I remember one of the first times I encountered Christ. I was sixteen years old and living in Italy, with a Catholic family who had a modest fifth floor apartment on the outskirts of the northern city of Turin. I had gone there for six months to do an exchange program. Although my own family had strong Christian roots, we did not attend church often and in those days I might have said I was an atheist.
On the bedroom wall of the Italian family, a portrait of Mary holding Christ as a baby was mounted on the wall. In the afternoon, light poured in from a double window, illuminating flecks of gold in the artwork. That home, besides my great-grandmother’s house, was one of the first places I felt peace. There was a stability to their way of life, a sensuality in the way they cooked and ate, a resting spirit I had never felt before in the evenings we sat around the table and talked for hours. Little did I know then that the peace I was feeling was distinctly Catholic — that their way of life was Catholic, that the beauty and simplicity of the tomatoes on their countertop or the herbs growing on their balcony were deeply Catholic. Little did I know then that I, too, was destined to become — and was perhaps already — Catholic.
One afternoon I took a bicycle from their garage and rode the narrow path toward a park encircling the nearby 18th century hunting lodge known as Stupinigi. Once a residence of the royal Savoy family, the small palace is surrounded by tilled fields and a quaint village. The road leading up to its entrance is lined by poplars.
It is difficult to explain what happened next. I have tried before, in a post I made during the throes of one of my conversions. I am not sure I explained it accurately. To do so would be impossible, for no one can truly put God into words.
I stood by the edge of the road holding my bicycle. To my right was a cultivated cereal field. On my left, the road started accumulating a great cloud of dust. A large rumbling sound could be heard. For some reason I felt dazed and unable to move, almost in a state of dissociation. I have a tendency to drift into thoughtless reverie, and a long bike ride is the sort of thing that will send me into this mental space. I didn’t feel like I could move. Or perhaps the air had shifted, and I was in another dimension.
Presently a gigantic, dirty and noisy truck passed within inches of my face. It was white but sullied by dust from the road, and its driver barreled onward with clattering, ferocious speed. It could have easily killed me. I stood motionless as it brushed right past my nose.
In the moments after the truck passed, I became aware of something. I can only call it great darkness or danger. It was ominous and filled every part of my consciousness with shadow, the way one’s vision is slowly filled in by black before fainting. I knew that there was some very grave energy swirling around me, and I wheeled my bicycle into the safety of the nearby field.
Once I got halfway into the field, I turned again to face the palace and the road. The sun was beating down on my shoulders. The sun in Italy is so much closer than the pale light where I grew up. I looked at the horizon. It was then that I became aware of a profound warmth, deep as the core of the Earth, wide as the farthest point of either ocean. It enveloped me. Its heat permeated every corner of my body, and the wisdom and comfort it communicated were absolute. They could not be denied. They said to me: You are always safe. You will always be safe. There is great danger and darkness, but I am real. I am always here for you. I will be with you always. I promise.
That energy was Christ.
Ten years later, I was living again in upstate New York. I was interested in farming and had requested to volunteer with sheep at a place nearby. The summer before, I had volunteered with cows, pigs, and another variety of sheep at a barn in Dutchess County. I was overjoyed when the people running Kinderhook Farm, a county north of there, said I could come along. There was much to do — feeding, herding, lambing. They started at 7 A.M.
I remember driving there in the dark. I had risen at 5 A.M., wanting to make sure I was ready for the day ahead. I did not want to be late. By the time I was driving, the faintest line of peach red could be seen at the edge of the landscape.
Although I had become more spiritual in the time since Italy, I would not have called myself Christian then. I might have even called myself a witch.
For some reason, as I drove toward the farm, an overwhelming sense of life flooded into me. I watched the sky become lighter and lighter and thought about the day ahead. I would be spending it with illiterate animals. Hundreds of them. I would be cleaning their stalls, setting up fresh hay for them to eat, and running ahead of them as they ran behind me into their night pen. This thought filled me with emotion. It said to me that I was going to be part of something true, and good, and deeper than any online communication, any office job, any form of prestige that the world could give me. These sheep accomplished nothing. They ate, shat, and huddled together in grassy fields. But they were living. The whole point of their lives was simply that: being alive.
