Magic

This reflection is from a series of mini-homilies delivered at All Souls Interfaith Gathering as part of their Sunday morning meditations.

This time of year my mind turns to the idea of magic, and lately I’ve been contemplating the way in which we define and relate to Magic. It’s different than our indigenous ancestors did, certainly. We tend to equate magic as something supernatural, or alternately, fake. We even call magicians illusionists. Connecting with the magic and mysteries of the supernatural for us today therefore requires faith; belief. But for our ancestors the pantheon of the gods, and their magic, was not the supernatural, but nature itself-: for them, the magic and mysteries of God and Nature were one and the same. The Natural was innately Super!

This is from David Abrams Spell of the Sensuous:

It is likely that the inner world of our western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates in our loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth…when the animate powers that surround us are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves; when the generative earth is abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then the sense of a wild and multiplicitous otherness in relation to which human existence has always oriented itself, must migrate either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself, the only allowable refuge in this world for what is ineffable and unfathomable.

But in genuinely oral indigenous cultures, the sensuous world itself remains the dwelling place of the gods, the numinous powers that can either sustain or extinguish human life. It is not by sending his awareness out beyond the natural world that the shaman makes contact with the purveyors of life and health, nor by journeying into his personal psyche; rather it is by propelling his awareness laterally, outward, into the depths of a landscape that is at once sensuous and psychological; the living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its porous surface.

What fairy tale or slight of hand can match the magic of the tiny danaus plexipus, the Monarch butterfly, which migrates from the northeast all the way to Mexico, then reproduces and the offspring, having never made the trip, follow the exact same path back, even resting on the same tree branches as its parents?. Or the frog in the arctic that dies- yes, dies- not hibernates, but freezes solid, no heartbeat at all- then, in the spring….wakes up! Comes back to life. That. Is. Magic. The magic of a sunset. The magic of getting feeling back in your fingers after they get really really cold. The unlikely magic of inonotus obliquus, the Chaga mushroom, which looks like a chunk of burned charcoal wedged in a birch tree, but is in reality one of the most powerful medicines known to humans; the wisdom of that birch tree’s symbiotic relationship with the mycelium which connects the entire forest in a web of life and collaboration. And on, and on. I haven’t even touched on the magic of the very bodies we perceive this magic through. I would need a lot more time.

The point is that Magic, real magic is everywhere- it is woven into the infinite unlikelihood of each of our existences and the existence of the very earth which sustains us.

There is no “faith” in this cosmology, any more than one has faith in the avatars of this mysticism themselves- the butterfly, the frog, the mushroom. They are undeniably real. Embracing and integrating the sacred and the natural world does not diminish our sense of Awe and Wonder, but instead tends to amplify it. As we open our eyes to the mystery and wonder of the more than human world, we are brought to a threshold, a doorway with a name, and that name is, MAGIC.

My holiday wish for you is that you experience the magic that is around you and that you are an avatar of: a living, breathing miracle.