Book Review: Living in Wonder

On Rod Dreher's call to reenchantment

One autumn night in Hungary, a distraught young American exchange student walked up to Rod Dreher and anxiously plucked his sleeve. “I’m a conservative evangelical and have been all my life,” the young man said. “But I’m dying. I mean, I’m like a fish lying on a riverbank, gasping for air. I believe it all, but I am desperate for a sense of enchantment.” Then he said, “I’d like you to tell me about Orthodoxy.”

Living in Wonder is Dreher’s book-length answer to the young man’s questions. He believes it’s not really a book about Orthodoxy, but it is a book about enchantment. Though, in Dreher’s personal life and praxis, this has practically amounted to much the same thing. And he does assert upfront that “we have entered an era in which the Western church desperately needs to taste the medicine preserved in the Eastern church,” a thesis that consistently weaves its way throughout the book.

But when it comes to defining this word “enchantment,” he tries to keep it simple. First, he defines what it is not: “Enchantment is not about having bespoke mystical experiences. It’s not learning how to ensparkle the mundane world with mental fairy dust to make it more interesting.” What “true enchantment” really is, “is simply living within the confident belief that there is deep meaning to life, meaning that exists in the world independent of ourselves. It is living with faith to know that meaning and commune with it.” To that end, it is vital for us to learn “how to perceive the presence of the divine in daily life and to create habits that open our eyes and our hearts to him.” Otherwise, people like that young evangelical student will never find their way out of “the dark wood of modernity.” Our civilization’s disenchanted evening will never end.

Dreher has built out this thesis in a work that functions as part travelogue, part history of ideas, and part devotional guide. As such, it is attempting to do many things all at once, buoyed by his usual deep sincerity and journalistic flair. Whether it succeeds equally well at all of those things is another question. But as ever, no one can accuse Dreher of leaving anything on the table.

I write this review as the sort of reader Dreher might predict would be a priori skeptical of this sort of book. I’m a Western Protestant Christian, and not the sort of Protestant who speaks in tongues and gets slain in the Spirit. I’m also a daughter of philosophers mentored firmly in the modernist tradition. I break out in hives and start sneezing violently whenever I read yet another genealogy of modernity in which everything is Descartes’s fault. If I criticize this book for falling into some of the pitfalls of such genealogies, I wish to stress that it’s nothing personal against Dreher. All intellectual histories of this kind trigger an equally energetic sneezing fit. (In fact, I literally sneezed just now. Coincidence? Let the reader decide.) Still, rather than just take curmudgeonly modernist pot shots at what Dreher is trying to build, I want to propose that even the most curmudgeonly modernist Christian can meet him halfway, albeit with some important reservations.

To say a little bit more about my own background first, for new readers or anyone unfamiliar, it’s a rather odd background for a Protestant. The family joke when I was growing up was that we were “high-Church Baptists.” My parents came out of strict fundamentalist backgrounds and “got liturgy” in their 20s, although they retained elements of their evangelical roots, like the idea that baptizing babies doesn’t make sense. I was accordingly believer’s baptized at age five in a dying little Michigan parish in the Anglican Catholic Church, which broke away from the Episcopal Church in the 70s over female ordination. We sang out of the 1940 hymnal and prayed out of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. We received Communion at the altar rails. There was no band up front, because of course there was no band up front. Are you kidding? That’s where the Sacrament was!

But at the same time that I was being nourished by liturgy, Eucharist, and Anglican hymnody at church, I was simultaneously learning to treasure my Baptist heritage at home. Listening to evangelical kids’ resources, learning old hymns and Scripture songs and gospel tunes, this was where you might say I learned to “speak evangelical.” And I was evangelical. Sort of.

What this really odd but kind of wonderful mashup amounted to was that I grew up denominationally multilingual. I could wander back and forth between evangelicalism and magisterial Protestantism or Catholicism and find elements of all of these traditions that made sense (while never feeling like I fully belonged to any of them). You might notice that Orthodoxy is missing here though. It’s true: For all my multilingual skills, I remain very much a woman of the West. At the same time, perhaps having this mishmash of tools on my belt better enables me to see what Dreher would like to do and tinker constructively with it. Meanwhile, some other important points of commonality between us will emerge in due course.

