Sacred Enchantment

Two basic ideas, categories of experience, ways of seeing-feeling-believing.  One has to do with “Sacred Irreverence,” and provides the over-all theme for www.theramblingrector.blogspot.com.  The other I call “Sacred Enchantment,” and has to do with all that island-paradise stuff from my childhood, mythic images of my father in uniform, our dog named Chief who guarded me from the numerous snakes that shared our yard in Green Cove Springs, Florida, feelings of cosmic wonder and amazement, love and sex,  solemn dread in the presence of a dead boy named Winfield Scott, whose drowned body I helped to find under an old railroad bridge on Broadheads Creek in the summer of 1958. Things like that.

 For me, sacred enchantment came first, before religion, before belief of any kind. When I first went to church I recognized it, along with other familiar feelings such as revulsion, boredom, and physical pain. After almost sixty years of churchgoing and professional  churchcraft I still experience all those things (except for the pain, because we don’t kneel as much), and still find myself periodically ambushed by an enchantment I can only call sacred.

Such an ambush occurred last time I was in London, in 2007. We had gone there for the marriage of our daughter, Caitlin, to Michael Lester, a Scotsman and our esteemed son-in-law ever since.  For an agonizing few days it appeared as if the wedding would not take place, since immigration authorities in the United States had not issued the documents necessary for Michael’s reentry. How to celebrate a wedding without a Bride or Groom?

While waiting for this to get resolved, I frequented a large parish church near our hotel in the Kilburn section of London. In terms of church politics, St. Augustine’s, Kilburn, is very far from my own viewpoint, but its worship and devotional atmosphere affected me in ways that transcended politics. At the time I wrote in my journal,

“…I found myself with disbelief suspended, watching my own imagination take flesh before my eyes, regretting the end of every psalm and every reading, every canticle and every prayer. If it were not for Nancy and the children to hold me in existence, I might have disappeared for good into the silence between the psalm-verses, and become another mute spectator among the apostles posted along the chancel walls. In a way, I am there still, suspended somewhere between the vaulted ceiling and the frescoed walls, a lingering molecule of incense-flavored air, having been burned alive and martyred on hot coals at that place where (as my brother Bob says) myth and reality intersect, and (as I have written before), “…all the stories and the rivers merge, and sleep rolls like breakers on an unknown shore.”

     I intend to visit St. Augustine’s on this present pilgrimage, but have no preconceived notions of being whisked off into mystical ecstasy at the first whiff of incense and candle wax. Sacred Enchantment is my avowed goal, but can only be trusted when accompanied by its acolyte, Sacred Irreverence. More on that tomorrow…