(y) – Disenchanted

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is the father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

– Longfellow

People like to say “the west needs enchantment,” but I consider this a meaningless cliche.

The west has enchantment. The west is capable of enchantment. We haven’t lost it.

We don’t need to change how we believe, how we behold, how we talk. I don’t need to turn into some cartoonish willy wonka character frolicking in the street and splashing in every puddle.

My grandfather, on his deathbed, looked at my grandmother and said, “Hello, beautiful.” Those were, as I understand it, his last coherent words. Love is what enchanted my grandfather to my grandmother. Love is what enchants us to the world. Love is a choice.

When people say “the west needs enchantment”, they say it like you can just add enchantment back into the mix. What they mean when they say this is that the west is loveless.

That’s not entirely true either. I don’t care about “the west” as a distinction. It’s fairly meaningless these days anyway. But Christianity is not loveless. Modernity is loveless. Modernity is sterile in every sense of the word. A pristine, shrink wrapped, single use package.

God is love. It’s the boring, mundane, vale of tears love, though–not a spicy romance. God sends the sunrise every morning to illuminate your drive to work at a boring job that pays the bills and provides for your family. But when God made creation he said it was “very good”. When God sees us, perhaps He will say, “hello, beautiful”. And He will mean it in a way no one else can, because he ordered every atom of our being.

Therein lies enchantment. Love. “the west” “needs” “enchantment” because “the west” needs God, from whom all blessings flow.

I hate to break it to you, modernity: you can’t get Christ without the cross.

AMDG