The forgotten world of mystery and magic

In the past, people thought differently about the relationship between the spiritual and material worlds. Ancient people groups as diverse as Native Americans, Japanese, and Greeks all understood creation to be teeming with divine life. Rivers, forests, and mountains were all alive with unseen powers. The influence of these powers permeated the whole world, even if their presence loomed over it like a menacing shadow. The old gods tended to be capricious, spiteful, and something to be on guard against. Yet to ancient peoples they filled creation with magic the human eye alone could not perceive.

When the gospel of the resurrected and reigning Christ spread across the world, it transformed more than hearts. The Christian revolution dethroned the old gods. In the Western world this had the effect of stripping the cosmos bare of its enchantment. “Christ’s victory-his triumph over the powers of the air, the elemental spirits, the devils, death itself- had purged the natural world of its more terrifying mysteries” (David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, 201).

The sober world of the present

In today’s demystified world, the unseen presence of divinity is largely relegated to fairy tales and books of mythology. As modern people, enlightened by science and technology we now know that the world runs according to material causes and predictable laws. We take it for granted that reality is a fundamentally naturalistic order. While this does not eliminate a place for God, since creation still needs a first cause, it does consign him to the great heavenly attic. The creator is kept at a distance, entirely above and removed from our material existence.

While this does not eliminate a place for God, since creation still needs a first cause, it does consign him to the great heavenly attic. The creator is kept at a distance, entirely above and removed from our material existence.

Most of the time this worldview works for me. It only has a couple problems. It is boring and it is not true. As much as I want to dismiss the unseen world as far away and irrelevant, it continues to haunt me.

Imagination, personal experience, and objective evidence have eroded my faith in this divided view of reality. I have witnessed people receive dreams that foreshadowed future events in their life with bizarre accuracy. Significant amounts of peer reviewed articles give testimony to medical miracles which have no naturalistic explanation. While my desire to live in a magical world like Narnia or Hogwarts competes with my desire to be taken seriously by serious people, I have to admit that reality is stranger than I first assumed. Like the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics demonstrates, not everything that is real can be fully known or explained.

While my desire to live in a magical world like Narnia or Hogwarts competes with my desire to be taken seriously by serious people, I have to admit that reality is stranger than I first assumed.

The enchantment of the ordinary

Our modern separation of the spiritual and material is a bit of a paradox. While this idea has uniquely Christian origins, it goes against Christian scriptures. The God of the Bible transgresses the boundary between spiritual and material. He is both transcendent and immanent; neither completely removed from creation, nor co-existent with it. God is high above and other than his creation, yet everywhere present and filling all things.

The Bible describes God as beyond perception, yet “​​not far from each one of us”, giving “life and breath to everything” (Acts 17:24-27). Because of this, we find the activity of God and humans sometimes overlap when people are called to act in faith. When Moses kept his hands raised, the Israelites overcame the Amalekites in battle (Exodus 17:8-13). After the widow gathered empty jars, she found that she had enough oil to fill them all (2 Kings 4:1-7). When Naaman the Syrian washed himself in the Jordan river, his disease was healed (2 Kings 5:1-27). In each case, ordinary human actions produced extraordinary results.

The New Testament is filled with these kinds of miracles. The sick and lame are healed, evil spirits cast out, but stranger still are the commonplace activities like bathing and eating that are given divine significance. Baptism makes a person’s body into the body of Christ, “by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body" (1 Corinthians 12:13). In the Lord’s Supper, the Lamb of God feeds his people, "for my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (John 6:55). People today typically describe these activities as purely symbolic. Yet for most of Christian history, people saw the presence of God in the sacraments of the church.

The sick and lame are healed, evil spirits cast out, but stranger still are the commonplace activities like bathing and eating that are given divine significance.

It is easy to mistake the essence of Christianity as beliefs about God plus good behavior. This kind of religion works well in a split level world where heaven and earth are a long way away. What it ignores is the incarnation, God with us and Christ in us. To the first disciples, the sacraments of the church were points at which the spiritual and material worlds regularly touched. Yet this intersection of the human and divine was not limited to things Christians did in their gatherings. What began here was intended to spill out into the world. Serving the poor, visiting the prisoner, aiding the immigrant and refugee, were not mere human works but a mysterious communion with Jesus Christ in the flesh. “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:31-40).

Contained within this idea is a hope that one day all creation will be filled with the “glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Habbakuk 2:14). This is the enchantment of the ordinary that the Biblical authors describe. It is a very different way of looking at the world, but one that offers us some insight today into the deep mysteries of our existence.

“With his divine alchemy [Jesus] turns not only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries, yea, every meal into a eucharist, and the jaws of the sepulchre [grave] into an outgoing gate” (George MacDonald, Miracles of Our Lord)

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Table of Contents

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01: The Enchantment of the Ordinary

02: The Language of Rejoicing

03: Created for the Feast

04: Real Presence

05: Ars Poetica