Vancouver+Enchantment

Class on enchantment, old albums I love, grumpiness about delay

[I am sorry this post is so late in the day! When I started writing it (as you will see) I assumed the delays of my day of travel were over. I was wrong… read to the end for my grumpy late night ramblings/explanation/plea for commiseration)

Dear Friends,

I am sitting in the Vancouver airport listening to the sweet, sweet sound of an overhead announcement saying that my flight is boarding. I won’t bother you with the details, but this sound is sweet due to a series of cancellations, delays, and general travel drama. I don’t know about you, but every I know who has travelled in the last few weeks has encountered travel nightmares of various and manifold kinds. Today hasn’t been too bad (though my delayed posting is due to some of the delays), but I’m pleased to get ready to board. To console myself about leaving Canada I’m treating myself to Tim Horton donut holes— my first ever!

This week I’ve been in Vancouver, teaching a class called “After Disenchantment” for Regent College. We read and discussed Charles Taylor, Max Weber, James K.A. Smith, Alison Milbank, Barfield, and more, all alongside Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. The class members were so engaged, patient, lively, and thoughtful— not to mention gracious! They put up with my persistent sniffling (I caught a cold) and occasionally jet lagged attempts to wrap my head around (and help them wrap their respective heads around) nominalism. As usual, I learned so much through the discussions each day with students. It was a really energising.

I really enjoy thinking and writing about enchantment. I find there is a general feeling in many circles that the world is disenchanted and we must re-enchant it! This is a misunderstanding, though, and I think a rather important one. When Max Weber invented the term Entzauberung der Welt he was describing not something that happened to the World, but to the way people encountered the world. As I put it in the class, enchantment is not about whether there are fairies (the world being enchanted) but whether we could perceive them if there were (us being enchanted). Charles Taylor describes this as our “social imaginary”, the subtle assumptions and attainment of attention which we all share. In his book Secular Age (2007), Taylor sets out to discover “a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” Enchantment is part and parcel of that shift, a change in social imaginary.

a view of downtown Vancouver

If the world really is, as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it “charged with the grandeur of God” then a part of the task of the Christian is to attend to it appropriately, especially in a secular age when our vision has grown dim. I really love how Alison Milbank puts it in one of our readings: