Reënchantment

Harvest, by Somniodelic Workshop

    

Pastor’s Epistle—August 2025

The fields grow ripe with amber waves of grain. An unseasonably blessed cool spell in the midst of July entices my mind with autumnal thoughts. And retail shelves, having cleared the hurdle of Independence Day, now begin to bedeck themselves with Halloween.

August welcomes Lammastide, the “Loaf-Mass,” when the firstfruits of the wheat reaping would be ground into flour and baked into bread, then gathered at the altar for a blessing to be brought back home. The Dog Days aren’t yet done, but the harvest has begun. And to my heart, at least, that makes all the difference.

I am a melancholic creature, a devotee of fall. Blame it on my mother, who made every holiday magical, none more so than the Hallowtide and Christmas. Our whole house would transform to match the turning of the seasons, the colors and scents and spices and sounds—when ghosts and witches, elves and saints, populated my imagination, wonders given form and flesh. I suppose I’ve always been a little mystic. I suppose I’ve always had a pagan streak.

Pagan is the Latin term for rural; it connotes the countryfolk. In her early centuries—first persecuted then patronized under Rome—the Church remained a largely urban phenomenon. Intellectuals embraced her, as did unruly mobs. But people in the countryside, far from philosophic ferment, continued as they always had, reverencing familial gods and personifications of nature, observing festivals and rituals and traditions.

Eventually Christianity percolated along those lovely Roman roads, robust in Greek and Latin, Syriac and Coptic. The conversion of Europe and the Mediterranean began. Yet while the teachings of the Christ remain a fulcrum of the world—the Sermon on the Mount, let alone the Last Supper, constitutes a sea-change in morality and faith—life on the farm continued much as it always had.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of rural Christianity. But the fresh faith didn’t disrupt the natural rhythms of life: the cycles of the seasons, the festivals and fairs, holidays both old and new. House-elves sat the hob, ghosts could come to church, and the occasional werewolf might meet a wayward soul traversing through the forest. Farmers maintained a close relationship with the cycles of sun and moon and stars, with saints and angels and the spirits of the earth.

Not until the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution—closely paired in mortal minds with the Protestant Reformation—did people cease to associate Christianity with primeval pagan things. That hardly seems fair to me: Christ came down as one of us 2000 years ago, whereas our materialism and dissociation from nature remains a bit of a Johnny-come-lately.

In truth, the neopagan movement—accurately described as a 20th-century religion based on 19th-century scholarship—really just revived and repackaged certain medieval and early modern folk-Christian customs. We should be grateful to them for that. Without Wiccan publications, Lammas and its like might have fallen by the wayside. And where would be the fun in that?

Reënchantment is the buzzword of our day. Deracinated metamodern people yearn for meaning, for purpose, for story, for community, for connection to generations past and present; and of course we all share in the universal human hunger toward transcendence. We ache for a world full of gods and monsters, wilderness and wonders, ancient myths and latter-day demigods. There’s a reason why Americans love flying saucers, sasquatch, and paranormal investigations. What is a UFO, after all, if not a technological angel for a secular age?

The world’s as weird as ever it was. We still encounter miracles, and things that go bump in the night. We still gaze at the full moon, the constellations, the dancing of leaves down the street, never quite able to shake the lingering suspicion that they might be watching us back. “Take away the supernatural,” G.K. Chesterton quipped, “and what remains is the unnatural.” I’m not advocating superstition, though each of us has his share; but rather I want to remind us that we are surrounded in every moment by the mysterious and the miraculous, by saints and angels and spirits in the shadows.

We who proclaim our death and resurrection in a dish of water; who consume the Body and Blood of God upon our altars every Sunday; who live with one foot in Heaven and one on the earth here below; we are creatures of eternity in time, members of the Body of the Christ, animated by the Holy Spirit of the Alpha and Omega, the One in whom we all live and move and have our being. We are gods in God, gods-in-becoming.

Call it pagan, call it Christian, call it mystical reënchantment—regardless of the label, it is Christ alive in you. And we see Him in the harvest, in the changing of the leaves, in the cycles of birth and life and death that turn our community over like soil before the sun. He calls His Church to worship, in Word and in Sacrament. Then He sends us out to share His life, to spread His Spirit, to make His Resurrection real to our neighbor in her need. We are called to give life to the world. We are called to raise the dead!

And yes, I think of all of this, at the falling of the scythe.

In Jesus. Amen.