Re-enchantment in a Mysterious World
Author: Stan Guthrie
October 24, 2024
“The world is not what we think it is,” Rod Dreher writes in his new book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. “It is far more mysterious, exciting and adventurous.” I believe him.
When I was a very young Christian, I went to a faith-healing service. If my lifelong cerebral palsy could be removed if only I exercised enough faith, why not? When my turn came on stage, the traveling “minister” put his hand on my forehead, pronounced me healed, and pushed me ever so perceptibly. As others had done, I fell backwards into the arms of some waiting attendants. When I returned to my seat with my usual unsteady gait, however, my disability was still with me.
Later, standing by myself after the service while people were milling about, I silently prayed, “Lord, if I’m really healed, please let me know.” Suddenly, a supernatural wave of comfort, love, and joy—which I had never remotely experienced before—swept over me. I knew that I had not worked it up. I don’t know how long this sense of perfect peace enveloped me—whether minutes or seconds—but the next thing I knew, I was sitting comfortably in a folding chair that I hadn’t seen before.
Clearly, my healing was coming. Today, 45 years later, it still is.
I don’t mind saying that the lack of an instantaneous miracle was confusing and upsetting—for a while, anyway. However, I have come to see that God’s Word is true, His timing is rarely mine, and that the most important healing—forgiveness and reconciliation with God through Christ’s death and resurrection—has already occurred.
I haven’t regularly shared this story with other Christians, partly because it doesn’t have an evangelically neat, expected ending. Another reason is that people—even fellow Christians—might think I’m a little bit weird.
You see, lots of folks in the post-Christian West, even believers, look on tales of the supernatural with a jaundiced eye. Charles Taylor, in his magisterial book, A Secular Age, traces the decline of belief in God from a society in which “it was virtually impossible not to believe in God,” to our current one, in which faith is privatized and simply one option among many. When it comes to spiritual things, too often we do-it-yourselfers are big and God is small.
The “thin places,” where God, heaven, and angels were liable to break in on human life at any moment, have been shrouded by a growing faith in scientism, “progress,” and human potential. Yet, just when our hubristic project to de-enchant the world reached the top of Babel’s tower, a cloud of discontent settled over us. “There is a widespread sense of loss here,” Taylor writes, “if not always of God, then at least of meaning.”
Dreher, for his part, agrees. “The crisis of our civilization, including contemporary Christianity, comes down to a loss of enchantment,” he says. “What do I mean by that? The abandonment of a sense that everything is in a mystical sense charged with the energy of God, that all things are connected and unified in the Logos, and that we can (and must) participate in the Logos.”
While Dreher acknowledges that one can live a faithful Christian life without this perspective, he says we would do well to return to a “Christianity that places mystery, wonder, and awe in the center of its worship and spiritual disciplines.” This, he says, is “a Christianity that can endure what is to come.”
But re-enchantment, he notes, has both positive and negative sides. Yes, God and His angels are near, but so are Satan and the demonic hosts.
If nature abhors a vacuum, this side of supernature does, too—with a vengeance. Quite apart from our increasingly dark Halloween celebrations, Satan has gone mainstream. We see the Prince of Darkness in everything from our culture’s desperate embrace of politics as ultimate, rising antisemitism, an expressive individualism that denies all boundaries, the hellacious sacrifice of children to the sexual gods, and the fanatical refusal of many to abide the biological, God-given differences between the sexes.
Satan isn’t going anywhere, and we’d better get used to it, but without going overboard. As C.S. Lewis said, “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”
Dreher, author of Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents and The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, would say that the cultural pendulum has swung too far toward “an excessive and unhealthy interest,” and Christians must recover a sense of God’s nearness for our own spiritual protection and encouragement. As the Apostle Paul noted, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).
Dreher’s latest book, Living in Wonder, tempered and guided by prayer and the living and active Word of God, is a good place to think about how we should respond to our culture’s ongoing re-enchantment and experience the God who draws near. And isn’t that the least we can do in such a mysterious, exciting, and adventurous world?
Stan Guthrie is Minister of Communications for New Covenant Church.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.
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