An Enchanted Reality

How Beauty Draws Us In

A Vase of Flowers Paul Gauguin 1895

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become a part of it.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

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Today is my birthday! Aside from the delightful particulars of eating chocolate cake and drinking red wine with my family tonight to celebrate, this day commemorates two distinct realities. First, a factual reality: I was born at a specific time and place, measuring and weighing specific numbers, born to a specific woman, all of which would become a part of my birth record, data to prove my existence and citizenship. Second, an enchanted Reality: I am a born person with a soul, made in the image of God, created with purpose, intricately formed in my mother’s womb. I am fearfully and wonderfully made, inside and out, created for a deep relationship with a generous God, with other people, and with creation. Both realities tell me something about who I am in the order of the cosmos; both are worthy of celebration. The same is true of you.

I realize it sounds strange to draw such sharp distinctions around a birthday, but the larger point is that we are each more than an accumulation of facts. A birthday is a day to say to those we know, Praise God that you exist and were born today! The world is better with you in it. The blessing is a statement from a deeper Reality. It’s an agreement with God’s declaration over his creation: it is very good.¹ Today, I am doing somewhat ordinary things, but the day is not ordinary. It’s a day to pause and thank God for this life, for all the ways he gathers my small ordinary things for his glory, for the deeper, delightful Reality.

We live in a secular age, a disenchanted world, “firmly entrenched in the fact realm — the hard sciences, finance, and industry.”² This is not to say that the fact realm is unimportant, hardly! Only that it is not the only realm. In the contemporary West, we have been immersed in a sea of philosophies descending from the Enlightenment, and they have swallowed us to the point of crisis. What is knowable? We have hacked our facts to the molecular level (physically and metaphysically) to make sense of who we are, of one another, of the universe. What is truth? What is love? What is a woman?

In the Platonic tradition, the visible world was a great icon charged with meaning and purpose. Beneath the messiness of our reality, a higher order exists. The world could be read as a copy or symbol, a series of images distorting the true Reality, alive and ordered beneath it all. Time imitated eternity. The sun imitated the good. All of the material world parodied something much larger. It was not the end itself. The material world was perceived as enchanted, ordered by something far greater than man. This order harmonized the cosmos like a symphony, a cathedral drawing us upward.³

This is not to say that if we lived in a different time, we would be more holy. The ancients were as full of vice as we are now. R.J. Snell clarifies, “If one was irritated at the order of the cosmos in 1066, one was irritated in a genuine sense, at the ordering chosen by God; postmodern irritation is directed at nothing, just a coldly impersonal set of forces.”⁴ The movements of thought over time have propelled us toward mindsets focused on the individual, the present, and a godless universe.

To think we are alone in the universe, left only to our prowess through ideas in the here and now, is a dark and hopeless thought. Yet these ideas permeate our businesses, medical communities, legal system, schools, and even, at times, the Church herself. Like those under the Queen of Underland’s spell, we too can become forgetful of what is Real.⁵ Beauty becomes tarnished. Truth seems amorphous. Goodness feels out of reach. As mothers (and people!), we can easily move through our days, asleep to the deeper Reality, blind to the beauty surrounding us, deaf to the symphony in which we participate.