Knowing that I was to take part in the great running of the sheep, as I sped up the county lane and the red line on the horizon grew more intense, I felt tears falling down my face. Again, I can’t explain why. I knew that day that I was going to be part of something eternal, that was much more important than I was, that had more meaning than any worldly achievement.
It meant everything.
I see now that this experience, as well as the one in Italy, even though I couldn’t put a name to it at the time, prepared me for the conscious entrance of Christ into my life. He who was a Lamb, who was slaughtered for us, who lives for us, even now, and always will, was searching for me then and would not let go.
“Living in Wonder,” a new book by Rod Dreher, speaks of the kind of experiences that are intrinsic to Christianity: felt encounters with the living God who has the power to save. This is the heart of the faith, he says: not apologetics, not morality, not social justice, not entertainment. It is not enough to be born again, Dreher says. We must be re-enchanted. The book’s subtitle is “Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.” In a series of chapters outlining what he sees as the nature of our current disenchantment, the false enchantments threatening to overtake and disillusion people, and what we must give up in order to encounter the real numinous, the author makes a strong case for something I might call Wild Christianity or Romantic Christianity. This is what we need now.
One of the issues with our era, Dreher explains, is the dominance of our society by those with “left-brained” modes of thinking. Using the bi-hemispheric model of the human brain originated by British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, Dreher lists the qualities associated with left-brain thinking which are valued by technocratic elites: optimization, rationality, efficiency, and utilitarianism. These qualities are associated with the belief that we can control reality — that there is no greater mystery before which we are powerless. They are the qualities in human leadership that have been greatly rewarded over the past several decades. This has created a society that is “intelligent” but “not wise.” There are new “ways of knowing” now seeking ascendancy, but they are emerging against an embattled and faltering left-brain supremacy that punishes anything that does not “conform” to its “hyperrational protocols.” Dreher writes:
It is characteristic of the left-brain way of thinking to cast aside things it cannot understand. The left brain seeks mastery and control of the world; it regards as the enemy anything that insists on the irreducibly mysterious aspects of our existence or denies that the world can ultimately be brought under man’s dominion.
To commit to the left-brained path of expertise is one means to gain power. But those who have “dissected the world to understand it rationally,” he says, have “blinded” themselves to its “flow.” This is why people who focus only on data or policy when it comes to sentiment or outcomes regarding the economy and the election are stumped. They are intelligent but not wise. And they rail against anyone with a more intuitive understanding, whose right-brain capacities allow them to speak “against the cultural hegemony of science and technology.” Dreher goes so far as to say that the left brain seeks to murder “(for the sake of control) what the right brain perceives as a ‘living and indivisible flow,’” in McGilchrist’s words. But it can’t. Unbalanced left-brained expertise, unwilling to listen to the right-brain realms of religion, intuition, and sensuality, has failed us. All it has left us is “disembodied forms of logic.”
Far from being sophisticated, “the left-brain vision that made the modern world is a distortion of the truth,” Dreher writes. Although its adherents often look down on people whose folk spirituality gives them a different understanding of the world, they are the primitives whose fractured perceptions can no longer guide us. We need right-brained people now. It is inherently anti-Christian to depend on our own analysis: lean not on your own understanding, says Proverbs 3:5.
Although I’ve existed in many elite spaces (big cities, academia, the art world), I have never suffered disenchantment. This is because I’ve spent most of my time with derelicts. The mentally ill, the addicted, goths, bohemians, bikers, and other social rejects have been my constant company. Enchantment is never far from these people because God belongs to the broken and to sinners. Dreher talks a lot in his book about beauty as a form of evangelization — the idea that aesthetics can bring people into the faith. I was surrounded by beautiful Christian art at many points of my life, but it wasn’t enough to bring me to my knees. I had to hit rock bottom.
After reaching the nadir of a specific situation about six years ago, I had to spend time at a women’s counseling center thirty minutes from my parents’ house. The woman who was assigned to be my social worker was a devout nondenominational Christian who had grown up in the Bronx. She held weekly prayer meetings at the local Panera Bread and invited me to come. It took me months to say yes.
