Praxis Circle wishes you and your family a Merry Christmas on this beautiful day, just before Christ’s birth. The millions of years waiting since Creation in time and space are as good as over today. We’ve received our glimpse of the fullness of Eternal Time. At the border of the material and spiritual, God enters the world as a baby, the miracle of miracles we recognize, celebrate, and sanctify.
We offer two quotes below from two exceptionally gifted Christians, when it comes to commenting on the secular worldview in contrast to the real, enchanted world human creatures inhabit. Christ is G.K. Chesterton‘s Everlasting Man. This is the book we are told that started C.S. Lewis down his pathway from atheism to Christianity. Chesterton and Lewis are masters at describing enchantment.
“The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame.”
― G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925)
Rod Dreher is similarly gifted. This year he wrote Living in Wonder about enchantment, and we are sure to review it in 2025. We’ve covered Mr. Dreher’s work in the past.
Americans and mankind across the globe increasingly yearn for God and the supernatural, according to St. Augustine, perhaps our most fundamental human trait. Enchantment merges the past, present and future into one moment. We will have our dreams fulfilled again tomorrow; since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the world is launched into a redeemed future and never been the same.
“We love what we find beautiful. This is an experience common to everyone. The Orthodox theologian Timothy Patitsas has developed a persuasive approach to evangelism and discipleship that he calls “beauty first.” He teaches that falling in love with beauty—something that everyone naturally does—is the surest gateway to God. It happens by awakening our eros, the Greek word for sensual desire.
We usually associate the term with sexual desire, but that is not how eros is taken in Christian thought. In his 2005 encyclical Deus caritas est (God is Love), Benedict XVI tries of Christian eros as bodily desire that has been sanctified by the spirit. In traditional Christmas teaching, man is both flesh and spirit intricately and explicitly commingled as distinct from modern Cartesian mind-body dualism, which holds body and mind to be ontologically separate. For traditional Christianity, to deny either the body or spirit is to lose something of our humanity . . .
The Church path, says Benedict, starts with eros but perfects in it by transforming eros into agape, or selfless, sacrificial love for another. Note that this is not a strict denial of eros but a distillation of erotic desire into something purer than mere bodily desire. Eros is the unfiltered desire to be united with the other, to possess it or be possessed by it. Eros can be purified and sanctified, or it can lead to destruction.
Christian eros, like enchantment, comes into being at the borderline between the physical and the spiritual.”
― Rod Dreher, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (2024), page 184.
We’re all children of God in Christ, and we should never lose our love and appreciation for the miracles of existence and the beautiful life all around us.
Our last wish for 2024? We hope you’re laughing and smiling with those two at top, as we, like those children, “fill and lift it up” together in tomorrow’s dawn.
