Everyone is talking about disenchantment. By “everyone” I mean the kinds of people that I tend to read and listen to. The world at large seems mostly ignorant, indifferent, or perhaps even triumphalist about the march of disenchantment through our minds.
“Our minds”, because the world is exactly as enchanted as it always has been, and the created order in which we find ourselves is very deeply enchanted. For one thing (and I never get tired of reminding people of this fact), we live in a universe that is not a clockwork wound up by God at some point long ago and left to tick away on its own. It is a mistake to speak of the creation as something that occurred only at some point in the past: the creation is ongoing, unending, held in being from moment to moment by the loving attention of God. We should remember that when we look out our windows, or go for a walk, or gaze at the stars (I do hope that you regularly gaze at the stars). The things you see are the ongoing work of God: he is making them as you watch!
We should also remember this when we deal with other people. They, too, are the ongoing work of God, held in being by his act of creative love. We have veils over our minds, in a sense, because it takes time for us to come to see things the way they are, and to recognize the ongoing miracles that surround us (and include us). We run into someone during the day and we tend to have a friendly or unfriendly reaction based on a set of hazy prejudices (good or bad) that come into play without our even being conscious of the process. “Good to see you,” we say. “Why do I have to deal with this person?”, we think.
God, of course, holds people in being even when they do wicked things (and that’s why you and I still exist, so we should be very thankful for this). And we don’t have to like everyone, or even most people. What is required of us is that we should strive to discern Christ, the worker of creation, within each person we encounter. We should work to see “Christ in mouth of friend and stranger”, as St. Patrick’s Breastplate says (in the unexpurgated version, not found, unfortunately, in our Hymnal).
I strongly believe that this linkage between the wonder of the created order and the inherent dignity of human beings is lost on many of those who describe themselves as environmentalists. If the world is worth saving, then human beings ought to be worth saving, too.
For Christians, though, this isn’t the end of the calculation. There is more to humanity than just our physical, animal nature. We are animals, of course, but we are animals with immortal rational souls. We are made in the image of God. Christ, we are told in the Scriptures, is the express image of the Father - an icon of the Father. We are icons of Christ. Maybe it is hard sometimes to discern the image; maybe we have tattooed the symbols of the world over the face of our picture; maybe we have so turned ourselves from the source of our being that our souls don’t reveal themselves through our bodies. Or maybe they still do reveal themselves, but what they reveal is dimmed and darkened and diluted.
Brush off your icon! Let its heavenly gold shine through by giving yourself over to prayer and to the life of Christ bestowed and nourished in the Sacraments. You are an enchanted being, filled with the God who is even right now holding you in being and pouring out his love upon you. I think you’ll find, even if you take only the most preliminary steps in polishing up your inner icon, that the whole created order will begin to reveal itself to you as itself an icon of Christ. You’ll begin to discern him in the “virtues of the star-lit heaven” and the “glorious sun’s life-giving ray” (more from St. Patrick). And in the people you meet every day. And maybe even in that person who greets you in the mirror.
