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

My Top 61 Books -- Giving me delight is all they have in common.

 

As a member of several book groups, I occasionally see a list of the top 10, 25, 50, 100 books of all time or some time or recent time.  On nearly every list are books I love and books I loathe. 

So I decided to make my own list. It was supposed to be a top 25, but it got longer.  I stopped at 61.  This list presumes no expertise other than that of an avid reader who found these books especially delightful and therefore memorable.  

What's Your list?

My Top 61 

1. Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro 

2. Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro 

3. Master and Commander (21 novels), Patrick O’Brian 

4. Game of Thrones (5 novels), George RR Martin 

5. The Lord of the Rings (3 volumes), JRR Tolkien 

6. Prince, Machiavelli 

7. Divine Comedy, Dante 

8. Decameron, Boccaccio 

9. August 1914, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

10. Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman 

11. Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy 

12. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 

13. Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas 

14. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo 

15. Great Divorce, CS Lewis 

16. Till We Have Faces, CS Lewis 

17. Four Loves, CS Lewis 

18. Aeneid, Virgil 

19. Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt 

20. On Revolution, Hannah Arendt 

21. Human Condition, Hannah Arendt 

22. Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch 

23. Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Than Nguyen 

24. Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari 

25. Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond 

26. Winters Tale, Mark Helprin 

27. Paris in the Present Tense, Mark Helprin 

28. Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer 29.

These Truths, Jill Lepore 

30. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder 

31. Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi 

32. Identity, Milan Kundera 

33. Genius of Judaism, Bernard Henri-Levy 

34. Not in God’s Name, Jonathan Sacks 

35. A Canticle for Liebowitz, Arthur Miller Jr. 

36. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut 

37. Spacetime in Special Relativity, N. David Mermin 

38. Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville 

39. Stuff, Ivan Amato 

40. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

41. Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy 

42. Time and the Art of Being, Robert Grudin 

43. Hamlet, William Shakespeare 

44. Richard III, William Shakespeare 

45. Laurus, Eugene Vodolazkin 

46. Six Days of War, Michael Oren 

47. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (4 novels) Douglas Adams 

48. Essays, George Orwell 

49. Animal Farm, George Orwell 

50. Iliad, Homer 

51. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman 

52. Free Will, Mark Balaguer 

53. Marlborough: His Life and Times, Winston Churchill 

54. Dune, Frank Herbert 

55. Noble Gases, Isaac Asimov 

56. Arthurian Romances, Chretien de Troyes 

57. Song of Roland 58. Intelligencer, Leslie Silbert 

59. Plot Against America, Philip Roth

60. Medea, Euripedes

61. Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius

Veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan to Retire on September 11

 

Master Sgt.Pamela Bleuel (left) in Afghanistan

In July 2009 I was pushing my bike toward a gap in the blast wall on Camp Adder, Iraq.  I lived in a trailer on the other side of that wall. A soldier wearing a bandana over her nose and mouth walked toward me and asked why the hell anyone would ride a bike in wind like this.  

I don't remember my answer, but Pamela Bleuel and I started talking about being old soldiers who enlisted late and had three college-age daughters back home.  She was 43 at the time, I was 56.  

Now she's 56, a master sergeant, and retiring on Saturday, September 11.  She enlisted in the year 2000 at age 35 to pay off her student loans.  She is a math teacher.  She liked the army a lot more than she expected, became a drill sergeant and when I met her was training troops in convoy security on Camp Adder.  She wanted to be convoy security but the rules at the time did not let her. She stayed in Iraq for two tours, then was in Afghanistan five years later. 

I visited Pam in her home in Kentucky in 2010 and 2014 and was thinking I would be visiting again this year, but plans changed. Maybe next year. I wrote about Pam when I was in Iraq in 2009.  Here's the story:

"I'd rather be digging a damn ditch than sitting on my ass in an air-conditioned office pushing FRAGOs (Fragmentary Orders)." That was one of the first things Staff Sergeant Pamela Allen Bleuel said to me when I met her walking across on open area in a sandstorm. She is a cheerful, imposing, funny woman of 43 who joined the Army Reserves on a whim just before 9/11 and now has an intense love-hate relationship with life in camouflage.

