Charles Taylor has said (following Max Weber) that a defining feature of our "secular age" is its "disenchantment." In past ages of faith, religion suffused public culture, so that belief in the supernatural - an "enchanted" realm beyond everyday, sensible reality - was as easy as breathing. Roadside shrines, processions through towns and fields, and bells calling the faithful to prayer made God's presence evident to everyone. But those days are long gone. Science has unmasked the mysteries of nature, narrowing the field of the miraculous to the vanishing point. The global economy demands more of our attention for work; consumerist marketing inclines our thoughts more to the things we can buy; and we do as we please with the material world thanks to technologies that our forebears never imagined. It is harder for us to find the space in the cosmos where God operates, and temptations to vice press more insistently.
In this disenchanted world, faith might seem almost impossible. Rod Dreher suggests that, through "experiences of wonder," we must "illuminate [our] religious imagination," so that once again religious belief will become second nature. Some might conclude that they need to turn away from disenchanted contemporary society - taking up farming to get more in touch with nature, moving to a less secular country, or leaving ordinary life altogether on a quest for mystical experiences. To find where God is hiding, many people consider doing something extraordinary.
But what if we don't need to go so far? What if God is hiding in plain sight - not in supernatural wonders, but precisely in our world's disenchantment? That, I submit, is an important lesson of the death of Jesus, which Christians once again commemorate this week.
The Gospels might seem to depict the most enchanted moment in history, when a man walked the earth who was closer to God than anyone before or since. The lame walked, the dead came back to life, and men heard the greatest wisdom ever spoken. "God has visited his people!" many exclaimed, as they came in droves to see, hear, and touch the wonderworker of Nazareth.
Jesus's persona exuded a sense of the divine presence. "I know that you always hear me," he once prayed aloud to God. In the midst of busyness, he could be seized with joy and shout, "I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth." His parables revealed a mind as fascinated with the sublimest truths as with the humblest material realities; he saw God's influence pervading every corner of the universe. His love for God overflowed into love for his fellow man. He preached and healed for hours, pouring himself out with pity for the multitudes: to him they were "like sheep without a shepherd."
But occasionally he revealed another side of himself. After seeing countless miracles, sometimes the crowds still would not believe. Then he might complain, "Oh faithless and perverse generation! How long will I be with you? How long am I to put up with you?" At other times, when his Apostles misunderstood one of his sayings - despite knowing him so well for so long - he asked, disheartened, "Do you still not understand?" "Do you still not know me?" And despite his compassion for people, he once admitted to feeling "constrained" in the world.
He found much of humanity disappointing. He chided people for their "little faith," because they would only believe if they saw "signs and wonders." He admonished them for not trusting God even though they, "wicked though you be," knew how to love their own children. He reminded them that they owed it to God to be as holy as they could; so that when they had done his will, they should say, "We are useless servants; we have done what we ought to have done." He was reluctant to trust men because "he knew what was in man." True, he "marveled" at the centurion for his faith, and he called Peter "blessed" for the same reason, but these were exceptions that proved the rule.
To the end he was, in the words of Alban Goodier, "a lonely Man," torn between tender love for his creatures and disgust at their selfishness, in a way no one else fully understood. His heart, with its infinite capacity to give, sought to slake its thirst on the least show of love from others; yet he received indifference or even hatred. "Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened and I will give you rest!" he pleaded, but he was ignored and cast out. Even his constant vision of God did not save his heart from breaking as he hung dying on a cross, to the point that he cried, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"
Far from being enchanting, his death was the greatest tragedy in human history. Today, in light of the later success of Jesus's message, we might find it hard to imagine how catastrophic his end seemed at the time. One day he arrived in Jerusalem to the acclaim of thousands; a week later he was rejected by the human race, despite the preparation of millennia of prophecies and of the moral law written on men's hearts.
Jesus of Nazareth, despite his boundless love of God and humanity, did not walk the earth with an unalloyed enjoyment of God's enchanting action in the world; his joy was always darkened by sorrow.
He did triumph in the end, the story goes, but not by overwhelming men with an unmistakable show of glory; he overcame the dark night of a disenchanted, godless world by entering fully into that darkness - by suffering humiliation and torture. Why did he do this? Because the true obstacle to men's faith in God was not their lack of spiritual perception or experience, but their knowing, free choices against God and his law - their sins.
