no longer possess a sacred dimension.
Brown, however, suggests these mundane areas of human experience can provide a symbolic mediation of “the divine in and through the world.” Perhaps, he says, “a divine structure is already implicit in certain forms of experience of the natural world, whether these be of majesty, beauty or whatever.” If so, then we need to recover “a form of perception that has largely been lost in our utilitarian age, experiencing the natural world and human imitations of it not just as means to some further end, but as themselves the vehicle that makes possible an encounter with God, discovering an enchantment, an absorption that like worship requires no further justification.”
Regardless of any decline in religious faith there remains a continuing need — perhaps even an intensified one — for ‘spiritual’ experiences that can help us find a sense of coherent meaning in our lives. We look at life as a problem in need of a solution rather than a mystery to be encountered and lived with courage and joy.
How might we do that? Oddly enough, another philosopher generally regarded as an atheist offers some guidance. Martin Heidegger argues that as modern rationalists we think about others, the wider world and ourselves in the wrong way.
He distinguishes between calculative thinking and meditative thinking. The former is the kind of thinking that is goal-focused, purposive, wilful and devoted to explaining and, indeed, mastering the world and ourselves. Calculative thought seeks the best way to dam a river to produce electricity, harvest a forest to produce lumber for houses, or discover a vaccine to cure disease. Heidegger doesn’t dispute the need for such thinking; we need houses and electricity and drugs.
But we also need the other kind of thinking for our spiritual health. For Heidegger, modern westerners have lost their original “embeddedness” in the natural world. We have become lost in the things of human projection and symbolic construction.
We have fallen into a way of thinking that sees the world as an object to be subjected to our will. We look at life as a problem in need of a solution rather than a mystery to be encountered and lived with courage and joy. Meditative thinking offers a way of “saving man’s essential nature.” It allows us to live in the world of technology without allowing technology “to warp, confine and lay waste our nature.” In meditative thought there is, as Heidegger puts it, a “releasement toward things and openness to the mystery” — or, the recovery of a sacred sensibility.
Heidegger’s use of meditative thought is reminiscent of Eastern traditions such as Zen Buddhism. Zen, too, urges meditative practice as a “way” of gaining release, if only momentarily, from the kind of calculative consciousness that divides the world into subjects and objects. Here is a haiku from the famous Japanese poet Matsuo Bashõ in which he recounts a few moments of rest on a mountain slope after a hard climb: “Ah, tranquility! / penetrating the very rocks, / a cicada’s voice.” In Zen, this is called “pure experience.”
Heidegger demonstrates something similar — an experience of “releasement”— in a haiku-like poem about a moment of enchantment with nature: “Forests spread / Brooks plunge / Rocks persist / Mist diffuses …” Heidegger refers to this kind of experience as “poetic dwelling,” and, like Bashõ, he reminds us the world really is enchanted — if we pay proper attention.
Not surprisingly, the poets offers the best examples of greater attentiveness, and none more so than the Romantic poet William Wordsworth.
“The world is too much with us,” he famously wrote, “getting and spending, we lay waste of powers.” It’s hard to deny the truth of this sentiment. We are terminally connected. We pack smartphones everywhere, a technological succubus that demands constant attention. We constantly check email to see if anyone wants to hear from us, and feel forlorn at the lack of messages. We blog and tweet and text, desperate to connect, hooked on the digital narcotic.
I’m reminded of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s tonguein-cheek observation nearly four centuries ago: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
He has a point. We spend much of our time engaged in “divertissements,” distracting ourselves however we can to avoid the solitude of our own minds. The Internet certainly offers plenty of diversion. Consumer culture keeps us, well, getting and spending. The entertainment industry keeps us mesmerized with virtual realities, news chatter, celebrity worship and sports spectacles.
But being mesmerized is not the same as the kind of attention that immerses you in an experience of deep emotional and intellectual significance, that breaches the walls of self-absorption and opens you to perceptions that are more than projections of your ego, experiences that offer existential meaning to your life.
Think of the painter absorbed in his painting, the musician in her song, the craftsman in his wood. They may not be sitting still, but they achieve a kind of internal stillness, a disciplined attentiveness that through focusing on a particular task or object makes possible the restoration of the greater world outside yourself — the mysterious Other, in all its enchantment.
