Hunting Magic Eels

We live in a disenchanted world where God has died a slow death. All we have left is belief, which is like an empty bucket. If you do not fill it with something, it is not hard to discard it. There are two main causes for this death of God. The first is the scientific revolution, whereby we began to see the world as an intricately designed machine that runs on the natural laws. Like a Swiss watch, and we could open up the back and see how it works, and this process has given us tremendous technological power. But it also disenchanted the world: previously the stars and planets moved by God guiding them in his Love, but now they are just a cold machine.

The second cause for the death of God is Protestantism. The Catholic service is enchanted—a literal miracle takes places with the elements; the Protestant service is a mere remembrance. Catholic space is enchanted: it is a beautiful, sacred space set aside for encountering God, and therefore the doors are open all day. The Protestant says that God inhabits all spaces, and worships in a warehouse and locks the door after the service. Catholic time is enchanted; the Catholic measures “what time is it” by where he is in the Church year, and by how long it has been since the most recent Liturgical Hour (e.g. the third Sunday after Pentecost, two hours after Matins). Catholic people are enchanted, too—through their prayers, saints have been responsible for two miracles, and we can experience God through saints. For Protestants, all people are saints, including some of us who do not look saintly at all, which has an effect of making no one a saint. Protestantism exchanged the mystical for the moral. “If God is slowly dying, it’s because Christians stopped seeking God and started focusing on being good.” (34)

A disenchanted worldview, reinforced by the spectacular technological successes of the past three centuries, makes it hard to believe in God. But people, especially young people, hunger for God. When they say anxiety, depression, loneliness, addiction, meaningless, boredom, hopelessness, etc., what they are really expressing is a longing for is God, specifically the experience of him. We can see that these expressions are a longing for God because we still hallow (enchant, make holy) things. We hallow sorrow by ceremony (funerals, reading the King James Version of the Bible, etc) and by prayer. Even atheists will offer to pray for someone, because prayer hallows the sorrow. We also hallow joy: weddings are hallowed through an official ceremony and a feast. We almost hallow nature with awe and reverence, because an unhallowed redwood is just timber. We hallow people with “inalienable rights”, we used to hallow people with a soul, and few people we say that they are nothing more than the sum of their parts.

We need to know that we matter. Viktor Frankl observed that in the Nazi concentration camps, his fellow prisoners that “[t]hose who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’” But those that did not would one day refuse to get up, and neither beatings nor pleadings would move them. This lack of mattering in our lives is also a sign of our desire for God. Only the sense that we are a child of God will satisfy our need to matter.

“It’s hard to ‘believe’ in God if belief isn’t naming something in our lives, something that we’ve felt, sensed, seen, or intuited. ... The mystics didn’t believe in God; they encountered God.” (11 - 12) Thomas Merton says that creation is transparent and God is everywhere, shining through. Andrew Root says that the problem is attention blindness, where we are so focused on one thing that we miss another, obvious thing (see the classic experiment). We have been so focused on looking at the machine that we have failed to notice God shining through. Orthodox priest Fr. Stephen Freeman says that we live in a two-story house: we live on the bottom floor, and God lives in his own apartment on the top floor. The only way we can experience God is through a miracle. The longstanding Christian, sacramental worldview is a one-story house, where God and the material world live together. (This is also what Christians mean by an “enchanted” worldview.)

The mystical experiences are primarily a different way of perceiving the world. Thomas Merton was standing on a street corner when he saw people as light, and himself connected to all of them, and as a result, felt love for all people. Brother Lawrence was looking at a tree in the winter when he was eighteen, and he saw a vision of it with leaves, flowers, and then fruit, and he realized that God brings life from death, spring from winter, and the joy of that lasted his entire life. They are also typically short (Pascal’s experience lasted two hours, and all of Becks’ have been shorter), noetic (that is, changing how we perceive the world), are received from outside of ourselves, and are not something that we can describe. They also produce joy as a by-product of the new perception.