Until last month SSG Bleuel was the sergeant in charge of the convoy training school here on Camp Adder. She taught troops how to drive and fight in convoys and how to best use the ungainly MRAP fighting vehicles that are now the standard troop carrier across Iraq. She loved convoy training and did not mind when her tour was extended. When she did the unit she went to decided her training as a military police officer would be best used processing FRAGOs--the daily changes to orders that bubble through the military system day and night.

Bleuel loves being outside, moving troops, and has no desire to sit in air conditioning, but she will do the job as well as she can until the end of her extended tour. 

She joined the reserves in 2000 at age 35 with no prior military experience at all, because she saw two soldiers hanging up a sign in the small town in Kentucky where she lives. The sign said the Army would repay student loans for reserve soldiers. She had three daughters between 8 and 13 years old at the time, taught math at the local high school and had $30,000 in student loans. She signed up. She went off to basic at the end of the school year, trying to fit basic and advanced training into the summer break. Training did not quite fit her school schedule and she was just about done with training when the 9-11 attacks hit.

At that point she just wanted to serve and was jealous of the regular Army soldiers who were whisked away to airborne schools and other assignments. She served as an MP until 2004 when she trained to be a drill sergeant. Every summer after that she would "push troops" through Fort Knox, Kentucky, during the 11-week summer break at her school district. Her experience as a drill sergeant and an MP lead her to convoy training here in Iraq.

 
Now she is ready to go back to being a drill sergeant part time and a full time teacher. "Each year it gets easier to go back to pushing troops and harder to teach school," she said. "It's not the kids. It's the damn parents." She then gave her version of the teacher's lament that parents call her, email her, come to school to say their little child is special. "In the Army you don't deal with that. Mom doesn't call basic training," she said.

 
She also likes the structure and clarity of Army life, at least in training. "We have a goal; get the trainees ready to be soldiers." She also likes the deference of soldiers when compared to civilians. "When I get back from Knox and I am in a crowd at Wal-Mart, I wish I could yell 'Make a hole' and have everybody get out of my way."

 
Bleuel's wall is covered with pictures of her three children. She is very proud of them--even the one who, "Is a liberal and wants to save the whole damn world. She voted for Obama. We don't talk about politics." Bleuel is somewhere to the right of Oliver North politically and hates everything about France, which is a double layer of irony given her name.

 At age 43 she has eight years of service and will have to decide soon whether she will make the Army a career or not. I'm guessing she will. The look she has in her eyes when she talks about basic training and convoy ops is not there when she talks about Algebra 2.

 

Fascists and Fundamentalists Don't Care if You (or your mother) Die

 

Anti-vaxx, anti-mask Republicans don't care who dies

Fascism has no ideology.  It is not a coherent system of beliefs.  Fascists:

--Love violence

--Love displays of strength, especially against weak victims

--Ally with nationalist religion

Fundamentalists of whatever nationalist religion, strive for theocracy, because when their god is in charge, they get to speak for god.  

Fascists and fundamentalists take different routes to domination, but their goal is the same: full control of a state remade in their image.  

In the case of Islamic extremists, Jihad is fascism and Sharia is fundamentalism.  The Islamic fundamentalists who want to form caliphates bring together political fascism and fundamentalism in a state that is maiming and murdering its own people.

I wrote in 2016 that Trump is neither Hitler nor Mussolini because those fascist dictators were men of considerable personal courage--that was their path to power.  Trump is whining bully who plays a strong man on TV.  

But Trump is a fascist. After he left the White House, the Republican Party has become more fascist than he is.  

Fascists and fundamentalists are united in not caring how many of their own people die. A fascist of course wants to kill "them," anyone who is not part of their country, party, etc. And every fundamentalist is quite sure their god only cares about those of their faith--the rest of the world is going to Hell.

Neither fundamentalist nor fascist cares if you die. They don't care if your parents die, your kids, your neighbor, your spouse as long as they are triumphant.

Trump worshippers deny he is a fascist, but 2020 made clear Trump's fascist credentials as golden as his toilet.  Trump would not do anything to stop the spread of COVID if he thought it would hurt his chances of re-election.  He turned people against masks, he made antivaxxers of his own people, he did not care about COVID initially because it was brown people and old people dying in blue states as the sad chart above shows.

