Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White,  Rumpelstiltskin - the list of fairy tales taking place in enchanted forests goes on and on. Some of the magic that took place in these fanciful places was wonderful and wondrous, and some was fearful and frightening.  None-the-less, it was a time that transcended the world of rational thought...it allowed the mind and spirit to surpass the factual world and the drudgery of the times.

 Charles Taylor, in his extensive tome exploring humankind's journey to a world he defines as secular humanist, identifies a shift from a world of enchantment to disenchantment. This shift is acknowledged in his world as being elemental in leading to the current state of humanistic secularism. A Secular Age identifies three traits of the world of 500 years ago that allowed people to intuit God as a part of everything; 1)"The natural world they lived in, which had its place in the cosmos they imagined, testified to divine purpose and action...2) God was also implicated in the very existence of society...One could not but encounter God everywhere... 3) People lived in an enchanted world...The enchanted world in this sense (the opposite of Weber's expression of 'disenchantment') is the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces..." (p.28)

 Taylor describes people of this enchanted time as being porous. "By definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and important emotions are outside of the 'mind'; or better put, the very notion that there is a clear boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, has no sense." (p.38)  There was not a sense of us versus Spirit, but a sense that there was no us without that which was beyond us. This logic was not limited to a sense of God, but also of all forces of the cosmos. His contention is that we have shifted to a time where our self have becomes "buffered." "This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it."(p.38)

 Time-shift to today. If you are a thinking person, you have boundaries. You have decided what you will let in to your world and what you will keep out. Your buffered self allows you to walk/drive past people on the street asking for money or holding up a sign that says "Will work for food." You have decided that you will not get caught up in religious fanaticism, so instead you seek out a theologically sound framework that gives you the opportunity of talking about the faith without ever participating. This, I think, describes the world of secular humanism Taylor seeks to define. God is one among many ways to express our individualism, and probably not the one that entices us to experience ecstasy, or in Taylor's terms - enchantment. We have no need. We actually might find the practice of a more charismatic faith completely out of the bounds of acceptability. We might label it as Taylor has - "folk ritual," controlling and manipulative. (p.438)

 How then do we experience wonder? How do we discover the multi-layered  dimensions of own existence? How do we move beyond the disenchantment of Weber, and once more find the enchanted forest waiting for us with great gifts of spirituality beyond the realm of sensibility? #dminlgp