May 13, 2007 - Enchanted

Sixth Sunday of Easter
13 May 2007
Revelation 21.10, 21.22-22.5
Enchanted
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

My brand new yard tractor was delivered on Monday. I had never owned one before. This one is red and shiny. I can pull a trailer with it and attach a snow thrower to clear my driveway in 42-inch swaths during winter. I have read all the literature and identified all the operating parts. I can describe how to detach the mower deck. I now feel somehow more competent that I can use the term “mower deck” in a complete sentence. I own a piece of equipment that has a real mower deck, which has had some sort of existential effect on me. I didn’t have time on Tuesday to mow the lawn, but I had time to climb into the seat—which is situated directly above the mower deck. I actuated the clutch and moved all the levers through their various positions. I am part of the society of yard tractor owners.

On Friday, I mowed the lawn to an audience of numerous birds and squirrels, guided, at first, by the pattern shown in the yard tractor manual. The birds were disinterested, but the squirrels watched with something between curiosity and terror. The pattern in the yard tractor manual was drawn without the trees. I made up my own pattern. If you looked at the lawn after I mowed it from the upstairs bedroom window, it appeared that I was trying to draw Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night” in the grass, with fanciful circles and sweeps and swirls and reminding you of an artist who at a distracted moment might, in the course perhaps of paring an apple, accidentally slice off his ear.

The way I first mowed my lawn with a yard tractor, the squirrels seemed surprised that I did not cut off my ear. They were relieved that I didn’t cut off their ears, though I did cut the grass in certain places low enough to have cut off the ears of several worms, who had previously assumed that a habitat an inch deep in the soil rendered them safe from my whirling blades. Silly them. I have heard that if you cut a worm in half, it grows into two worms. The worm population in various parts of my lawn has recently doubled. These parts of the lawn, according to the image of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” would be black holes, which is how they appear from the upstairs window.

If you were to have looked at the lawn not from the upstairs window but from the downstairs floor level (about twelve inches above the lawn), you’d have seen that it appeared entirely smooth and green, and I made sure to call Marcia’s attention to my handiwork from this pleasant angle. With the help of a clever and brawny machine, I have created a green velvet acre that might remind a nearsighted person of paradise, which gives me a certain satisfaction. A kind of peace comes to me from manipulating and managing the little bit of the world where I live, and so to drink in that satisfaction, I walked my fresh cut lawn, for the creation of which I am only the most recent agent. My course took me from the street around the side and across the back of our house and brought me against the end of the lawn at the edge of the wood.

Then I kept walking.

I’m not sure why I kept walking after the lawn had ended. Many things remain to be done to the house we’re still moving into. There are repairs and installations and painting and flooring jobs. There is the putting away of every single thing we have, which at this point still involves climbing over boxes of every other thing we have. There are books to read and the impossible backlog of thank-you notes to feel guilty about. But I kept walking from the end of the lawn into the wood.

The first sensations were the crunch of leaves and then my feet sinking into the softer woodland floor. The drone of neighboring yard tractors receded, while birds sang out between suddenly penetrating silences. These are silences of the sort in which creatures wait for the response that might lead to a new life. What happens in the birdsong is a calling out to the universe by a creature that wants something more, something new. What happens in the ensuing silence is the expansion of space and the suspension of time in which a miracle may occur. Or so it seemed to me, as I stepped from my pleasant and satisfying little lawn into the transcending wonder of the wood.

The difference between the lawn and the wood is the difference between delight and enchantment. There is nothing wrong with either, but they are not the same thing. I delight in the lawn, because it is the pleasing product of human ingenuity. I am enchanted by the wood, because it arises from a wider spirit of life. I delight in the lawn, because my imagination is reflected in it. I am enchanted by the wood, because it bursts the boundaries of my thoughts. The delight of the lawn is the beauty it exposes. The enchantment of the wood is in the mysteries it hides.

Delight and enchantment are two goods. I would not enjoy life much without delight, and I would slowly die without enchantment.

If ever there were an author of scripture who wrote from his enchantment, it was the one we call John of Patmos, the author of Revelation. In paragraph after paragraph, John draws us into a world of strange singing creatures; a slaughtered but living lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, worshiped by myriads of angels and creatures and elders; four horses, white, black, bright red and pale green with riders bearing a crown, a sword, scales and the name of Death; the sun black as sackcloth; stars spinning into the earth; a cosmic battle between Michael and the angels against a great red seven-headed dragon. By fours and by sevens and by twelves, the forces of good and life are cast into a final cosmic conflict against the forces of evil and death.

King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table would have blanched at the enormity of the dangers presented in Revelation, but something in the time and place of the late first century church suggested just such a dread and serious state of things. Only in an ecstatic state of enchantment could a visionary see in the deepest horrors of existence the hope of good’s greatest triumph. John found a way to unleash from the boundlessness of his soul the spectacular imagery that would ignite the imagination of every generation since.