But to begin on a critical note, I will echo what other Protestant reviewers have been saying and propose that Dreher sells the Reformation rather short. And more broadly, I think he sells the better elements of modernist philosophy short. In his mind, these things are all of a piece, though he will also argue that Western Catholics share Protestants’ modernist vulnerabilities. Like many of its kind, his short history of ideas guides the reader from “enchanted” medievalism, where the material world was pulsing with life and not strictly separable from its Creator, into the “disenchanting” Enlightenment, where Descartes’s mind-body dualism split modern man in half. From here (so the narrative goes) it inevitably followed that there was no real connection between spirit and matter, that the material world was just “dead stuff,” and that even our own bodies weren’t sacred. Some will even argue that we should ultimately blame transanity on Descartes, since after all he was the one who first proposed that mind and body were different kinds of things. I haven’t seen Dreher make this specific argument, to be fair, but Descartes is still very much a whipping boy here. In genealogies like this, the catastrophe of the “dualistic turn” can’t be overemphasized.

However, as I began sketching in my last (paywalled) post, it can be and in fact is overemphasized. Because it simply doesn’t follow from the simple proposition “Mind and body are not the same kind of thing” that “Mind and body have nothing to do with each other.” Quite obviously, they have quite a lot to do with each other. Dualism dissenters in the philosophical literature will triumphantly raise the so-called “interaction problem,” assuming that the question of how body and mind interact must stump the mind-body dualist. But one might as well ask how one electron repels another. To be very technical and philosophical about it, I dunno man, they just do. Nor does dualism logically entail the idea that the human body is mere desacralized “stuff.” I fully grant that some Christian philosophers like William Lane Craig can give dualism a bad name (like in this podcast where he entirely fails to grasp the point of Nancy Pearcey’s book Love Thy Body, asserting among other wince-worthy things that “a human body without its soul is just a relatively advanced primate humanoid”). Is that really poor old Descartes’s fault, though?

Also of prime importance in such genealogies is the subsequent “mechanistic turn” with the scientific breakthroughs of Isaac Newton, which Dreher writes “gave rise to the ‘watchmaker God’ model, in which the deity created the cosmos but then stepped away from it to watch it from afar.” The natural world’s “demystification” supposedly proceeded apace from there, and so thus did its disenchantment. I think the phrase “gave rise to” is doing a lot of work here. While it might be true that some modern scientists took Newton’s work in a certain way, that doesn’t mean there was a logical through-line (by contrast with Darwin’s Descent of Man and the eugenicists who came after him). Consider the fact that in Newton’s model, God regularly had to get His hands dirty by rewinding the universal “clock” so the planets would be kept in motion. In one of his sermons, Newton said that God desires to be worshiped not chiefly for who He is, but for what He has done. To say this is incompatible with aloof deism is an understatement. Dreher doesn’t namecheck the natural theologian William Paley—the man who did the most to popularize the image of God as watchmaker—but others writing in this vein have painted Paley in a similar bafflingly unfair light.

What seems to be consistently missed in these popular histories is that modern men like this, so far from putting God at arm’s length from creation, were ecstatic over new discoveries of God’s creative hand in the natural order. It’s true that their worldview was not panentheistic—creation was distinct from Creator—but that didn’t make creation any less wondrous in their eyes. The writings of Johannes Kepler alone provide many lovely pull-quotes. Much more could be said here, and likewise much more could be said to question the popular idea that ancient or medieval people had “no concept of the supernatural.” But suffice it to sum up that whatever is valuable in Dreher’s project should be considered separately from whatever grounding he believes it has in the history of ideas.

