Hunting Magic Eels and the Search for Spiritual Reality

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age

by Richard Beck

 In one of my book groups, the one where we read and discuss books of all kinds, we are in the midst of discussing:  Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck.  

This book reminds me why I love book discussions so much.  Each reader brings his or her own life to the book.  The discussion brings those perspectives together to clash or harmonize, reinforce or raze, and otherwise share the wonder each person brought to the book.  

The premise of the book is that the world has become disenchanted. The author tells how we became disenchanted, then tells how he, and we, could become re-enchanted. 

I liked the beginning of the book, particularly connecting our disenchantment with the reformation.  He makes a good case for the unintended consequences of blasting the foundations of Catholicism.  In Beck's analysis, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution are more layers of the disenchantment cake Luther and Calvin baked.  

For me, the Scientific Revolution and the wonder of the Enlightenment re-enchant the world of faux spirituality that grows in a world of religion plus ignorance, but I know that makes me very marginal among believers.  

I have a favorite author among those who explain relativity physics.  I wrote him 25 years ago to tell him I love his book.  In that book, Spacetime and Special Relativity, M. David Mermin writes a long aside explaining why fundamentalists are wrong.  I also told Mermin that I am a believer and found the fact that light was the speed limit of the universe made my faith more vivid.  He wrote back and told me he was working on a sequel that dropped the criticism of belief.  A few year later It's About Time was published with even better illustrations of the inextricable relations of space, time and special relativity.  

To return to Beck, after he makes the case for disenchantment, I found his case for re-enchantment difficult.  Not what he did, but the context in which he writes.  He teaches in Texas.  The book was written after 80% of Evangelicals and nearly as many conservative Catholics voted for a game show host who believes himself entitled to sex with anyone he wants and has no need of forgiveness.  And Beck returned to spiritual health in the company of charismatic believers.  They may, as Beck says, have a grip on the reality of the ministry of the Holy Spirit that other Churches lack, but the charismatic Churches are also the source and propagators of the horrendous prophecies declaring Trump a modern day Cyrus, chosen by God to rescue the Church, and after the 2020 election, charismatic groups more than any other promote the lie that Trump won the election and will be returned to office by God.  The false prophet of Revelation is clearly legion.

Can re-sacralizing spaces help re-enchant the world? It can't hurt.  But I wonder what would have helped the German Christians expelled from Churches in 1935 if they had one Jewish grandparent.  In this world, all spiritual practice exists in a political reality.  Among the first martyrs were those who refused to worship Caesar.  If a Church is enthusiastic about worship and also believes every lie from Trump's mouth (only worship does that) is it a Church.  Reading about the expulsion of the Jewish believers in Holy Week 1935, I wondered if that building and congregation was a Church the following week.  The definition of love that leads to that end is utterly Orwellian.

So here's my letter to Beck.  No answer so far:

Richard,

I am reading your book Hunting Magic Eels at the prompting of a Orthodox Christian friend. We will be discussing it September 9 with a small group that formed beginning with ESL volunteers.  Our first book "Laurus" followed the (imagined) life of a Russian monk and Holy Fool in the 15th Century. We read that book in 2016.  The core of the group is parents with six kids.

That year, I felt increasing dread as the election approached.  I am half Jewish (my father) from a non-religious home.  I became a believer after being blinded by shrapnel in a missile explosion in 1973.  But the Church, the anti-intellectual American Church, has always been difficult for me. The next year, after Charlottesville, the Church became impossible for me.  I left and joined a synagogue.  If Nazis can march in America chanting "Jews will not replace us" and be "fine people" according to the President.   

As I read your book, I am pulled back to Holocaust narratives.  As you can imagine, I was drawn to the stories of Jewish converts expelled from German Churches in 1935. Most were dead by 1945.  There were 400 million people with the label Christian who lived between the Pyrenees and the Urals during the era of the Nazis.  Fewer than one in a thousand actively helped Jews.  

For me, a Christian who cheers Trump echoes Nuremberg.  I was in Europe last month for three weeks visiting death camps.  I have visited ten since 2017.  

If you will allow me the cliche, is re-enchantment of our lives and personal spaces just arranging deck chairs on the Titanic? 

I like your book but cannot shake the larger context of wondering what those German Jewish believers, some going back three generations, would say about re-enchanting their lives when their last days were in death camps.

If the coup had succeeded on January 6, or if the next attempt succeeds in 2024 we will be living in an authoritarian nation. And once tyranny begins, Jews are in trouble.

Neil