Recovering enchantment requires different perception. In “On Fairy Stories”, Tolkien says that fairy stories are a way of practicing attention, that is, practicing re-enchantment. He also talks about the eucatastrophe, the sudden turn for the good, that although expected, comes from outside of us. As Beck notes, we live in the Valley of Dry Bones (not just the current disenchanted macro-situation, but whatever our situation is), and without God’s Spirit from without, it is true that the bones will not live. Thus, enchantment does not deny our situation, but rather it expectantly hopes for the eucatastrophe from outside. This eucatastrophe is received as a gift, with gratitude. Contrast this with the modern assumption that meaning comes from within, since without is just the meaningless machine. There is no gratitude, since we are just living on a lump of rock in empty space. If within, then feelings are the only way to find it, but our feelings are changeable. Worse, our authentic selves actually change—the authentic self at 20 years old most likely has different values and priorities to the authentic self at 45 years old. Self-esteem, a recent concept first advanced by William James, also fails. He initially described it as the ratio between your successes and your achieved dreams. Most of us have some pretty important dreams that have shattered around us. More problematic, these dreams may have been inspired by comparison on Instagram rather than authentic dreams. Either way, self-esteem is based on comparison, which is no solution. Only being the child of God provides an unmoving foundation. This is why Howard Thurman found that Black slaves were attracted to Christianity—there was no self-esteem to be found in the lowest status; the meaning that gave them strength was in being children of God. They were attracted to Christianity, because, to God, they mattered.

Four Christian traditions can be helpful in recovering an enchanted worldview. The first is the liturgical “enchantments”, enchanting space, time, and people. Beautiful spaces are sacred spaces, as are spaces made sacred by art and objects that facilitate connection to God. We can create our own sacred space by filling it with things that draw us to God. We can re-enchant time by following the Church calendar, and by saying the Liturgical Hours (Beck says morning and evening prayers using the Anglican Book of Common Prayer). Observing Lent prepares us for Easter, and makes Easter more meaningful. We can also invite people over to celebrate feast days of the saints, or celebrate other seasons of the year, like May Day.

Contemplative “enchantments” offer ways of practicing our perception. The Ignation Exercises is a season of exercises that is useful for this. The examen is useful for seeing where God has been in our day (“consolations”), and where we were drawn away from him (“desolations”). This can be modified as something like highs and lows for children, which is also a good way for parents to maintain a sense of their childrens’ spiritual needs. Prayer beads can be helpful to refocus on God: Beck carries Orthodox prayer beads, and if he is stressed, he prays “peace” for each one; if he is angry he prays “mercy”; if he struggles to pay attention, he prays the Jesus prayer. The Anglican morning and evening prayers are good, and he offers suggestions on other helpful resources on prayer and spiritual disciplines (see the notes on chapter 7).

Charismatic “enchantments” are more direct re-enchantments. The charismatic worldview expects that miracles are a frequent and normal result of prayer, which is very enchanted, and prayer for miraculous provision and healing is normal. Charismatics have a “hermeneutic of gratitude”, whereby they interpret events assuming that God is doing something, and are thankful for his actions. This is in contrast to a hermeneutic of skepticism that sees everything as a mere coincidence. It might actually be a coincidence that you acquired enough money just in time to pay rent, but people did pray for it, and the result was provision, so why not interpret it as God. Charismatics also take the devil seriously. There is a force opposing the kingdom of God, and once you look you see it everywhere: we are always encountering moral decisions, and the Kingdom path is rarely the easy one that you just happen onto by default. Finally, charismatics engage the heart, which knows things that the head does not. Excessive rationality kills worship. Now, it is true that charismatics have excesses, and discernment is needed, but Beck thinks that the other extreme is far more deadly.

Celtic-Christian “enchantments” teach us to enjoy the material world as a gift, in the context of spiritual disciplines. Celtic Christian poetry celebrates God through all aspects of nature. Descended from Celtic tradition where poetry is the repository of knowledge, in the Christian version, poetry is a practice of attention, and is itself kept by God. Celtic Christian enjoys “fleshly” things like feasts, but Irish Christians were very ascetic. It was the fasting that enabled the enjoyment of the feast; otherwise, the feast would just be normal. Fairly uniquely, since the rest of Christianity up to that time was Roman, Celtic Christianity had a sense of the sacred feminine (beyond Mary), which is a maternal engagement, and helps us act like children receiving from God. The Celtic Christians had a sense of unbuffered self, that we are porous to demons wanting to harm us, and angels to defend us; hence all the “breastplate” prayers, like St. Patrick’s Breastplate. They also saw God in people in a way that the Roman Christians did not, and they thought that a “soul friend” was necessary for flourishing (although it was unclear to me if they meant something like a spiritual director or a Anne of Green Gable style “kindred spirit”).