And there is much valuable stuff here, both in his own insights and in what he passes on from fellow pilgrims along the reenchanted way. He is at his best in full journalist mode, simply narrating and describing. He has always had a great capacity for love, with that natural writer’s eye for the striking and the beautiful. From Ian, the strung-out London druggie who found healing and new life in Jerusalem, to Marco, the Italian lawyer who sees God’s grandeur in a wild rabbit, to Angela, the Palestinian cleaning lady who touched Dreher with kindness in his darkest hour—these and many more wonderful characters fairly leap off the page. As they humble him, so they humble us.

Dreher’s reflections on pursuing God through beauty are especially apt and wise. Beauty is inextricably bound up with his own testimony, beginning with his first awed experience of the Chartres cathedral as a shallow, ignorant teenager. I was reminded of the story of a philosopher I won’t name (because as far as I know he’s kept this testimony private) who stopped dead in a different cathedral on a European walking tour while his friends walked on without him. He sat there for hours, and when he walked out, he went home and became a Christian. As James Joyce would say, both Dreher and the philosopher were placed under “aesthetic arrest.”

One of my favorite underrated movies is The Soloist, a bittersweet based-on-a-true-story about the unlikely friendship between a journalist and a schizophrenic homeless man who has a prodigious gift for the cello. At one point, the journalist scores special tickets for the two of them to watch an orchestra in rehearsal. The journalist watches as the homeless man begins silently weeping, spellbound. Later, in a noisy bar, the journalist is getting drunk, trying and failing to describe this moment to his ex. “I’m watching him, he’s watching the music. While they’re playing, I say, my God, there’s something higher out there, there’s something higher…and he lives in it, and he’s with it. I’ve never even experienced it, but I can tell...I don’t even know what you f*cking call it.”

Here his ex smiles a little and says “Grace,” too soft to be heard over the chatter.

“HUH?”

“GRAAAAACE!”

“Alright, that’s grace?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you. Yeah.”

Back when I had too much time on my hands, I cut a music video for this film, using a song called, appropriately, “One Thing of Beauty.”

The great writer and communist defector Whittaker Chambers was placed under another kind of “aesthetic arrest” while simply sitting at home and watching his baby girl in her high chair. All at once, he was overwhelmed with the beauty of her ear—how tiny yet perfect it was, how exquisitely designed. The intricacy of that design cried out for a Designer. This epiphany didn’t come to Chambers in premise-conclusion form. It simply revealed itself. I loved this story long before Dreher retold it, but it appropriately finds a home here.

It also provides an opportunity to draw out a point that I think goes missing when people downplay an evidentialist approach to Christianity: Evidence suggests itself to us in many different forms. Often, it comes in the form of an intuitive flash, something that’s not fully articulated but feels like solid ground. Sometimes it’s a common-sense instinct that rises up to resist the bad sort of modernist just-so story about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. When Dreher himself or interview subjects like Shaw keep repeating that we’re not going to “argue our way out” of the dark modernist wood, that “apologetics” doesn’t work, that we must all escape the trap of “left-brained” thinking, I tend to think they’re operating with a rather low-resolution view of what the business of apologetics is really about.

Whatever else it is, it’s certainly not about waving away epiphanies of beauty as “not an argument” or “too right-brained” and therefore irrelevant to the case for Christianity. On the contrary, it’s about homing in on such epiphanies, encouraging the strong commonsense reaction that they must mean something, and making that common sense rigorous. To take another example from Shaw himself, he’s mentioned that when he read the gospels during his adult conversion process, he sensed that they “had a postal code,” that the stories weren’t just another collection of myths. This is exactly the good intuition that scholars like my mother have fleshed out at book length. (Read a free sample of the arguments here.)

