Would it surprise you to know that I am feeling pretty disenchanted with our political systems lately?  Okay, probably not.  How about that I’m disenchanted with the “greatness” of the country in which I live?  Oh, you, too?  Right.  How about that I am disenchanted with professional sports,  or the music industry, or the “church culture”?  Would that surprise you?

No?

It seems the older I get, the more disenchantment I feel.  Perhaps that’s how it works.  The longer we live, the more let down, the more disillusioned, the more disenchanted.

The word “enchant” comes from two Latin words: in cantare.  Literally, “in sing”.

Disenchantment, then, means to experience the song going out of things.  Some things begin to lose their tempo, their rhythm, their beat, their melody.

What once we experienced as a chorus we now experience as a tomb.

So…rhythm is what I’ve been attempting to tune myself to in every aspect of my life: a rhythm of community, of family, of season, of week, of day, of…everything.  If there is a rhyme and season to the world I find myself in, I would do well to live in step with it, to dance to its Drummer.

I am seeking to learn the song of things, both around me and within me.  I am seeking enchantment in the midst of disenchantment.

Because we can’t let the song go out of things.

We can’t let the song go out of us.

And so I would argue that we need to be enchanted again.  Richard Beck has said this about enchantment, “At root, enchantment is simply a holy openness to Divine surprise.  Enchantment isn’t forcing yourself to believe in unbelievable things, it’s allowing yourself to be interrupted and surprised by God.”

Beautiful.

But I’ve found that surprise requires space.  And what I mean by space is time in our schedules/calendars/lives to see surprise, react to surprise, receive surprise.

I remember driving my wife and I to a restaurant while we were on vacation in Florida.  I had a schedule.  I had a list of things for us to do and things for us to see.  But I took a wrong turn, started heading in the exact wrong direction.  180 degrees wrong. Which was going to mess up my plans, and our schedule.  Which began to make me tense.  

Like it does.

And then…and then. There was this bright streak across the sky, right in front us as we were heading in the wrong direction.  A few miles in front of us, a space shuttle launch was unfolding before our eyes.

Surprise.

And it would have gone unnoticed in our rearview mirror, had we not found ourselves off schedule, heading in the wrong direction.

As important as a solid rhyme and season, rhythm and flow is to our being, it is also important to allow ourselves space to break rhythm, to divert schedule.  It is possible to so organize and calendar ourselves that we organize and calendar awe right out of our lives.

Sometimes the off-beat is just as important to the music as the down-beat.

The punk band Rancid taught me this.  As strong and hard and tight as their rhythms were, occasionally they would tweak the tempo, play at half time, and then swing it back again.  It grabs your attention, puts a smile on your face, signals that something new is happening.

Some poetry works this way, too. Some poems get us used to a rhythm of rhyme…until they break the meter with a line that doesn’t rhyme. Suddenly, we are tuned to the words differently than we were before.  A new meaning surfaces from the medium.

As much as we need to do the work of forming in ourselves and in our engagement with the world a rhyme and season to things and relationships, we also need to do the work of making space to be halted, diverted, enchanted.  And enchantment isn’t always interested in our timing, our schedules, our over-calendared selves.

Enchantment needs more room than that to breathe.

So perhaps the more disenchanted we become, the more enchantment we need, the more Divine surprise, the more song in our divisive and anxious and jaded lives.

Maybe we should begin to see our interruptions, not as problems to be solved, but rather as windows to be opened.