Quotes from the amazing 'Living in Wonder' by Rod Dreher:
Living in Wonder
Chapter 1: To See Into the Life of Things
Al things have ultimate meaning because ethyl participated in the life of the Creator.
Life ebbs and flows. We feel closer to God in some seasons than in others. Yet in an enchanted society, it is easier to believe in God, to always feel his presence nearby.
If the cosmos is contrasted the way the ancient church taught, then heaven nd earth interpenetrate each other, participate in each other’s life. The sacred is not inserted from outside, like an injection from the wells of paradise; it is already here, waiting to be revealed. For example, when a priest blesses water, turning it into holy water, he is not adding something to it to change it; he is rather making the water more fully what is already is: a carrier of God’s grace.
True enchantment is simply living within the confident belief that there is deep meaning to life, meaning that exists in the world independent of ourselves.
For Christians it’s about learning t live as if what we profess is true. It is also about learning how to perceive the presence of the divine in daily life and to create habits that open our eyes and our hearts to him, as our father and mothers in the faith once did.
Iain McGilchrist “if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula.” A formula that included rejecting all transcendent values and event he possibility that they might exist.
In valuing only left hemispheric attention McGilchrist writes: We are like someone who, having found a magnifying glass a revelation in dealing with pond life, insists on using it to gaze at the stars - and then solemnly declares that if only people in the past had had such a wonderful magnifying glass to look through, they’d have known that, on closer inspection, stars don’t actually exist at all.”
I am convinced that the only way to revive the Christian faith, which is fading fast from the modern world, is not through moral exhortation, legalistic browbeating, or more effective apologetics but through mystery and the encounter with wonder. It’s not going to come quickly or without struggle. A pilgrimage is not the same as a three-hour tour.
Chapter 2: Exhie from the Enchanted Garden
The universe and everything in it is sacramental - it is a symbol of a spiritual reality that both points to transcendent reality and participates in it.
We know from writings from the early church that miracles, not message, were the prime motivator for the conversion of the first Christian generations.
Nature becomes super nature when it is charged with God’s grace… for the East God could not be grasped simply through rational contemplation of Scripture and the natural world but had to be known primarily through participation, via prayer, liturgy and so on.
Politicians are nothing compared to the power of money… therefore the great mover of history was not belief I God, or even faith in politics but the pomps and works of mammon.
If nothing has intrinsic sacramental value, then the best way to measure the value of things is by putting a price tag on them.
In the modern age capitalism has subdued christianity… after all if contrary to Christian teaching about the world, there is no intrinsic meaning to our bodies or to the sexual act, aside from the meaning that individuals assign to it, what is wrong with a transaction in which a other consents to conceive a child, carry her to term and sell her to a wealthy couple to fulfil a contract? What is wrong with a woman choosing to rent out her body to men for sexual pelasure/ This kind of exchange was unthinkable in Christian society. Today, though, neither the sexual integrity of the person not the mother-child bond is sacred; cash and contract are.
The internet can be thought of as a vast dis-enchantment machine.
Marshall McLuhan : the medium is the message.
If, say, the invention of a mechanical digger extends the power of our hands, or the invention of theauthomobil magnifies the power of our feet to provide locomotion, then, argues McLuhan the advent of electronic media amounts to externalising our entire nervous system. If so, we are extremely vulnerable to manipulation.
Using the internet creates brains that cannot easily remember… but also creates brains that cannot easily pray, which is the main and most important way we establish a living connection to God.
Chapter 3: Enchanted Mind, Enchanted matter
Chester: “if there is magic, then there is a magician. So, if you want to keep yourself sane, you have to regard all of this as if it were a gift for you. If there is a gift, there is love. If there is love, there is the lover. If there is the lover, there is life. It’s simple. So, you can start everyday with this idea.”
It is better to stay in the valley because from there you can only see great things. (Referring to the mountains)
Ockham’s Razor: a principle of problem solving that says the simplest explanation if probably the true one.
We labor under the false belief that the most reductive account of a phenomenon must be the best one.
German sociologist Hartmut Rosa talks about the importance of not being able to control things. “We crave control and yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive.” She goes on… “my argument is that, if I could make it snow at will, the I could never experience being called bye the falling snow. If my cat were a programmable robot that always purred and wanted to be cuddled, she would boom nothing to me but a dead thing.”
Alchemy and magic, are attempts to tap into supernatural power and bend it to human use. To pray, though, is to approach God out of love, not out of a sense of what God can do for you.
When our main way of encountering faith is through ideas, not prayer, pilgrimage, worship or other direct sensory experiences of the holy, our faith is at risk of hardening into ideology. This is not of course to demean intellection but only to order it rightly. To talk nd think about Godis not the same thing as encountering God, of perceiving him. Without perception, enchantment is impossible.
Chapter 4: Why Disenchantment Matters
“Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.” - John Paul Satre
Chapter 7: Attention and Prayer
Attention - what we pay attention to, and how we attend - is the most important part of the mindset needed for re-enchantment. And prayer is the most important part of the most important part.
“Attention changes the world, and how you attend to it changes what you find there.” Iain McGilchrist
T. M. Luhrmann discovered that the ability to focus one’s attention makes a big difference in a believer’s ability to feel the presence of God. “People who are able to become absorbed in what they imagine are more likely to have powerful experiences of an invisible other.”
“…[a person’s attentional patterns] can alter something as basic as their perceptual experience.” Ie want to see clearly/differently, attend to your attention.
“Thinking and talking about God is not communion with God,” writes Frederica Mathews-Green. “Only prayer is prayer. Both worldly distractions and theoretical cogitating can be used to avoid the challenge that ultimately faces each of us: that we are called to enter a direct, personal relationship with God, one where he will be God and we won’t be.”
Open-mindedness can be a facade over a refusal to give up control.
Paying attention requires sacrifices, both small and large. A small sacrifice is closing one’s laptop at bedtime to pray. A large sacrifice is submitting one’s will to an established tradition, a way of life, to allow it to shape you. Nothing is more contemporary than to go through life keeping one’s options open, flitting from diversion to diversion, “sifting” to find bespoke spirituality for ourselves. But this doesn’t work, and cannot work, because it inevitably traps us inside our own heads.
Paying attention is a form of love.
Reality is flow… The frozen moment of a ballet dancer’s leap makes for a beautiful photograph, but it is not the same thing as dance.
“Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather on howe we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (mee-hye cheek-sent-mee-hye)
The thing is you can’t find happiness by searching for. It has to come as te by-product of some other search - a search for something in the world beyond your head.
We pay attention to what we desire, but we have to learn to desire the right things.