Re-enchantment requires discernment. The growth of “spiritual but not religious” is not evidence of disenchantment, which is everywhere (even Christian sermons talk less about heaven and hell now), but it is evidence that our enchantment is shifting to a pagan enchantment. This is not completely bad, as it does act as a counterbalance to the tendency of transcendent enchantment to become gnostic (that is, spiritual is good, physical is evil). However, pagan enchantment ultimately leads to self-worship. “The critical issue, then, for both the religious and the spiritual alike, is this: Can your enchantment judge, criticize, and unsettle you? Can your enchantment point out your selfishness and self-indulgence? Can your enchantment, be it burning sage for your spell or singing ‘God Bless America’ in your pew, hold up a mirror to your hypocrisy? Can your enchantment weigh your nation or political party on the scales and find it wanting? Does your enchantment create sacrificial obligations and duties in your life that you cannot avoid or ignore? Does your enchantment call you to extend grace to people you’d prefer to hate? Does your enchantment bust up your cozy self-satisfaction and dogmatic self-righteousness?” (214-215)

God’s enchantment is not “the beautiful, the easy, and the self-indulgent”, but the call to self-sacrifice, even as God sacrificed himself for us. Moses turning aside for the burning bush resulted in Moses leading a group of consistently cantankerous Israelites into the wilderness, which involved a lot of self-sacrifice on his part. St. Francis is known as a lover of animals, but he was deathly afraid of lepers during his initial years where he repaired churches, so eventually, compelled by knowing that Jesus loved them, he just ran over and hugged a leper (who then was nowhere to be found afterwards, suggesting that he had hugged Jesus)

Hunting Magic Eels (referring to the eels in a British well that were said to heal you if they caught your coin) is a clear description of the current problem, a short explanation of how we got here, and very concrete suggestions on how to return. “The meaning crisis” has been talked about by John Vervaeke, Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, and “this little corner of the Internet” Youtube channels clustering around Paul Vanderklay, but none of them articulate the problem clearly (except perhaps for Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist who spent 25 hours talking about it in academic detail, albeit probably not on the philosophical level). Pageau, an Eastern Orthodox artist, now Youtube intellectual, talks about re-enchantment, but aside from Orthodox art and a symbolic view, has no concrete suggestions.

The title of the book does not do the book any favors, as it sounds like some pop Emergent Church book. It is pop in style, but Beck, is a psychology professor at a Christian university and he clearly did an academic amount of research for the book. In addition to his professional philosophical understanding, he has also read a number of books of the saints, Thomas Merton, Andrew Root, some books on spiritual disciplines, some on prayer, a number of works by the mystics, as well as books on Celtic Christianity. I have to assume that he read quite a few others that he did not reference, as I expect his search was rather undirected at first. I have noted books that he references in the notes below.

I found this book to be quite helpful, and recommend it to any one for whom “the meaning crisis” has any resonance, or for anyone who is struggling with meaning of life, mattering, and similar concerns. The difficulty appears vague, and although people like Peterson, Pageau, NT Wright and Bishop Robert Barron are easy to find who trace the problem to the Enlightenment, Beck has a more articulate analysis, as well as concrete steps to take. He also does not just say “you need a sacramental worldview” and expect you to jump in to Catholicism. In fact, despite a more sacramental worldview, Beck remains Protestant. I have some doubts as to whether this is sustainable long-term, but it does mean that he provides a bridge for someone encountering the idea of a sacramental worldview for the first time. His examples of re-enchanting give some perspective of what a sacramental worldview involves, as the Roman Catholics (in my view) take the sacramentalization way to far. However, I think this book would be well-paired with a book discussing a sacramental worldview by an Anglo-catholic author.

Review: 8

Effectively structures the problem, symptoms, history, and resolutions. As a book in the modern popular style, it does not contain the robustness to be a definitive work. I am also not convinced that it is likely to persuade those who are oblivious to the problem that there is a problem. However, I think it is an effective book if you are already aware of the problem to some extent. In this case, the book will give you a strong framework on which you can explore causes and resolutions.

▶ Notes