But now, the sick and the dead are the anti-vaxx, anti-mask dimwits who are Trump's most loyal worshippers. Trump does not care.  Most Republican leaders don't care. The Republicans who do care are hounded and threatened.

Right now in Afghanistan, the Taliban will be forcing Sharia Law (their sick interpretation) on their country.  They will put their Islamic fundamentalist program in place by beating, maiming, raping, enslaving and murdering their own people.  And they will believe they are doing their god's will.

Right now in America, Republicans are pushing a Christian fundamentalist agenda in part because the biggest group that voted for in higher numbers for Trump in 2020 than in 2016 was Evangelical Christians.  

Sacrificing their own people is not a bug of fascism or fundamentalism, it's a feature.  

Nazis are a special case of fascists with an anti-Semitic ideology.  Italian fascists were not anti-Jew immediately, but they got around to it eventually.  French fascists are deeply anti-Jew. They are the source of the Great Replacement Theory that was behind Trump's invading caravans. French fascists like an intellectual veneer on their hateful ideology.  They despise Trump. 

 

"Make a Buddy" Shitter

 

The times when I lived and worked in close quarters large groups of men--the Army and Teamsters loading docks.  One lament common to both places was, "Can't I take a shit in peace?"  

And even men I have known who care little for privacy would occasionally want "to shit in a latrine with a door."

When I was on German gunnery ranges in the 1970s, some of the ranges had a place we called a "Make A Buddy" Shitter.  It was an outhouse with two boards with three holes connected by a narrow floor space.  When it was full, three men sat on each side facing each other with interlaced knees.  The inside guys had to wait until the outside guys were done to get out.  Sometimes men would wear their gas masks to use that latrine.  

I have a lot of good memories of my military service, but "Make a Buddy" Shitters is not one of them.

Every Day, All Day Humiliation at Auschwitz

 

Auschwitz-Birkenau latrine

On my return visit Auschwitz in July of this year, I saw things I missed or forgot I saw on my first visit in 2017.  

In 2017 I was overwhelmed by the scale of the camp--so many people murdered, so many German soldiers and civilians running the camp.  

One of the horrible sights was the latrine in a barracks at Birkenau.  The guards herded the inmates to the latrine. They used the latrine together, dozens at a time. The guards used a stopwatch.  When time was up, the inmate had to get up or be beaten.  

When I try to imagine how horrible life truly was I think of times when I lived and worked in close quarters large groups of men--the Army and Teamsters loading docks.  One lament common to both places was, "Can't I take a shit in peace?"  

No one wants to be rushed in a latrine.  

And even men I have known who care little for privacy would occasionally want "to shit in a latrine with a door."

When I was on German gunnery ranges in the 1970s, some of the ranges had a place we called a "Make A Buddy" Shitter.  It was an outhouse with two boards with three holes connected by a narrow floor space.  When it was full, three men sat on each side facing each other with interlaced knees.  The inside guys had to wait until the outside guys were done to get out.  Sometimes men would wear their gas masks to use that latrine.  

And yet, these laments of dock workers and soldiers hardly touch the deep humiliation of prisoners in Auschwitz and other concentration camps forced to use latrines on a stop watch.  

The Nazis who marched in Charlottesville represent the very same things as the guards at Auschwitz. They see me and everyone who is not in their tribe as less than human. Nazis are never "fine people." We can never have peace with a government that tolerates Nazis. We are fortunate to be delivered from a government that numbers all American Nazis among its voters.

Nazi and rebel flags together at Charlottesville, 

both flags represent the losers in racist wars.

 

Seven Years Ago Today: Ironman Finish Six Minutes Before Midnight

 

My wife and I crossed the start line at 7:20 a.m. I crossed the finish line at 11:54 p.m. after 16 hours and 34 minutes of swimming, riding and running a total of 140.6 miles. My wife finished an hour before me.

Seven years ago today, I did my first, last and only triathlon. It was the Louisville, Kentucky, event.  That day, like today in Pennsylvania, the temperature was in the mid-90s with 90% humidity.  

Since that very long day, I had a knee replaced, lost partial use of my left arm.  I will never do another Ironman, but I am very glad I did the one I finished seven years ago today.

I have written several blog posts about the Ironman. They are here.