Casting Magic

"For the sake, as he sees it, of the ones he preaches to, the preacher is apt to preach the Gospel with the high magic taken out, the deep mystery reduced to a manageable size...The wild and joyful promise of the Gospel is reduced to promises more easily kept. The peace that passeth all understanding is reduced to peace that anybody can understand. The faith that can move mountains and raise the dead becomes faith that can help make life bearable until death ends it. Eternal life becomes a metaphor for the way the good a man does lives after him. "Blessed is he who takes no offense at me" (Matt. 11:6), Jesus says, and the preacher is apt to seek to remove the offense by removing from the Gospel all that he believes we find offensive. You cannot blame him because up to a point, of course, he is right. With part of ourselves we are offended as he thinks by what is too much for us to believe. We weren't born yesterday. We are from Missouri.

"But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still. No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth."

~ from Frederick Buechner, "Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale"


Over lunch one day, a professor-pastor-friend in college told me that for him, whenever he would visit someone in the hospital, that he felt he should remove his shoes at the door because he was about to tread on holy ground.

Another professor, this one in seminary, once told my class that the most dangerous thing that any pastor can do is forget that they handle holy things.

And by holy, I mean magical. Call it an over-active imagination or a divorce from reality, I believe in magic. Not the cantrips we hear about in Harry Potter, that unlocks doors and makes things float. Not modern Wiccan rituals or decapatated chickens or devil worship. Real magic. What Aslan calls, after his miraculous resurrection, "The deeper magic."
What the church calls Easter.

I grew up losing myself in stories about fierce, awe-inspiring dragons, powerful and dangerous wizards and valiant, iron-clad knights. And I cannot help but believe that these journeys into another world were a vital part of the formation of my faith, perhaps as much as any other event that led me to Christ: the freedom to believe in magic; the ability to envision a world where extraordinary things can happen that make a lasting, life-giving difference for everyone. More importantly, the ability to see (on my good days) that world in this one.

I think Buechner is quite right to see the Gospel as a fairy tale. Not an entertaining story that's mostly for children and earns millions for movie-makers. The tales that actually talk back to our reality, peeling back the mundane to reveal the magic that's been there all along; the magic we're often too busy to notice.

The magic of the Gospel and its Easter-Christ, that proves He can bring resurrection to the most unlikely places and people.

But we're scientists and enlightened minds. We want hard proof before we give up our precious time and energy following leprechauns and Holy Grails. We'll take cold hard facts over warm bread and ruddy wine any day.

Because that's what we can control: our facts. Magic is beyond our control; of another world that we haven't spent enough time in to feel comfortable there. But that's just the point: faith in Christ is all about living into another world; or rather, the true world; where the grass is so real, it can cut your feet (as it does in C.S. Lewis' heaven in his account 'The Great Divorce.') .

"My kingdom is not of this world..." Jesus tells Pilate. The crowd chants for their agenda (the assassination of a God-Son they cannot contain). Weary Pilate just wants a little peace and quiet for a change, and a little truth. But even in Jesus' beaten body, magic is already at work that is going to mystically sweep away all of sin (the sin of the crowd that wants him dead, of the betrayer, of the denier, of the bystander-friend who wants to do something but is paralyzed by fear) and open the wardrobe to a magic kingdom, where peace is had, where companions and neighbors find endless joy in serving one another, where evil is easy to spot and where the King is trustworthy, compassionate and just and brings order.

And every Sunday, the preacher dances between lunacy and comfort; between the fairy tale that men and women (who "share the sad beliefs of this world") have forgotten but come every Sunday to hear and at the same time, speaking encouragement to those same tired souls. And all the while, this preacher himself fights to remember that he too is a child and that the bread and wine and Storybook and hospital rooms right there in his hands are magical; visible signs of the holy fairy tale that have punched through the veil; that has more to with the real way of things than reality itself.