Musings on Re-enchantment in Religious Communication
Liturgical Living and Preparation
People often lament that our world has become disenchanted. With the rise of modernity came a new map of reality—an enlightenment grid laid over the terrain of life, instructing us how to walk it. Where once people discerned gods in groves, fairies in fields, and holy places alive with presence, now there stretches only a mechanistic nature. The magic has drained away. The divinities have retreated. Holy places no longer thrum with transcendent spirit but are reduced, at best, to markers of history and memory.
The map we now use is guided by science and technology, with scientists and technologists serving as its new priests. As powerful and even thrilling as these tools can be, many quietly confess that the age of disenchantment has left them with a void—longing for meaning, weary of life’s monotony, and searching for some other form of enchantment. In truth, these modern maps have not only displaced but rivaled the church’s ancient vocation as the keeper of a sacred map of the world. And yet human yearning remains. Which is why the most compelling preaching in our day must be preaching that re-enchants—offering a vision of the world lit up with God’s presence, a sacred cartography that gives meaning to pilgrims on the journey.
New Models of enchantment
No matter how disenchanted our modern world has become, it appears that the yearning of most people is for some version of enchantment—a vision of something more than the material, mundane, and mechanistic. In what follows I offer an incomplete list of some examples (that have interested me) of modern attempts (knowingly and unknowingly) to reenchant the world or at least moments within the world to imbue existence with a sense of something—ietsism. I will break them apart into three categories: technological/digital, performative, and land based.
Techno/Digital:
-Pokemon GO- augmented reality game one could map onto the landscape of their daily lives.
-V.R. Headsets-immersive technology.
-Techno-Futurism
-Digital Avatars with Digital Identities/Crypto-currency.
Performative:
-Professional Wrestling
-Immersive Worlds and Theme Parks
-Dungeons and Dragons and other RPG’s
-Geocaching
Land-Based:
-Neo-Pagan and other Earth based Spiritualities
-Agrarianism and other alternative, place-based political visions.
-Culinary and food culture.
-Modern Day treasure hunting.
As I said, this is an incomplete list. The criteria for making the list were simple. First, I had to notice it, and two I found it compelling at one time or another. The main point that I would like to make is equally simple: the fact that we have so many means of re-enchanting everyday existence, or imbuing it with a sense of “something more” tells me those who are given to speaking sacred things need to restate and reframe the world in order to show that it is always, already enchanted. In what remains of this short essay, I will reflect on one way that religious speech, preaching, and spiritual leadership can extend sacred focus into mundane life to demonstrate the inseparability of the sacred from the so-called profane: liturgy in daily life.
Liturgy Everywhere
Over the last few decades, it has become vogue for some Christians to pattern their everyday lives more liturgically. Or at least the desire has been popular. And for good reason, this is one way to immerse oneself into the sacred narrative. Resources such as Every Moment Holy which is a collection of liturgies meant for each moment you can imagine: cooking dinner, decorating the Christmas tree, taking a walk, etc., and Salt of the Earth: A Christian Seasons Calendar which is a calendar not marked by months, but rather by liturgical seasons, marked with reflections, art, and seasonal colors are both designed to help communities mark time according to sacred rhythms as opposed to the mundane rhythms of our market culture. As challenging as it is to honestly pattern one’s life by a sacred calendar when all the world around you marks time differently, it is one way to show that one’s daily life intersects with the most holy and sacred truths.
By patterning one’s life-rhythms according to a sacred calendar, the holy is engaged through storytelling and ritual. It is a concrete way to allow one’s identity to be taken up into a story and shaped by its meaning. This is not merely done by placing a new calendar on your wall with different dates highlighted—it is rehearsing various stories each season as they are paired with personal and communal rituals, liturgies, and remembrances. This is what researcher Paul J. Zak would call immersion, which for him is the best way to cultivate happiness and has direct links to education, sales, and getting others to buy into your message.
In Zak’s book Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Sources of Happiness,48 the author engages neuroscience to study what makes a message more memorable and meaningful. His team studied everything from commercials, films, superfans, churches, classrooms and board rooms. While noting that story, emotion, and a delicate balance of the novel with the comfortable or expected increase one’s chance of feeling “immersed” in a piece of communication, Zak points to the experience at a theme park as a high-water mark. At places like Disneyland, people line up for a ride. The story begins there. The line is never merely a line. Rather, it is a carefully curated experience of storytelling—it is atmospheric, and it helps to build the anticipation. There is also something added to the experience when you stand in line waiting with other people to share the same experience with. The total immersion of this experience raises its quality and its lasting impact on people’s memories.
Isn’t this exactly what religious communities aim do? We curate and tell stories as people enter a religious space. If we were as effective and technologically skilled as the theme parks, we would narrate and tell people what to expect on their way in, so as to prepare them and build their anticipation. The question for us always concerns the quality of how we use our tools for the sake of immersing our communities in the story.
The tools at hand include architecture, orders of worship, art, screens, incense, bells, and bands. Then, with a gathered community of souls, we participate in a story rehearsed together. At its best, worship becomes a multi-sensory experience—and that helps. The goal, of course, is that believers might experience a portion of the sacred story within the context of a larger season, one in which the same story is still being rehearsed but through a widening lens. Over the course of the year, these believers follow a narrative that weaves the seasons together into one great tapestry of meaning. All of it is designed to be so immersive that it becomes formational—helping believers live the sacred story not just on Sunday, but on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and beyond.
