Giles Fraser: Longing for the truth of glory

by Giles Fraser
The Church Times, January 2, 2009

The sleigh was nothing more than an open-top car, with some imaginative use of balsa wood and fairy lights. Santa sat resplend ent on top, carols blasting from hidden speakers. But, to my six-year-old son, in pyjamas and sneaking a peep out of his bedroom curtains, it was the most wondrous thing he had ever seen. His eyes were out on stalks. Santa had waved at him, as he breath lessly repeated.

Over the holidays, I have been reflecting on my son’s sense that the world is a magical place. No doubt part of the reason adults think of Christmas as a children’s time is that we are able vicariously to participate in that sense of wonder that many of us have lost in adulthood. We have this deep sense of nostalgia, even longing, for a time when we saw the world as alive with the extraordinary. But now we have got all grown up, and can no longer see what we once saw. Some thing has been lost.

The great German sociologist Max Weber coined the word “disenchantment” to describe that pro­cess whereby the world comes to lose its magical colouring. His interest was not in children’s growing up, but in the “growing up” that comes with the expansion of the scientific world-view. As more and more things come to be understood scientifically, the once-enchanted universe is re-described as functional and mechanistic.

As Weber noted, there are styles of Christian belief that have co-operated with the process of disenchantment. Most versions of Protestantism, for instance, set out to rid the world of the vain superstitions of idols and liturgical theatre.

What Weber called “religions of salvation” often have little time for those who find the traces of God in the ether of a more Catholic sensibility. They also want to point to the staging required to invoke this sense of the numinous, and cry foul. Thus — to the extent to which disenchantment is an element of the broader secularisation of Western culture — it could be said that Protestantism has actually aided and abetted the withdrawal of religion from public life.

What both the scientific and the Protestant world-views miss, I be lieve, is that there is an order of truth in what my son sees as he peers through his curtains. For want of a better word, I would call that order of truth “glory”. It is terribly easy to destroy. And it is terribly easy to think of that destruction as growing up.

Yet many of us nurse an anxiety that we have squandered something precious. Christmas is that time when most of us own up to how much we long to find a second innocence of our own. This is not just a question of sentiment. Children see things that we no longer see — and I suspect that, often, they see it right.