Navigating Enchantment: Part II, Fairy Tales & Sacraments, or, Living Within a Cosmos
Vol. 3, No. 3
Once upon a time, there lived a young girl in a suburban house in a cul-de-sac, with two loving parents who watched over her. They had a pool in the backyard that they used in the summer, and a well-worn VCR that they used for entertainment in the winter.
Every weekday, she went to school, and every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night she went with her parents to church. As the school was part of the church, she saw mostly the same children and the same adults week in, week out.
Now, this church was small, a world unto itself, convinced of its truth and equally convinced that everyone else was wrong. Folks within the church were usually very warm, and kind, and generous, but as a whole, the kind of life this church prescribed meant that people usually focused on what they couldn’t do more than what they could.
And so, life was very routine for this young girl. She had, as we said, two loving parents who gave generously, which meant she had clothes, and dolls, and horseback riding lessons, and all the food she could eat, whenever she wanted it.
But what she loved most was books. She went with her father to the library most Saturdays, getting lost amongst the shelves and discovering fantastic stories. She was given a small allowance every other week, which she never had, because she always spent it ahead on a book. She read books in the bath. She read books at meals. She read books in the car. She read books under the covers at night. She read books at school recess, avoiding other children as much as she could. She read when she should have been doing homework. She read, and she read, and she read. You could almost say she was made entirely of books.
And of everything she read, she loved fairy tales the most.
The idea that, with one step, one door, you could move from your familiar, comfortable, routine life and into a strange, uncanny, slanted just so world filled with all kinds of creatures and rituals and awe-full beings and charming wee folk — well, this young girl wanted to find that door with all of her heart. She wanted nothing more than to be able to take that step, to cross the threshold and be welcomed in, to a world full of surprise, beauty, and mystery.
She hoped, and she longed, and she looked, and she waited.
And she never found that door.
Indeed, everyone and everything around her told her — by words, by deeds, by hints, by different books — that that door, those other worlds...
They didn’t exist. Here was the only world available.
And this left that young girl confused, and lost, and broken-hearted. But she kept reading her fairy tales, and later her fantasy novels, and always wondered, if these stories were about other worlds, how others managed to tell those tales here. How did we even glimpse the possibility of these other places?
So, that young girl grew up, and went to on to get a degree, then another degree, and then another one, at first planning to make a career of helping other people get degrees, then realizing that was way too small and boring of a career. So she started following her curiosity, reading whatever she wanted, and exploring strange new worlds, encountering bold new ideas, and finding that this world was not as sterile or mundane as she’d thought.
Once she started looking around her, she discovered all kinds of creatures, and rituals small and great and funny and solemn, and awe-full and awful beings, and charming folks who became friends, and far more surprise, and beauty, and mystery than she ever expected.
Until one day, it occurred to her...
Maybe the books are the doors.
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Welcome to the latest issue of Creative\Proofing, the second installment of a very wordy thought that grows ever wordier. In Part One of Navigating Enchantment, I reached across the mists of time to pull forward thoughts from Plato, pre-modernity, and C.S. Lewis. Here, in Part 2, I play in sacramental reality and begin to connect these ideas to Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. In Part 3, I’ll then explore how, or even if, this conceptual stew is at all relevant or illuminating for us now. Here we go. Again.
Participating in Heaven (on Earth?)