Corporate liturgical reflection can deepen the daily devotion of individuals. Likewise, when individuals and families shape their lives around the liturgical calendar, it can enrich their participation in corporate worship and help re-enchant the world around them. The priest-theologian Sergius Bulgakov reflected on the interplay of liturgy, the seasons, and daily living with remarkable insight. In his personal journal, he once wrote:
Holy Week and Christ’s Pascha are marvelous and manifest miracles of God that appear every year, like the stirring of waters at the pool of Siloam [John 9:7]. These are the highest mountains to which the long ascent of Great Lent leads, and their heights are not even felt once a person scales them. The soul is aflame and burns everything with a blazing fire in the marvelous days of Holy week, and in dying it experiences bliss, and in bliss the soul dies. And afterwards this flame suddenly and immediately transforms and turns into the paradisiacal, luminous, and gladdening white Paschal fire, neither scorching or burning. If people alien to the Church knew this, how they would be ignited, how their souls would begin to shine. And this manifest miracle of God’s grace is both salvific and merciful. Everything is transfigured, and this already just is the dawn of transfiguration; everything appears in a different light, full of grace and sanctified from within.49
I suppose such an experience is there for the taking. The message has been shared. The table has been set. The priests and pastors have been praying, teaching, leading the hymns. Maybe everyone has bought their new calendars—alternatives to the workaday world. But are the people ready to receive the enchanting of our world by holy bursts of illumination? My guess is, sometimes. Just being liturgically sensitive is not enough.
Perhaps what stands in the way of sensing the enchantments that exist, even when we let liturgical life shape the mundane one, is preparation. Do preachers get up into the pulpit only having studied books, but having never prayed? Do lay people get out of bed and think about Christ only prior to the Eucharist, so busy are they with getting their kids out of the door, dressed, and to childcare? Training each of us to see and to expect an experience is paramount for moments of celebratory gathering, but it is also just as important for preparing oneself to begin the day. This is immersing oneself in grace. Bulgakov’s faith was intentional. Few had his life of piety. But hear from his own reflection on the way to church, found in his Spiritual Diary,
Today on my way to the liturgy, in the early morning, I walked through the streets of the city made fresh after the night. I thought: God provides this morning in His world. Everything within it lives in boundless breadth and depth. Innumerable creations: people and birds, fish in the deep and leeches on Everest, all creatures clean and unclean [cf. Lev. 11] -- everything sings praise to God this morning, and He fills everything and everywhere He is near... And He is near also to you, and you were created in this world as part of it, no less than the others were you counted worthy of existence; you are a citizen both of this earth and of these stars, and of all endless things, both great and small. And you can and therefore must attend to the song of the world bone to you from all sides, you must attend to the glory of God that fills heaven and earth [Isa. 6.3]. For here there is no other then or there; there is only the immovable here and now.50
What preparatory contemplations! He is preparing his mind for the liturgy with the gifts of his theological mind. And preparation is part of an immersive experience. Recall waiting in line for a roller-coaster!
Bulgakov’s theological mind was shaped by his liturgical history/practice, and his practice was shaped by his theology. And these crosswinds worked on one another to help him experience the world as enchanted, sacred, and sacramental—where even a morning walk draws him into a divine experience.
All too often, our theologies are abstracted from our lived experience. And our liturgical reflections are cordoned off to the time set aside for corporate worship in the church sanctuary. It is easily forgotten that liturgy is a school for life and that theology touches everything. Through robust teaching on developing a contemplative practice that grants one the eyes to see a world teeming with sacred witness will the faithful notice once more that their day to day lives are not lived devoid of the sacred, but rather that their lives are made intelligible by the sacred. This is just one benefit of reframing liturgical drama within daily living. Once more, I am moved by the witness of Sergei Bulgakov
The Lord has given us a spiritual sword—prayer; yet how difficult it is for us to wield it when our hearts grow lazy and cold. Man hurries to quickly bypass prayer and to undertake the day’s work, he hurries away from prayer. And only when he overcomes this laziness of his heart, when his heart is ignited by prayer, does he see that he is hurrying to nowhere and for nothing, that there is nothing on earth more needful and sweet than prayer.51
Conclusion
If immersion in sacred story is indeed the key to re-enchantment, then the church must become a community that practices attention. Attention to time, to space, to story, and to one another. The sacred calendar, the Eucharistic table, and the gathered people are not static symbols but living tools of divine pedagogy—they train us to see differently. Yet to make this vision concrete, churches must teach, model, and structure communal life around these rhythms.
While this is typically practiced through holy days, seasons, liturgies, and lectionary readings, the church must act in ways that help individuals take these practices home with them. The church’s task, then, is not merely to preserve sacred stories but to help people inhabit them—to become living icons of the story they rehearse each week. In doing so, both church and world are re-enchanted, and the faithful learn to live, move, and breathe within the sacred drama that never ends. Allow me to conclude with three “off the wall” suggestions that will help advance the cause of immersion into the churches sacred practices:
1.) Like amusement park rides, perhaps the church should prepare material (digital, print, or audio) that narrates the journey from entering the church doors to the sanctuary, preparing people for what they are about to experience. Perhaps this video is sent out via email prior to worship, or it is playing on loop in gathering spaces outside of the sanctuary. How often are we prepared for worship? Most people contend with the busyness of life all the way through until the start of worship. Immersive preparation can pave the way for the liturgy to do its work.
2.) Churches could give liturgies and prayers to families to participate in before they leave their homes and go about their day. These can be patterned to the liturgical calendar and be one more way of establishing an alternative way of experiencing time.