When I attended on Valentine’s Day evening of 2019, holding hands with other women around the plastic table as we read Scripture, each of us was given a fabric rose to take home. We were reminded that Christ was the true love of our lives. That night, in the darkness of my teenage bedroom, I prayed to Him for the first time. I asked Him to help me. I had the fabric rose sitting in front of me on my old green carpet. Slowly, in the months that followed, my life began to vastly improve. I was able to move out on my own and go back to New York City, where I had been living before my terrible downfall. I had been saved.
My time at that rock bottom was a kind of crucifixion. At the very least it was a chastening. This is similar to what Dreher describes when he talks about Dante’s experience in “The Divine Comedy,” in which purification comes before the vision of God. In Dreher’s words, the journey of the Italian poet sounds remarkably similar to the process of the Twelve Steps, in which an addict or otherwise afflicted person admits powerlessness and is instructed by a sponsor.
The pilgrim Dante can’t escape the prison of the dark wood without putting himself in the hands of a trustworthy guide. That guide, the poet Virgil, takes him on a long and arduous pilgrimage of repentance and rebuilding the inner life so that Dante can bear the weight of God’s glory. Repentance begins with the sacrifice of control.
This is how it was for me, too, when working the Twelve Steps several years after my initial born-again experience. Toward the end of the process I stayed for three days at a monastery. I had never tried such a thing before. It had been a long year: the Fourth Step inventory requires one to list all personal defects, and in the Seventh Step one gives them over to God. The Ninth Step, in some ways the most difficult, involves making amends to those people we have wronged. We take responsibility for “our side of the street.” The effect of all this inner work is to feel completely cleaned out, like a pipe through which water can flow after decades of rust and grime. I believe this is what allowed me to experience the presence of God at that monastery, and soon afterward.
In the weeks after my retreat, I often visited a garden here in Washington where there is a very large, old tree. I remember telling a friend of mine about my stay and hanging up the phone. I was sitting on a bench in front of the tree. Suddenly everything seemed pink. My vision took on a hazy, glowing quality. Everything was suffused with a celestial light, almost like cotton candy. I could feel the profound benevolence of God all around me. He was exactly how He is described in the Scriptures. And He is male — He is a Father. This I could feel very clearly. There was never any doubt in my mind after that day that God wants the best for me, and for everyone. Even after returning to a more quotidian life, the memory of that feeling has never left me. It was as if for about thirty minutes, I could see Creation as it actually is.
Many people in recovery have a light about them. I understand why ancient and classical artists depicted people with halos that look like golden plates — because I’ve seen this kind of illumination in people who have submitted themselves to a healing process. And there is plenty of enchantment in recovery. Even people who can’t bring themselves to choke out the word “God” — people who swear they are atheists or pagans — sit in meetings and extol the peace and freedom that sobriety (in fact a form of ascesis) has brought to their lives. For me, “recovery” is simply another name for Jesus.
I think of recovery as its own kind of monastery. Instead of the letters after the names of monks and nuns, which delineate which religious order they belong to (example: Sister Maria, OCSO — Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, or Brother Matthew, OSB — Order of Saint Benedict), we have our anonymized names plus the initials of our specific afflictions (example: Jason D., SLAA — Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, or Celine H., NA — Narcotics Anonymous). We live by a daily structure, a lighter version of a religious prayer rule: the Eleventh Step prayer is to be said in the morning, asking for God’s will to be done that day, and some of us do a short Tenth Step, modeled on the Catholic examination of conscience, at night. I think that people in recovery, far more than many people who simply go to church, are the true religious people of our day.
“Recovery” used to be what all of Christianity was. Christianity involves acknowledging a state of brokenness, or fallenness, or sin: exactly what addicts or people with compulsive behaviors do when they identify themselves by their affliction. We are lucky, because we have no other choice if we want to survive, and this obligatory humility gives us permission to freely state what modernity considers gauchely self-deprecating. We do have “souls broken in the fall,” as Dreher writes. We are not enough on our own. We need something beyond ourselves. This used to be the common, obvious state of every Christian.