Wordsworth again serves as the exemplar on this claim. Consider the enchantment he found in the mundane circumstance of an early morning’s walk across a London bridge. As he writes in his poem “Lines Composed upon Westminster Bridge”: “Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty; This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky ...”
Of course, few of us possess much of a poetic sensibility after childhood. The world, as the poet said, is too much with us. There are mortgages to maintain, families to feed, career concerns. We are too busy calculating life to spend time meditating on the mystery and wonder of it.
Perhaps what we need — at least as a starter — is to recognize that not everything in our lives is comprehensible by means of calculative thought. Try “explaining” what you feel looking over your child sleeping, taking a walk in the park on a crisp fall day, or, for that matter, having family and friends gathering in your home for Christmas dinner.
In those moments we are — or can be — on the edge of the sacred. Such moments offer the same potential for enchantment as that experienced by Wordsworth walking across Westminster Bridge — if we learn to perceive them rightly. Wordsworth’s gift — and here’s the point — was in being able in moments of meditative thought to realize the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the sacred in the mundane.
To think meditatively on your everyday world, even if only for a few moments in a day, helps you maintain the necessary distinction between the “divertissements” of our culture and those authentic responses to the world that reveal our lives, and the lives of those we love, as a mysterious gift. Regardless of any decline in religious faith there remains a continuing need — perhaps even an intensified one — for “spiritual” experiences that can help us find a sense of coherent meaning in our lives. No longer certain of an answer from the “beyond” to our existential questions, we need a sense of the sacred in the here and now of our earthly occupation. As Charles Taylor puts it, this potential for a meditative awareness of everyday experience “possibly contains the key — or a key — to what it means to be human.”
CHRISTMAS: WHEN ORDINARY BECOMES EXTRAORDINARY
Gazing around the silent church, following the refracted light as it moved through the church, I remembered some of the old Bible lessons: how in the New Testament you find Jesus attending wedding feasts, providing food, offering wine (including wine from water). By all accounts he enjoyed this world, taking pleasure in the birds of the air, the flowers in the field.
The Old Testament, too, is full of enchanted people. True, plenty of people are smited and Jehovah is far too wrathful. Yet, amid their trials and tribulations the ancient Hebrews enjoyed feasting and rejoicing. Almost any ordinary event — the birth of a child, the presence of a beloved wife, an abundant harvest — brought out the harps and tambourines for dancing in celebration of life’s bounty.
Do we possess this capacity for celebratory enchantment anymore?
Our occasions for celebration often feel more frenetic than fulfilling.
But surely if there is one time of year when we should celebrate life it is Christmas.
To be sure, the Christmas season is so inundated by the tide of commercialism that we tend, in the words of theologian Donald Heinz, to focus “on the materials that claim to be good instead of on the Good that claims to be material.” Christ’s incarnation, God taking human form, eternity entering time, can be easily ignored in the getting and spending. And yet, if we pay attention — and regardless of any attachment (or lack thereof ) to a religious creed — Christmas can still provide a few moments in sacred space.
Scholars have long recognized the cultural significance of Christmas, how it is viewed as a special time distinct from the rest of the year. Regardless of whether Christmas is treated as a religious or a secular festival, it possesses the feel of time out of time. Every year we transform our homes with strings of lights. We drape trees with beads and baubles and angels.
Friends and family gather. And, somehow, the familiar space of a living room or dining room becomes a place of enchantment for children and, if they would pay attention, for adults.
The rituals and symbols — angels on the tree top, the ring of lights around the window, the nativity scene in the front yard, the turkey dinner — work a psychic alchemy, transforming our homes in all their ordinariness into something extraordinary. Christmas creates a space — a phrase from historian John Lukacs’ came back to me as I lifted my eyes to the sanctuary — for “sublime stillness.”
I looked at my watch, surprised to find I’d been sitting for so long. The light was fading from the window. It was time to leave. Standing, I took one last look around the church as I pulled on my parka, gathered my parcels and went outside into the cold to walk home with my gifts.
We need to recognize that not everything in our lives is comprehensible by means of calculative thought. Try ‘explaining’ what you feel looking over your child sleeping or taking a walk in the park on a crisp fall day.