What We Mean by 'Enchantment'

## A Word Worth Reclaiming The sociologist Max Weber spoke famously of the *disenchantment of the world*, the modern conviction that the cosmos is mute, that meaning is something humans bolt onto the surface of an indifferent universe, that the holy has been quietly shown the door.

Most of us have inherited some version of that conviction.

We did not ask for it; it came with the air.

When we named this church the Church of *New* Enchantment, we did not mean we wanted to go backward.

We meant that we believed the world had never actually been disenchanted in the first place, that the holy had simply been forgotten, ignored, or politely talked around, and that learning to see it again was the work of a lifetime, not a weekend retreat. ## Enchantment Is Not Sentiment To be enchanted is not to be naive.

The enchanted person knows perfectly well that the world is also full of suffering, of cruelty, of grief that does not yield to a tidy meaning.

Enchantment is not the denial of those things; it is the conviction that they are not the last word.

There is a Light underneath all of it, and it has names.

This is what every honest mystic, Christian, Sufi, Hindu, Jewish, indigenous, has always said.

The Church of New Enchantment is, in the end, simply a community trying to remember what every honest mystic has always known.