Embracing an Enchanted Faith

A realization aided by a healthy helping of Bananas Foster

Towards the end of 2023, I noticed a theme running through my reading, enchantment. The word brings blue diamonds and lush waterfalls straight to mind, probably because Disney got a chance to shape me before Jesus did. Enchantment in an incredibly intriguing call to faith and, the more that it crosses my path, the more I am driven to orient faith in its direction. It satisfies the deeper voids that logic can’t. It goes hand in hand with art, music, and poetry, all architects of beauty and wonder.

I’ve been reflecting on other times of life where enchantment has shown up to animate dreariness, one of which is food. My bachelor’s degree was in nutrition, a field I convinced myself I had chosen altruistically, to help others be healthier. Truthfully, I chose it because I wanted the knowledge to maintain a tight grip on my own body.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for the journey through the degree to end in utter disenchantment. During my final internship I was so painfully shy that I failed rotations and received consistently poor reviews. Something else was happening too; as I witnessed nutrition meeting the lives of actual people, I was deeply unsettled by the clinical approach to food. In training to teach others to live healthier lives, food had been distilled down to its most scientific, lackluster elements- vitamins, minerals, monosaccharides, polyunsaturated fats, etc. Food had become as bleak as my gray internship binder sitting on a stainless-steel food prep table. What was I doing here? I began to see how my training had married food to science and divorced it from culture, tradition, stories, comfort, joy, geography, and intuition. As long as I looked at food that way (a way that is also tainted by whiteness, a theme for another time), I couldn’t develop a healthy relationship with it. It would be simply a means to an end.

After graduating, I abandoned nutrition’s scientific obsessions. A healthy relationship with food didn’t spring up overnight, but I began to pay attention to other people- why they liked certain foods, how they acted when they cooked, what kinds of stories they would share over meals, and more. A flaming bananas foster was no longer just a dessert (only to be consumed in moderation) undergoing an intense Maillard reaction. It was a fascinating marriage of flavor and texture, lit with a dazzling delightful fire, to consume liberally. Food had become enchanting.

There’s quite a parallel between food enchantment and faith enchantment. I’ve been trying to rebuild, or fortify, my faith by working through a sea of questions. But the maddening quest for resolutions has started to function like fats and carbohydrates did with food: a wearying process of logic and out-of-context-elements missing vitality.

The concept of enchantment seems filled with potential to animate faith and add a different timbre to uncertainty. Thinking of uncertainty as a mystery to be explored, rather than an emotion to be assuaged, strips it of its restless power. I’ve gotten to the point of accepting uncertainty to a degree, but I haven’t found full contentment because I still don’t know how to live with the uncertainty. Sometimes I’ve sat with it and done nothing, that doesn’t feel right. At other times I’ve binged books and podcasts, certain that I’m on the brink of finishing off the tension once and for all. That never happens. Enchantment, reclaiming the magic and mystery that modernity has tamed, seems like a different approach altogether- not obsessed with answers and also seeking experience. I think of the Greek word Zoe, connotating a life of vitality, animation, vigor and fullness. If faith is a marathon, it must be animated by these things.

I also realized that enchantment is not new, nor has it even been very far from me. My first conscious memory of being drawn to God was through the beauty of music, how it moved my heart. Realizing that God was its essence filled me with belief, wonder and awe. Enchantment. I’ve never forgotten that experience, though it has waxed and waned in its power to keep me convinced of belief. But when I reflect on that early experience, an experience that isn’t cheapened by the naivete of childhood, I’m hopeful. Uncertainty that delves into mystery, that is overwhelmed by the beauty of forces unseen, that draws on thousands of years of human expression, that doesn’t abandon aesthetics…that feels like life. That feels like the opposite of logical formulas.

I’m reading two books steeped in artistry: one is Poetry Unbound, edited and annotated by Padraig O’Tuama. The other is Winnie the Pooh, the original, 1920s version. The first explores mystery through poetry, and Pooh is immersion in pure enchantment. I’ve already found more than a few parallels to faith buried deep in the Hundred Acre Wood. Both are slow reads, which seems appropriate. They must be soaked in and experienced- considered and reconsidered. I’m excited to keep reading, keep thinking, keep experiencing. And ultimately, connecting with Jesus, because that’s the point of it all.