Pop 89: Magic in the Moon
By Madonna Hamel
Wandering through Moon Records in the beautiful old Customs building on Cumberland’s main drag, I am instantly drawn to the book shelves. On display are the latest nonfiction award winners. Without exception each one deals in some way or other with the themes of my family’s life right now - sudden grief due to trauma, finding wonder and enchantment in the least expected places, the challenges of mental health crises as we age or suffer from a major health threat. It is as if the whole world is waking to these forms of ‘reality’, or, perhaps more to the point, is waking to the truth of what it means to be fallible, mortal, human.
But there’s something else going on here; it seems to me that once we jettisoned traditional religious or philosophical ways of framing and facing our lives we were left with a vacuum. A hole. Be it God-shaped, hero-shaped, or ideology-shaped, that hole has become a serious void we yearn to fill. Maybe we played a while in the fields of drugs and thrills, or of wine, lovers and song - but we came to realize that we crave a healthy routine that does not always satisfy immediate cravings but helps us serve the world in a way that feels vocational.
Maybe we want to believe there’s more than this when we die - that there’s more than this when we live! And it doesn’t have to be great huge bonanzas of the lottery-winning variety. It can just be seeing something like a climbing vine for the first time. Seeing how its flowers, which are the rarest form of mauve, always turn their faces toward the sun.
For disillusioned religious types, among which I count myself, one solution is to re-turn to one’s childhood faith through the doors of the mystics - where all the sublime interdependence and vibrant mystery of being comes to us as lived experience. Where, as one Indian mystic put it, it is possible to watch a child drink a glass of fresh water and witness God pouring God into God. This view of the sacred comes close to what my physicist friend Mike explained as his take on God: “I don’t know about God, but I do believe in the Uni-verse: The single-uni verse- story. It’s all one story.”
I’m reading a great deal of Christian and Sufi mystical writings these days, and I’m relieved to find myself at home among their ways of being in the world. I have never believed humans to be the centre of the universe. And I think part of the existential malaise re-arising in our world today is due to the hubris of believing that our physical experience of the world, including nature - and our illusion of control over it - is all there is.
Here’s a quick list of some of the titles on the Moon shop shelves: “Strangers to Ourselves, Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us,” by Rachel Aviv. “Constructing A Nervous System” by Margo Jefferson. “What My Bones Know, A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma” by Stephanie Foo. “Enchantment, Awakening Wonder In An Anxious Age” by Katherine May. “Lost & Found, Reflections on Grief, Gratitude and Happiness” by Kathryn Schultz.
Aviv’s book looks at the lives of a variety of people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness. She looks at “the stories that both save us and trap us” and the many “mysterious ways our minds can fail us.” Jefferson also looks at how “identities are forged” and the figures in her life who “thrill and trouble her, and who have made up her sense of self as a person and as a writer.” Foo faces her own childhood trauma and learns, “ultimately, that you don’t move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it.” And, she discovers, “you can reclaim agency from trauma.” Schultz’s book reminds us that grief and joy jostle for our energies and attention every day. It is part memoir and part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of suffering and wonder. Such a world demands both our gratitude and our grief.
The one took among them I have read is Katherine May’s “Enchantment.” I appreciate her ability to slow us all down and find a saner way to pace ourselves, using nature as a guide. She writes: “Enchantment cannot be destroyed. It waits patiently for us to remember that we need it.” That sounds an awful like the good old words: “Mystical experience” and “Transcendence”, “Divinity” and “Holy Spirit.” A year after May’s book came out she admitted she thinks she believes in God, but continues to call it “Magic.”
New ranks of authors and researchers remind us, as if discovering the paradox for the first time, that crying out in despair and whispering thanksgiving is key to surpassing the slings and arrows of misfortune. Centuries ago the psalms were written as both lamentations and praise and meant to be recited as such, simultaneously. But who among us, even those of us raised as Christians, are aware they serve that purpose? I was never taught them. I know them because they showed up every Sunday in mass just before communion, recited in a collective drone as rote prayer, without meaning or context.
We may think high levels of anxiety are attributable only to our present day and age, but I’m old enough to recall the popularity of intellectuals like Camus, Sartre and Beckett claiming everything the grumpy new atheists do. Then Thomas Merton came along with his particular brand of poetics and side-stepped the hyper-critical intellectual approach to anxiety, introducing the West to a mystical approach. And today, in a 2023 book about the mystics called “Living in Wonder”, Rod Dreher quotes the theologian Karl Rahner as saying, in 1981, “The devout Christian of the future will either be a mystic or he will cease to be anything at all.”