Perhaps it is time to recover enchanted Christianity. I’m not as pessimistic as Dreher, in that I see examples of enchantment constantly, within and outside of the faith. I don’t see our era as post-Christian, as he does. But I loved the interviews he shares in “Living in Wonder” with people I can only describe as “nature Christians:” writers like Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw who have converted to Orthodoxy from a kind of folkloric understanding of myth. Both of them find God in nature. Shaw quotes a philosopher who says that the faith is “in danger of losing its ‘bush soul.’” It needs more “wild … women” again, more “hermits.” It needs a restoration of its “contemplative tradition.” It has become too “domesticated.” Kingsnorth, for his part, advises the cultivation of an “indigenous sensibility.” There are some aspects of the faith that can only be experienced through the body: sensing the unseen world deep in the woods, for example, or receiving the bread of the Eucharist. A deeply-lived Christianity is “in tune with the rhythm of the seasons,” Shaw says. “We see a Christ motif in the earth itself.”
One of the difficulties of our lives is that unlimited internet use “creates brains that cannot easily pray,” Dreher writes. Being too online can bring a “diminished ability to concentrate” and “destroys our ability to focus attention.” Not being able to enter deeply into prayer is grave indeed: for this, the author says, “is the main and most important way we establish a living connection to God.” Kingsnorth concurs. “We’re not disenchanted these days — we’re just enchanted by the wrong thing,” he says. “And the thing we’re enchanted by is technology.” Our heads are in the “information cloud[s].” The basis of our “technological crisis” is “a loss of connection to the earth.”
Machines dominate our lives, and we often find ourselves in bondage to them. Dreher quotes the late architect Christopher Alexander, who said that this state of being creates “despair and hopelessness [which] follow from the belief” that we, too, “are machinelike.” But this is not true, and it is possible to escape slavery to the internet. As I was thinking about “Living in Wonder,” a concept came into my mind: digital chastity. It doesn’t have anything to do with sexual content, per se, but represents a right-ordering of one’s internet use. It’s not the same as digital celibacy, which would imply no internet use at all (being a Luddite — nearly impossible in today’s world). In digital chastity, one only uses the internet for things one is “married to” (for example, a beloved business), leaving all the rest behind. This is one way to be closer to God, or, as Kingsnorth says, to “keep Christianity simple, and wild, and ascetic, and beautiful, and loving.”
Monk and writer Thomas Merton wrote, in a time before the internet, that “technology can elevate and improve man’s life only on one condition: that it remains subservient to his real interests; that it respects his true being; that it remembers that the origin and goal of all being is in God.” Through overuse of technology, he warned, we are “losing touch with being and thus with God.” What we need instead is to “[seek] to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being.”
Andrew Sullivan brought up his mentor, the idiosyncratic conservative Michael Oakeshott, in a recent interview with author Christine Rosen for her book “The Extinction of Experience.” Oakeshott’s idea of Christianity, Sullivan said, was that it is “the religion of unachievement.”
And Dreher, who at times veers a bit too deeply into the apocalyptic, writes that “science alone can’t offer any of us a reason to live.” We may not be at the end of the world, but we are certainly at the end of a world.
I see signs of the resurgence of religious belief all around me. And where there is not yet belief, there is desire, and desperate need. This is an opportunity, and the healthiest option would be for people — especially young people — to deeply root themselves in orthodox faith traditions, particularly those of their ancestors.
Dreher does much in his book to defend his declinist vision of Western Christianity, but other voices are signaling the opposite. “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again,” by British author Justin Brierley, came out in 2023. This spring, analyst and former Baptist pastor Ryan Burge posted remarkable data showing that the number of “religious nones” in the United States has stopped rising, and that Gen Z in particular is turning toward religious affiliation. Even in elite artistic and downtown circles, new generations are showing distinct curiosity toward religious tradition. Some onlookers are cynical about their sincerity, but I wrote a Note in May implying that it’s important to be gentle with these people.
It is normal and natural to need the numinous. I agree with Dreher when he writes that “people are religious by nature.”
Several nights ago, I had a dream. I was in a monastery in Kentucky, the one I have written about before. I was with some of the monks, and there was also a Native American woman standing with us. She had long black hair in braids and was wearing a light brown leather garment with shredded tassels. A white, pink, and beige dove was trapped somewhere in the rafters high overhead. We were beckoning it down. The only person who could coax the bird to join us was the Native American woman. While the rest of us cajoled, she stood quietly, with her hands outstretched, simply awaiting the bird. It landed softly on her palms, and we all brought it outside again.
“The world has never been truly disenchanted,” Dreher writes, and I’m with him. We have simply been living through enchantment’s eclipse, and the light is now returning.