Dreher focuses on the more tantalizingly mystical elements of Shaw’s conversion—a “silent meteor” that seemed to fall like lightning before his eyes in the night, dreams where he felt himself pursued by Christ disguised as a stag or a World War I captain. They are beautiful and intriguing, and as with other stories in this book, I’m not entirely sure what to make of them. Particularly head-scratching are another interview subject’s earnest claims of alien communication. Given the detail of his account, it’s difficult to categorize it as the sort of thing about which he could be honestly mistaken, leaving us with the classic Lewisian trilemma: lying, insane, or telling the truth. With nothing but Dreher’s secondhand reportage to go on, one hesitates to commit decisively to any of the three horns.

I tend to practice a similar caution when it comes to stories of the demonic, or demonic possession. This is not because I have any doubt that demons are alive and well and always seeking whom they may devour. Rather, I weigh up reports of alleged demonic activity based on whether the explanation feels purposeful, parsimonious, and consistent with other elements of a Christian worldview. For example, Dreher was quick to believe Tucker Carlson’s story of being attacked by a demon who left scratch marks on his chest in the night. The fact that Carlson sleeps with several dogs would seem to be a relevant datum to consider here.

I have also never been sure how to interpret stories where devout Christians allegedly manifest sudden signs of demon possession. Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose was based on the real-life case of Anneliese Michel, a German Catholic girl whose supposed exorcisms were caught on harrowing tape. This poor, tormented young woman eventually died after refusing food and water. Her parents and priests were found guilty of negligent homicide, and the Church eventually shifted its diagnosis from “demon-possessed” to “mentally ill.” I think I speak for a number of Christians when I express hesitation that a person can be possessed (not just oppressed) without positively inviting such a possession. Though it might seem like cold comfort for the Christian to believe God “just” allowed Anneliese to die from her own mind’s self-inflicted torture, rather than the torture of a demon.

Dreher takes pains to emphasize that he’s not selling Christians a “get out of terrible pain and suffering free” talisman. “You can have a mindset that cherishes enchantment,” he writes wisely, “but if you don’t have a mindset that can sustain enchantment’s eclipse, it will do you no good.” He notes that some Christians earnestly pray and seek God their whole lives while never sensing His immediate presence. It would be hard to argue that Mother Theresa simply got the “enchantment recipe” wrong. For whatever reason, God simply chose to deal with her in a different way. I’m glad Dreher pauses to say things like this, because other passages in the book could give the impression that he is offering if not a recipe, then at least a regimen with excellent chances of results, much like one expects results from a fitness regimen. The “nous,” the part of the human person that perceives God, is spoken of like a muscle that must be practiced and strengthened. Tips like “The kind of attention that leads to flow is a paradoxical mix of engaged disengagement,” or the instruction that one needs to think hard about God but not too hard, feel like advice from a personal trainer, and potentially frustrating advice at that.

But just as some of us are more naturally athletic and likely to see results from fitness training than others, are some of us more naturally likely to experience enchantment? Perhaps, as with physical fitness, the idea is that each person should modestly concentrate on what counts as “success” for himself, not for a spiritual Olympian. Yet who was a spiritual Olympian if not Mother Theresa?

As I’ve written before, such questions are not merely academic for me and my family. My mother has shared openly about her long journey with chronic pain, which began with a COVID vaccine injury in April 2021 (everyone DO NOT turn comments on this post into a COVID debate, please and thank you—I’m simply stating the facts as we have best determined them). In walking through that pain, she has been equally open that she has yet to experience a comforting sense of God’s presence. As she reflects in this vulnerable video testimony, when she asks God for bread, He doesn’t exactly give her a stone, but He does give her silence.

It is of the utmost importance that Christians in chronic pain or illness aren’t given false hope. This, I think Dreher is also concerned not to do, although I worry about how certain stories in this book could be read along those lines. Take for example the story of the novelist Tobias Wolff, who suffered severe vision impairment but experienced what seemed like a miraculous temporary improvement during a vulnerable spiritual moment accompanying pilgrims to Lourdes. He felt a powerful prompting that as soon as he was able, he should “go to the grotto and pray.” Yet something inside him resisted, and he wound up ignoring the prompt. Next morning, his eyes were back to “normal.”

