Finding Enchantment Once and For All
What a year studying in Scotland taught me about deep magic
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Julia Bartel
This is the first October since 2015 where my life is not governed by the academic calendar. With everything getting busier and filling up with color, just as summer gives it last gasp and school buses once again line the streets, I find that life is quiet all of a sudden, after a year spent in Scotland finishing my master’s degree.
Being home is something akin to the old “if a tree falls in a forest” dilemma: if one returns to her hometown after a year away, with none of the evidence of that life-changing year around her–none of the friends or settings or touchable things–it’s hard to fathom that it was all real. And yet, my phone reminds me that on this day a year ago, I was sitting in a cozy classroom or having a scone in a corner cafe or walking along a seaside cliff. I look at the photos and think, did that really happen? Did I dream it all?
After I finished my undergrad in English Literature, I worked in ministry full-time for three years. Full of youthful idealism and quite sure I knew everything, I burst out of my undergrad determined that my life would make an impact for eternity, and decided that full-time ministry would be my indefinite path forward. Just under a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic made my job— student mentorship and international missions mobilization—a thousand times more complicated.
I spent my time in ministry waffling back and forth between loving the work and feeling burned out and exhausted. I was sad about dreams I had once had—before I laid down my life at the foot of the cross and determined that I would become less so that Christ would increase. One of these dreams was to become a novelist. For whatever reason, I was convinced that my deceitful heart had to give up the part of myself that, at age six, started stapling together notebook pages covered in scrawled stories and circulating them to my family and friends, complete with illustrations and a pen name on the front page. I thought this is what it meant to die to myself: to put my deepest hopes aside for Jesus, to view my longest-held dream as something to be lashed with a whip and nailed to the cross, and that this had to happen in order for me to be fully sold out to life in ministry, for Christ to win my total heart and focus. At the very least, I thought I’d write later. At some other vague time in my life. After I got done saving souls, of course.
When Chadwick Boseman passed away, I kept coming across a quote wrongly attributed to him, originally from Erma Bombeck: “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me’.” These words haunted me. I knew that if I died, I would have to explain to St. Peter why my talents were unspent.
There’s something magical, even enchanting, about Scotland. I have a theory that the land, in its distant past, was spellbound by a powerful mage who promised that any who touched its shore would always be compelled to return: lulled back by the spell of dramatic landscapes and a storied culture. Given the place of magic and superstition in Scotland’s history, such a notion might not be too far off. It’s hard to imagine a place better suited to studying the Christian imagination than St. Andrews. In the medieval era, the town was named for its ancient cathedral, which housed the bones of St. Andrews himself, the patron saint of Scotland. Pilgrims from all over Europe would travel up the Fife Pilgrim Way to worship at the cathedral. In its heyday, it was the heart of Catholicism in Scotland. When the Reformation hit, the cathedral was ransacked and its relics destroyed. Stones were filched from the structure, taken down the hill, and used to build the iconic pier that juts from the edge of East Sands into the North Sea. Today the cathedral is a visual reminder of both the erosion of faith in modernity and its steadfast and timeless presence despite it. It overlooks the North Sea, surrounded by the cries of gulls, with flowers pushing up each spring from the ancient gravestones that line the field beneath.
Theology and the arts has been an emerging field for a while now, with classes and dedicated programs popping up at schools like Duke University, Regent College, and the University of Aberdeen within the past generation. At the University of St. Andrews, the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts was founded in 2000 out of a desire to investigate the place of the imagination in Christian history and thought, and to explore the effects of theology-making and art-making on one another.
“Enchantment” is its own area of study in the academic field of theology and the arts, referring to the historical saturation of faith in both the public and private spheres, and the way it has, in modernity, evaporated. Charles Taylor’s seminal work A Secular Age refers to enchantment as “the world of spirits, demons, and mortal forces that our ancestors lived in.” An enchanted view of the world believes that there is a higher power, or powers, to which humans look for answers to questions of meaning and morality.
Disenchantment, a term coined by Max Weber, refers not only to the overall fading of belief in God, but to the rise of alternative structures of meaning and experiences of “fullness”, as Taylor puts it. It has long been held that modernity is characterized by its disenchantment. In his essay “On Fairy Stories”—delivered, of course, at the University of St. Andrews—Tolkien defines enchantment differently than Charles Taylor, imagining it in the context of fiction and fantasy stories. When one is enchanted, they are completely immersed in the “secondary world” the author has laid out, “to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside.” The best stories and the most meticulously crafted worlds, Tolkien postulates, provide the strongest potential for enchantment.
It doesn’t necessitate taking out a student loan and getting on a plane to Scotland to find enchantment in the everyday, but during my year in St. Andrews, I felt that enchantment deeply. I’m used to the urban haze of downtown Toronto; in St. Andrews, I walked along the beach to get to class, stopping at the harbor to watch terns bobbing and diving in the water; I had regular encounters with stray cats and wild rabbits; I relished the salty air. I touched the petals of seasonal flora blooming over the sidewalks. I experienced silence. I loved solitude. I felt embodied, fully rooted where I lived, aware of and okay with the movement of the seasons, willing to take the slow route instead of rushing home. Scotland showed me that God could give me something good for no other reason than because it delights me: that a good Father can give his child an egg, and it won’t be hiding a scorpion (Luke 11:11-13). All year I held my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Instead, the year simply was. And I got to spend it writing.
Although I’m hoping to return to the UK permanently, I came back to North America after finishing my dissertation to rest, process, and job search. Coming home has felt like the part in Outlander when, believing that her love Jamie will die in the battle of Culloden, Claire steps through the magical standing stones that whisk her from 1740s Scotland to 1940s Boston, ripped out of a life that was both familiar and magical and plopped back into the setting where she lived before everything changed. Unable to know that Jamie survived and that she would return one day, Claire spends 20 years trying to avoid the grief of her ordeal. Like Claire, I have no idea what’s coming next, and I spent my first week at home in tears.
“In this moment,” writes Wordsworth in his famous “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”, “there is life and food / For future years.” The poem, a long time favorite of mine, formed one facet of my dissertation. The poet visits an old haunt, overlooking the Wye River in Wales, and recalls his past there, recognizing that one moment of beauty can feed the soul for years to come. My year in St. Andrews was that moment for me and will stand as an ebenezer of sorts, a testament between God and me of his gentleness and kindness, and the fact that he sees me. It may be that enchantment has faded in our modern life, and might continue to. But my community of scholars and friends in an ancient seaside town reminded me that there is magic everywhere you look.
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Julia Bartel
Writer & Student
Julia recently studied at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. Thoughts on this essay? Leave a like and share in the comments!