What's Tony Thinking

Christmas Enchantment

My paternal grandmother, Victoria Moon Robinson, would sometimes speak of having “the anticipates.” She was anticipating something, or someone, that was coming. I suspected she enjoyed the anticipation as much or more than the thing itself. Sometimes what she anticipated was a visit from her grandson.

These final days before Christmas have always seemed to me to be ones when “the anticipates” are running strong. Some people happily (or not so happily) rush to do final shopping or make a last pre-Christmas trip to the grocery store. Others listen to favorite Christmas music and fill their homes with candles. I had fun over the weekend wrapping Christmas presents with my 9-year-old granddaughter, Lila. As Linda said, we made “a great team.”

Some read the Christmas story, not one of the zillion extent Christmas stories (many of which are great), but the “real one,” Luke 2: – 14.

But it’s not only anticipation of Christmas itself, it’s the anticipation and longing for enchantment. In these days and hours there is enchantment in the air. A sense of something magical, of angel’s wings hovering, of a grace that reaches out to touch and comfort us, of — as it is put in the Gospel of John — “a light that shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it.”

The glimmer of enchantment doesn’t usually last long. Soon after the day itself, cast-off Christmas trees begin to appear at the curb. People will be busy returning gifts to UPS and FedEx drop-offs. Stores will trumpet after-Christmas sales. And the much anticipated Christmas school break will give way to children saying, “I’m bored.”

Richard Beck writes about “enchantment” and the need for a re-enchanted world if we are to be sane and find a restored relationship with creation, the world of nature. In a recent post Beck discussed “the colonialism of disenchantment.” Among his points, a disenchanted view of the world and life, is pretty much a western thing. Here’s Beck:

I was recently presenting about enchantment and disenchantment and one of the points I made, a point I’ve made ever since the publication of Reviving Old Scratch and more recently with Hunting Magic Eels, is the colonial aspect of doubt and disenchantment. I wrote about this here in 2019.

There are two aspects related to the colonialism of disenchantment.

The first aspect is the observation that disenchantment is largely a Western problem. The Christianity of the global East and South is very much enchanted. In Africa, South America, and the East Christians don’t need convincing that the devil exists and that malevolent spiritual forces are at work in the world. Educated white people in America and Europe doubt this, but the rest of the world doesn’t.

A different way to make this point is to observe that disenchantment is WEIRD. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Over the last few decades in psychology a conversation has started about how the vast majority of participants in psychological research has come from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic nations. These studies produce psychological findings we too quickly assume hold for the rest of the world. But do they? How weird are WEIRD participants? The answer, it turns out, is pretty damn weird. Numerous studies have shown that WEIRD participants behave very differently from the rest of the world. Here, then, is another way to describe the colonialism of disenchantment. Most of the world is enchanted. Disenchantment, by contrast, is both WEIRD and weird.

You can click on the link above for the full piece. I agree with Beck on two of his main points. One is that disenchantment is largely a western, WEIRD, problem. And second, it is at the root of much of our soul-sickness, our craziness and sadness. We’re lonely for enchantment, for the transcendent, for magic, for a graceful God.

So, here’s hoping that enchantment finds you, and me, this Christmas. (Note: it isn’t so much that we find, still less manufacture, enchantment. Enchantment finds us, comes to us, sometimes when and where we least expect it.)

I celebrate the enchantment of these days (and nights) before Christmas. And I want to say that even as, yes, there is so much that wrong and worrisome in our world, my sense as this season comes and a new year is upon us, is one of a perhaps strange sense of hope and curiosity.

All sorts of change is afoot. Much of it that makes me uneasy. But also curious and hopeful. I guess I have “the anticipates.”

(The photo, taken by Linda, is of a nesting Great Egret in San Miguel de Allende earlier this year.)