Here I think my mother has a wise word (in another video on temptations in pain) about the “temptation to superstition.” At one point, charismatic Catholic friends invited her to a healing service, which she declined. It might be tempting in her position to fret obsessively over choices like this in hindsight, caught in an endless OCD loop of “coulda woulda shouldas.” “Should I have gone to that healing service? Was that my one shot, and I blew it? Is God punishing me now?” I doubt that Dreher intends to create this sort of temptation in his readers. I think he’s just fascinated by Wolff’s story, and by Wolff’s self-diagnosis that he resisted going to the grotto because he was afraid the miracle might be real and wanted to be “safe” in his closed system. But I also believe it’s important to emphasize that such stories should be treated as curious anecdotes only, and not as some kind of instructive cautionary tale for the average chronically sick Christian.

Returning to my mother, I also want to note that even through her pain, she has practiced some of the very sorts of things Dreher recommends towards “enchantment,” even though the enchanted feeling, for her, is lacking: liturgical prayer, church attendance, listening to music, attending to the beauty of nature. This, I think, is worth underlining: Certain disciplines are simply good and nourishing in and of themselves, whether or not they give us a decidedly supernatural warm glow or a supreme confidence that God is “talking back” to us.

The psychological anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann writes about this expectation that God will “talk back” in her “field notes” on various religious communities. In charismatic Vineyard churches, for instance, people matter-of-factly report hearing “words from the Lord” on a regular basis, after priming themselves with the expectation that such a word will come if they listen closely enough. Of course, to the outside observer, this smacks of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It likewise doesn’t seem far-fetched that, in Luhrmann’s words, “People who become absorbed in what they imagine [e.g., during prayer or ritual] are more likely to have powerful experiences of an invisible other.” Further, she observes these results in Christian and pagan communities alike. Dreher acknowledges that there’s a “warning” for the Christian here, but I’m not sure his warning goes quite far enough, given that he still seems to believe such techniques could be good and fruitful with the right application.

A perfect cautionary tale in this context is the story of religion philosopher Michael Sudduth, who dabbled in the occult as an adolescent, then converted to an austere Reformed Christianity, then walked away from his successful Christian academic career to immerse himself in, of all things, Hare Krishna. He walks through his conversion in a lengthy open letter that would no doubt fascinate Dreher. In tandem with Bible study, Sudduth began intensively studying the Bhagavad Gita and practicing Hindu mantras. The more he practiced, the closer he felt to God, whom he now began to conceive of as “Lord Krishna.” This became progressively more intense, until one night he woke up from a deep sleep hearing someone say Krishna’s name. In that moment, he was confident that he could sense Krishna’s presence in the very room with him. He goes on to stress that at no point has he thought of himself as worshiping a different God from the one he worshiped as a Christian. He just believes God is now showing him “a different face.”

Whether we conclude that Sudduth has actually made contact with the Wrong Sort of spiritual entity or has simply psyched himself out, Christians should be able to agree that something has gone very wrong with this picture.

But where Dreher would say Sudduth should have prayed something like the Jesus Prayer instead of his Hindu mantras, I would take a further step back and question the overall wisdom of mantra-like prayer techniques, particularly when they’re recommended with the goal of altering one’s “perceptual experience” of God, or presented as the sorts of “things one must do to experience enchantment” (emphasis mine). Although it should be said that Dreher’s prayer instructions are quite tame by comparison with this guide from an anonymous monk of Mt. Athos:

And so, beloved, when you pray noetically within your heart, pray in the following manner: First say, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” about ten times, forcefully from your heart and clearly with your intellect from your depths, one time with each breath. Restrain your breath a little each time you say the prayer as your heart meditates from its depth on the words. Once you have said the prayer in this fashion ten times or more until that place within you has become warm where you meditate upon the prayer, then say the prayer more forcefully, with greater tension and forcefulness of heart, just as the cicada ends its song with a more pronounced and melodic voice.

I don’t mean to be crude, but when prayer advice starts to resemble sex advice, it seems to me that this isn’t exactly helping Dante find his way out of the woods.

