Magic and more

This morning in church on the second Sunday in Advent, the Christian season of waiting in joyful hope for the divine child, one of our prayers asked: "may every heart prepare you room." The "you" in the prayer refers to Emanuel, God-with-us.

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck, a professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, is about just that -- about practices that humans can and have adopted to make room for the intuition of the immanence of Something More, something divine. I think most everyone enjoys flashes of feeling that there must be something more, something bigger and hopefully better, than our daily, almost mechanical existence. But mostly we shy away from wonder and imagination.

Beck proposes:

Living as we are in a skeptical world, the journey back toward enchantment starts with a disenchantment about our disenchantment, cultivating a disillusionment with our doubts. ... if your entire life has been devoted to putting question marks next to everything—especially the things you hold most sacred—is it any wonder we’re all feeling a bit fragile and anxious? I think it’s time to question some of those question marks.

He urges first that we'd be more grounded, and more amenable to encountering Something More, if we could acquire/reconnect with a more child-like delight in response to the world around us. From there, the book dances lightly through the value of Christian seasonal liturgy and ceremonies, pantheism, Celtic spirituality, contemplative practices, mysticism and fairy stores. It's a broad and, for a quasi-evangelical Christian, quite broad-minded survey of a wide landscape of spirituality.

I enjoyed this book -- but -- if you've read this far you may have guessed there is a "but." I am influenced in my experience of Hunting Haunted Eels by having consumed the audio edition. It is possible that reading this in print (or Kindle) might not have given me such a strong sensation of a sort of Christian bait-and-switch. The reader's voice reeks of authoritative, white, patriarchal Protestant Christian preaching. In a book in which Beck gives ample evidence of being aware that there are other avenues to approaching experience of the divine, somehow I suspect he thinks they all lead back to a sadly cramped culture.

• • •

According to Historic UK the magic eels of Beck's title are reputed to dwell in the convent which the Welsh St. Dwynwen established on the island of Llanddwyn.

... a well named after her became a place of pilgrimage after her death in 465AD. Visitors to the well believed that the sacred fish or eels that lived in the well could foretell whether or not their relationship would be happy and whether love and happiness would be theirs. Remains of Dwynwen’s church can still be seen today.

St. Dwynwen seems to be a sort of Welsh St. Valentine -- a patroness of lovers.

Hanging this book on the story of Dwynwen's well reminded me of the temple of the Bhutanese Buddhist "mad monk" Lhakhang where couples come to ask for fertility. Somehow, I don't think Mr. Beck would be comfortable with the iconography of that potently magic place. Here's a photo that shouldn't get my post categorized as pornographic.

 

 

Not my druthers, but not to be disdained, either.