I have been reading Malcolm Guite’s latest book, Galahad and the Grail, and it has made me notice what his public work has been about lately: re-enchanting the world for people who live under the weight of disenchantment. It is as though modern rationality has drained the magic out of the world, something Max Weber saw coming more than a century ago when he wrote of the “disenchantment of the world.” I have also been following Lee C. Camp’s wonderful podcast No Small Endeavor, where he has done a series of interviews called “The Ache,” all about our longing for enchantment and transcendence, for something more than materialism can offer our deepest desires.
I am glad to find these voices. I wrote my PhD on the ecological crisis and Christian thought, and I often go on about the need to recover the ways Christianity actually enchants the world, despite the accusation that it was a disenchanting force. (Maximus the Confessor is my favorite counterexample.) So I have been asking how I can help others re-enchant their view of the world. My primary public role is preaching, and so the question becomes: what can I do through public speaking to shape and reshape the imaginations of those who listen?
Here are some practical ways you can help enchant the imagination through your teaching, preaching, and other public communication.
1. Get away from your notes. Perform your message with energy and imagination. This lets ordinary things come alive. Use imagery, storytelling, and dynamics rather than PowerPoint or a tightly held script. The act of speaking needs a spark so people can feel the spark that is all around them.
2. Practice your storytelling. Facts and ideas change minds, but stories change lives. We are story-formed creatures who experience and tell stories, and when we tell them well, we place listeners inside worlds. Entering a world is one of the ways people learn to reimagine their own.
3. Find moments of whimsy. Playfulness, humor, and witty connections delight the mind. You can bring whimsy through story and joke, but also through examples drawn from unusual or niche corners of the world. Showing how an extremely particular story still holds universal concerns is a way to slip a little whimsy into a message. Listeners feel delight, see connections, and find the world simply more interesting.
4. Study poetry. We should do this for its imagery and metaphor, but also to become more masterful with language itself. “Enchantment” holds “chant” in its root. There is something spellbinding about language, and it can make the world meaningful in new ways. We must learn to use the gifts of language in the broadest sense, so we can weave a spell of meaning for listeners who are busy, distracted, or not paying close attention.
5. Perform paying attention. Be someone who notices things. The world is what we attend to, and most of us miss so much of it. As leaders, we must practice attentiveness ourselves and then perform it publicly, noticing the small, the overlooked, the unexplained, the mystifying, and, dare I say, all that is magical about the ordinary world.
6. Go deep in a specific area, and talk about it. The more you know about a thing, the more mysterious and wonderful it becomes. While I was on medical leave for liver disease, I fell in love with studying fungi, and as a kingdom of living things they are mind-boggling. I can rattle off facts and figures that will wow you. The same is true of any subject: birds, trees, river avulsions, the size of the Milky Way, canine hearing, the age of sharks. You get the idea. The world is interesting. Be interested, and go deep. It will help you speak to the majesty of the world.
7. Pay attention to world-building. You do not have to study fantasy, but notice the stories where whole worlds are built: film, television, role-playing games, video games. World-building stretches and shifts the imagination, and it can help you show people where they stand in the drama of real life.
8. Avoid AI for content. AI generates language from patterns in what has already been written. To find an original voice, you have to come at things through your own mind and experience. What you share back into the world will then be refracted through your uniqueness, and it will meet other people in theirs.
9. Resist the urge to apply too quickly. Your teaching and preaching should have lessons and “what now?” moments. But let people turn their imagination toward wonder about God, the world, and the self. Let them luxuriate in meaning found in contemplation, not merely application.
10. Let silence have its place. Modern people are not silent enough. In silence we listen, and in listening comes a haunting sense of something more.