This point is hard for us to get. As John Henry Newman said, sin is "natural" and "familiar to us." Living for pleasure, wealth, and our egos can seem normal, because we all do it all the time (although we might use less embarrassing terms for it, like "self-respect," "defending my rights," "giving myself a break," etc.). To God, however, sin, especially if it be grave and deliberate, is, as Newman says, "woe unutterable." It "is the mortal enemy of [God's] All-holy" being. It "is that . . . which, could the Divine Governor of the world cease to be, would be sufficient to bring it about."
Sin just is to choose to live without God - or rather, to live as though God were absent (no one in fact can exist without God): it is precisely to choose the disenchanted attitude of our age, and we all do so continually. Because man is free, his choices mold his existence; they cannot simply be undone. Although man needs God to exist, now, after sin, he cannot stop turning away from God; he is permanently restless and disoriented.
But Jesus, Christians believe, because of the boundless power of his love, was able to live in that disenchanted nature - feeling "as though" God were absent - and to love God anyway, beyond measure. He did this even though he was saddened by life more than any of us can be: being perfectly conformed to God, his soul was perfectly sensitive and vulnerable, able to suffer more than any of us could. He chose to suffer although, unlike us, he had no obligation to do so; he sought as much suffering as his human frame could take, unlike us who resist all pain, even that which our misdeeds have earned. He lived as we do in every way except sin, so that he could take all that was in man, even his wounds caused by sin, and direct it to God - by loving to the point of being wounded for his love. He "descended to hell," as the Apostles' Creed puts it, as part of the new path he forged to heaven - but without ever passing through hell's gates by doing evil. Our nature was bent toward nothingness by our choice to hate God; by his choice to love God in that nature, Jesus made that bend a turn toward eternal life.
By his death Jesus pioneered a new path to being God's children - the path of suffering to which he has called his followers ever after. Before the early Christians could convert their neighbors, they had to endure centuries of persecution at their hands. Before the light of the age of St. Francis of Assisi came the darkness of the age of St. Benedict. And the darkness gave way to light because men did not curse it. Rather, through their prayers, penance, and service to others - leaving their comfortable communities to evangelize their worldly neighbors - they learned how to find God where he seemed far off.
Jesus said, echoing the Jewish scriptures, that friendship with God comes not from extraordinary experiences, but from living with a "pure heart," as he did, doing God's will even when one's feelings point the other way. One must turn away from evil and order one's life according to truth and charity, no matter the cost, trusting that God will bring our trials to an end when the time is right. If one does not experience the enchantment of God in his life, he should try doing God's will anyway - as he knows best in conscience (aided by prayer) - and then perhaps he will find God. If the world is far from God, then if we do God's will in the world, God will be there through us. As John of the Cross, theologian of the "dark night of the soul," once said, "Where there is no love, put love there, and then you will find love."
If we wait to give ourselves to God until we experience supernatural enchantment, we risk waiting a lifetime and leaving the world - and ourselves - little better than when we entered it. If we want to leave the best legacy we can in this life, we should follow Jesus's example by loving the truth and our fellow men, even when we don't feel like it. That means embracing pain - something especially difficult for us in these times of material abundance, when we flee suffering and the tedium of ordinary life. Resisting excessive love of comfort is a challenge in every age, and a duty for anyone who wants to lead a good life. But we are more likely to give up the fight if we devote our attention more to religious experience than to religion's essence: giving all our thoughts, desires, and deeds to our Creator.
Christians, as they commemorate Jesus's death, should particularly examine their consciences on these points. Do they complain resentfully about the world, or do they embrace this disenchanted, secular age as the form in which Jesus has chosen to meet them - hidden in the painful experience of God's absence? Rather than recoil from the bitterness of living in a godless era, do Christians strive to find God in that bitterness - mercifully coming to meet them when they feel most alone?
God is with us - not just in mystical consolations, but in all our sufferings, even the most mundane. If we took this truth seriously, our secular age would in good time be transformed. From the wounds of its disenchantment, springs of strength, justice, and concord would flow into the world - just as from the wounds of the resurrected Jesus, new life flows into all who answer the call to on the way of the Cross.