And now we welcome Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation to the conversation. Boersma, like Charles Taylor, traces the cultural and philosophical shifts that have occurred over the last 500 years or so, but in a theological key. He points out that Christian theologies (coalescing in the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century) made significant shifts across several hundred years, turning away from the very same Platonist concepts that had been synthesized with Christian theology in a long-standing “Great Tradition” over earlier centuries.1
The outcome of these theological shifts — a divorcing of the created world from its eternal source which meant that created objects no longer carried a “tremendous surplus value” from participating in Deep Reality — meant a loss of a “sacramental” mindset or way of being. No longer was God or some form of supra- or super-natural force symbolically manifest in the cosmos: there lay just a rock, not the cornerstone to Jacob’s heavenly ladder; there, the entrance to just a cave, not the doorway to the gods’ house; the flash of lightning, a result of storms in the sky, no longer the signal of a message or a herald of the divine. Additional shifts in theological formulations, and the subsequent impact on social and ecclesiastical behaviors meant that nature, the universe and all created, material things, functioned autonomously, and “could manage its affairs without supernatural aid.”2
Boersma puts forth a hope: to renew an enchanted, sacramental way of being in the world, one that recognizes that the material world around us participates in, and points toward, a Deep Reality, the contours of which we may see, but the fullness of which we will never comprehend in this layer. This hope arises out of a familiar perspective for many of us in Western societies: one inherited from the likes of Descartes, with his cogito, ergo sum, and the subsequent development of the scientific method (which has given us many of the comforts and luxuries we enjoy today, to be sure).
A distrust of meta-narratives (which are the fields in which Platonic Forms and Deep Reality play) arose from the influence of postmodern philosophy as well, which pointed out that much of what may be considered reasonable or rational is tied to the local, the time-bound, the specific. To claim the universality of anything is to create the conditions for hegemonic imposition of unverifiable truth claims. We trust empirical evidence: the materiality of the world and our nervous systems’ response to it. Make of it what we will.
Despite growing up in a church environment, where you’d think we’d at least take seriously the idea of divinity come amongst us from another realm, I was never taught to conceive of that other realm as connected to ours in any way. Only once this body died could we access heaven; the movement went in one direction: here to there. (Despite the larger, first movement there to here, apparently, but details.) Heaven had little relevance to how we experienced or perceived life in the day-to-day.
All of us — religious, spiritual, agnostic, realist — we all live in this rational, skeptical, disenchanted universe; we all live autonomously, managing our affairs with minimal recourse to supernatural aid. We all find the idea of talking beavers or classical gods walking down the sidewalk too ridiculous for consideration.
(I bet you snorted at that last sentence.)
Participating in the Fantastic
Perhaps you, like the young girl of our fairy tale above, find yourself longing for those other realms, for those doorways that spring out of nowhere and open to new adventures. We live within a strange tension, then: it seems impossible that those worlds exist, but we cannot stop listening to news from a far-off country.
The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some readers; for others, at none.
At all ages, if it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalise while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies.
But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life’, can add to it.3
Books as conceptual doors to other worlds is nothing new, and I am one in a long lineage of those who discovered the ability to travel far afield through reading, and found themselves in some sense saved or sustained by it. But I want to say something stronger than that. I want to say that books do not just carry signs (inert phenomena burdened by imposed meaning), but rather, that some books may actually be symbols: “phenomena [that] inherently carry meaning, because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present.”
If, as C.S. Lewis thought, “symbolism exists precisely for the purpose of conveying to the imagination what the intellect is not ready for”4 — then, books-as-symbols may act as literal doors between this layer of reality and another, participating in Deep Reality. Books-as-symbols help make us ready to reconceive the world as it may actually be: one level of an enchanted cosmos, an interconnected web of thin places that enable meetings with supra- and super-natural beings and forces as real as the rock, the cave, the lightning.
Some books, some experiences, through their fantastic, slanted just so doors, prepare us to receive, to recognize those far-off countries, to notice when their denizens take up residence here. To live as though those other realities are true, because, in fact, they are.
Part I | Part III
I beg your patience a bit longer.
The ideas calling for exploration, and the richness of their interaction with life today, ask me to slow down, to take more time than I’d originally intended.
Part 3 will, truly, explore Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, so, if you haven’t yet read it, now’s your chance. I’d love to hear what you think of it as we explore the House together.
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise — together.
Shalom,
Megan.
A Quick Note: I work from within the Christian tradition, and understand the Divine as the Trinity of father, son, holy spirit. That said, I know we all have different ways of understanding God and the Divine, so if you wish to insert [Other] when I use that phrase, please feel free to do so.
Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, p. 66.
”Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” On Stories, C.S. Lewis, p. 48