It's a pleasure to be addressing my tribe of fellow writers and readers on Maundy Thursday this Easter week. Allow me to pull the veil back for a moment on what we can't see.
Writer and Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren dares us to believe in what she calls 'a crowded cosmos.' It is not a popular stance to take in our modern era. After the Enlightenment captured our western world with its intellectual revolution, our collective imagination robbed the world of supernatural life. Once upon a time our vast cosmos was envisaged as a canvas full of enchantment, bustling with mysteries, teeming with angels. Now a mere three centuries later, our subconscious default is to regard it as a vast, empty sea. Anything regarded with a whiff of superstition or whimsy is scorned at worst, or chuckled over and swept aside at best.
The shift is more dire than we may imagine.
Consider this for a moment. Separated by a slab of time, counterpart citizens of the world conduct their normal routines with polar opposite worldviews. These impact how they approach their families and leisure time. Jack Brown the thatcher in 1726 regards himself as beloved of God, watched with interest by angels, treasured as part of a divine order, while Jack Brown the roofing contractor in 2026 chooses to lose himself in drinking, gaming, and social media, trying to ward off a never-ending sense of futility and existential crisis. Sally Smith the seamstress in 1726 trusts that a recent chain of unhappy events in her family may be redeemed as part of a greater, invisible plan, like a design feature in an intricate tapestry, while Sally Smith the Spotlight shop assistant, suspects there's no rhyme or reason behind any of it, and consequently lives life on a razor's edge, waiting always for the next shoe to drop.
But say our historical forebears had the right end of the stick. That would imply 21st century sophisticated denial doesn't remove the supernatural denizens of the cosmos. They are still there. Dismissing them as non-existent merely restricts and narrows the very same human lives we assume are growing broader. What if we are ostriches with our heads buried in the deepest sandpits. In The Screwtape Letters, senior demon, Screwtape, gleefully tells his nephew acolyte, Wormwood, that this is precisely what their cohorts aim for. They don't need to be believed in to wreak havoc.
I came across an Instagram interview featuring poet and academic Malcolm Guite. He discusses how, in his opinion, we need to 're-enchant' a disenchanted world. Guite imagines what it must have been like to be a medieval knight, when living in a parallel world with dryads and naiads was commonplace. Then he imagines with horror, how this man might feel if a sudden timeslip occurred, and he was whizzed to our vantage point, a quarter way through the 21st century.
'The poor chap wouldn't know what hit him. He would be aghast.' Guite calls our world 'utterly alienated, reductive, mechanistic and materialistic.' We, like frogs in the gradually boiling pot, haven't realized how frightening it has become, but any time traveler might be confronted with the fact that we profess a weird, abnormal way of looking at the universe, especially compared with civilisations which have hummed in presumed harmony with the supernatural for centuries.
Easter, then, is a gracious time for us to reassess what we really believe. Wherever we turn, it is easy to see others divesting the season of its significance. Some who merely pay lip service to a historical Jesus reduce his death to the unfortunate execution of a good man; a popular teacher who got on the wrong side of the religious powers of their time and place. Extra scriptural details, such as the falling of sudden darkness, the spontaneous tearing of the Temple curtain, his sinless substitution on our behalf, and his wondrous Resurrection are swept away as folklore. They certainly don't match the tone of our reductionist, pragmatic era.
To be a Christian at this time of year then, we recalibrate what we believe. We do, in fact, take the subversive point of view that our narrow world of five sense evidence is framed by a far greater world of cosmological power plays, mysterious substitution validated in heavenly courts, authorial footnotes written on the canvas of the world which we can see. Our savior surely died for the sins of the world, as we've been taught, but by accepting this, we're making a rebellious stance of clinging to a storied world, refusing to be swept away by the brutal tide of 'sense'.
Hooray for Jesus, and also for the magnificent storied, supernatural world which is still influencing our affairs.
