Re-enchantment

 

The magical wonder of snow can be lost by a couple of degrees warming turning the white falling flakes into dismal rain.    It is precisely the same elements of moisture and air, humidity and wind, yet the shifting of the one variant of temperature creates a totally different outcome.  I have only managed three snow days in the mountains this winter, due to a combination of mostly busy diaries and a very unpredictable weather which meant days set aside for a climb would sometimes be literally a washout.  Ina and I did have a good summitting of the Cobbler with the spikes on our boots giving us the grip we needed in the the last snow of the season, and I felt again the sheer wonder of walking in crisp, hard snow as the world fell away around us.

It looks like it's gone for the year now though and we have to wait 9 months probably to get out onto the white stuff again.  The hills just look wet and sodden now and most uninspiring... and yet...they are exactly the same slopes and  views.   It got me thinking of how our lives can often seem to hover between a sense of wonder and a sense of disenchantment.   In the first we value what we have and see the bigger stories that we are part of, even in the smallness of our day to day lives, we can take great joy in  little things and have a spirit of gratitude and appreciation for the sheer grace of being alive.  It doesn't take much though for the emotional or spiritual temperature to change a little.  Our circumstances may remain the same, but we find ourselves bored, unhappy, dissatisfied and what once seemed homely now seems mundane, what we were content with now seems limiting.

This can creep into our wider culture too.  Films, novels, songs, political discourse, media and of course social media, can look on askance at our world and see little to be hopeful about, few things to inspire and not much good news to help us believe in the better angels of our humanity.    Such a disposition is rarely disappointed because it rarely hopes, is impervious to hurt because is rarely vulnerable and is too grown up to fall for the stories of adventure and travail, happy endings and brave hearts that enchanted our childhood. 

As we approach Holy Week though and the heart of the biggest story of them all, I am called to hope again in the the sheer goodness of the deep down things.  That there is more goodness in this world than evil, that the love of God and His entering into human history is the ultimate guarantor of all our childlike longings for a better world and better version of who we are.  The acceptance of our inability to sort ourselves releases us from attempting to create the smaller worlds we can manage.   Instead, a sense of wonder opens us to a much larger world, shot through with  traces of a God who is good but most certainly not safe.   He shows us in Holy Week that we find our lives by losing our lives, that our destiny maybe found only through  sacrifice, that it's only when a seed is buried that a harvest can come.

We can be re-enchanted once again not by some grand flight of fancy of our own making but by having the courage to believe once more that there is an awful lot more going on than meets the eye.  That slight shift in perspective that creates snowflakes out of raindrops.