But every now and then a generation misses the point of it all. In our generation, we miss the point in two ways. One way we miss the point of Revelation is chronicled in the Left Behind series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the popular fictionalized account of the rapture and its aftermath, when all the acceptable Christians can expect to be dematerialized on earth and rematerialized in heaven. These are morality stories about good guys and bad guys, and they’re meant to scare you into wanting to be one of the good guys, no matter how statistically remote that possibility is. The problem is that the Left Behind books teach fear so imaginatively that you’re left shaking in your boots, whereas the power of the book of Revelation is that it engages your own imagination to provoke awe in the core of your being.

The other way our generation misses the point of Revelation is to consider the Left Behind version definitive and then reject it as balderdash. On some level, most of us know that Tim LaHaye is just riding his own personal, profitable apocalyptic high horse. As a commercial genius, we have to admire him; as a purveyor of truth, he makes us gag. We spew the hollowness of his lukewarm intellect from our collective mouth, and the taste of it has been so bad that we refuse altogether the cup of Revelation, as if it were some Jonesian apocalyptic Kool-Aid. We’re afraid of being suckered, or worse.

But there is an alternative, and the alternative is enchantment. We almost all of us know how to be enchanted. In a small way, many of us were enchanted the first time we saw Star Wars. We realized there’s probably no world like Tatooine with two suns that sustain human life in a dry, barren desertish sort of way, but the characters, battles, inventions and mysterious powers were too wonderful not to believe in, if only for a couple of hours. In a similar way, we look forward to the release of the next Harry Potter novel, because just as the legends of King Arthur and his knights transported readers and listeners from lives diminished by cramped imaginations into the hope of fulfillment and goodness, so do we trust that somewhere, someday there is, has been and will be a boy who cannot help be and do everything possible for him. If that is true for him, it may be true for us, and in that truth may be the seed of the salvation of the world. The original wonder of life may be restored. We actually imagine that someday, again, things will be okay.

So if, now, you can let yourself be enchanted by something in the book of Revelation, see what happens when you step from the nicely clipped lawn of your carefully managed life into the wild, surpassing wonder of John’s vision of the “holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God,” the city that has no need of sun or moon, because its light is the glory of God and its lamp the Lamb.

There is a river there, bright as crystal, flowing with life through the middle of the street of the city. Now, stop any other thought you may be having and see only that crystal river flowing down the middle of the wide main street. Watch the glints of light, which sparkle only with the light of God. Watch it all closely, for this is the life toward which you have already chosen to live. And notice, now, the tree of life on either side of the river with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month. This is how full and sweet real life is. People have told you what “real” life is, by which they mean a life full of disappointment and treachery and the prevalence of wrong, but now you see that the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit is more real than any of that, because your imagination has shown this to you at your core.

And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Whatever else you have read in the history of nations—whatever mutual distrust nations have harbored, whatever wars have been waged, whatever despicable monarchs, generals, presidents and prime ministers have despoiled with their lies and their intrigues and their power over nations—whatever else you know about nations, notice, now, that the final act among nations will be their healing. The final act among nations will be their healing by the leaves of the tree of life. In certain seats of political power, in certain boardrooms of corporate domination and in certain studios of cultural influence there is great gain to be sought in disenchanting you of your belief in the healing of the nations. You should think you are naïve, they will tell you, if you believe in this healing. But then if you insist on being naïve, they will shame you in public for believing in the healing of all instead of fearing the power they alone wield. But then if you won’t be ashamed, they will turn their power against you and injure your reputation or deprived you of your prospects or damage your very living and being.

But then if you won’t be intimidated out of your belief in the healing of the nations—which is also the healing of the religions, whatever their creeds, and which is also the healing of the sexualities, whatever their orientation, and which is also the healing of the races, whatever their pigment or the shape of their eyes or the texture of their hair—if, still, you won’t be intimidated out of your enchantment with the healing power of the leaves of the tree of life, then all the world leaders and CEO’s and talking heads and talk show bullies are utterly powerless against you. Powerless against you, because you have been shaken to the core of your being by the power of God’s idea for the fulfillment of life, and no one, anywhere, by any means, can shake you. You are at peace.

You are at peace down by the riverside, where the crystal water nourishes the tree of life and its sweet fruit and its healing leaves. You are healed every time you remember them. You are healed after the mean-spirited comment someone made to you or that you made to someone. You are healed after the memory of something painful swallowed yet another hour you might have spent happy. You are healed of resentments that chain you to old sadness. You are healed of the chemistry your body still obeys, in spite of everything you’ve done to change it. You are healed, at least in the moment of enchantment and peace, and in that moment resides the promise for your life.

I believe that the enchantments of our faith, which we anchor in the life, ministry and eternal spirit of Christ, are what really teach us about salvation. We have creeds and laws, dogmas and doctrine, which we use to order matters of faith to make them manageable, but faith management is not what I pray for. Faith liberation and healing is what I pray for, and when we are enchanted by the Spirit of God, we are free and healed. Amen.