However, I don’t question Dreher’s self-reported sense of peace and well-being after taking a priest’s advice to pray the Jesus Prayer for an hour each day. As someone who like Dreher falls on the OCD/anxiety spectrum, I deeply empathize with his quest for a spiritual discipline designed to relieve the suffering that comes with such a condition. I also note that he preempts the critique of “vain repetition” by arguing that it’s not vain if one’s attention is focused on Jesus. But it just seems to me that the Christian might be better served by a more contentful prayer or Scripture reading/memorization routine. And to be fair to Dreher, I think he would approve of whatever works for a given individual, so long as he sticks to it consistently. His general point stands that prayer is a vital ingredient in repairing our worn and tattered attention spans. We would find common ground in our shared love for liturgical prayer, where the Anglican tradition is quite deep and wide.

Dreher also acknowledges that God’s “answer” can take more indirect forms, like Scripture, or the encouragement of a brother in Christ. In such cases, it’s difficult to conclude with any certainty whether God is working through secondary causes or has provided some supernatural prompt. I’m reminded of Andrew Klavan’s powerful story about being pulled from the brink of suicide by an unexpected word on the radio from his favorite baseball player, after winning a game with badly aching knees: “Sometimes, you just have to play in pain.” This tough word was precisely what Klavan needed to hear in that moment, and he has always believed that in some sense it came from God. And I would say that since we already have independent reason to believe God is real, active, and concerned with our lives, we have no reason to be closed to such a possibility. But in the end, I would argue it is that independent reason that should be anchoring us.

However, Dreher writes out of an urgent concern that for some people, only “enchantment” can be that anchor, and that without it, people will drift away from their faith. Looking back on his own life, he wonders “Where would I be?” without those certain special moments where he felt like God had intentionally reached down and communicated something to him. Without those moments, without that feeling of being specifically “seen” by God, he believes he might have completely despaired, given up on life, maybe even ended it all. I think he particularly clings to moments when another human being brought him a kind word, a piece of art, or some other sign that felt like a divine tap on the shoulder. Earlier I mentioned the story of Angela, the cleaning lady, which is probably my favorite in this vein, so I won’t spoil it for the reader. As far as Dreher was concerned, in that moment she might as well have been an angel. Was God supernaturally prompting her? Or was it just a long obedience in the same direction that led this particular godly woman to the place where she was granted the chance to bless this particular broken man? Perhaps all of the above. Either way, one can say it was “of God.”

But my hope and prayer for Dreher, and for all Christians who have wrestled with dark nights of the soul, is that they are able to cling to what they know even amid God’s absolute silence. The great minister Charles Spurgeon preached well on this topic, speaking as someone who suffered from chronic depression:

Certain Christians are afraid that they cannot be in a saved state because they are not joyous, but we are saved by faith and not by joy. I was struck with the remark of Ebenezer Erskine when he was dying, and some one said to him, “I hope you have now and then a blink to bear up your spirit under affliction”; he promptly replied, “I know more of words than of blinks”; that is to say, he had rather trust a promise of God than his own glimpses of heaven; and so would I. The word of God is a more sure testimony to the soul than all the raptures a man can feel. I would sooner walk in the dark, and hold hard to a promise of my God, than trust in the light of the brightest day that ever dawned. Precious as the fruit is, do not put the fruit where the root should be. Please to recollect that. Joy is not the root of grace in the soul, it is the fruit, and must not be put out of its proper position.

Dreher quotes Marshall McLuhan’s ideas of “concept” and “percept” as applied to the experience of God. We desperately need to recover the “percept,” the direct perception of God, McLuhan thought, because as long as He’s a mere concept, we will lose Him. Again, I wonder what exactly we’re talking about when we talk about these sorts of things. It’s my belief that the apostles experienced something singular in the years they spent with Jesus, and then the weeks spent with Jesus in his risen form. We envy them because we long for what they had. I’m inclined to think God calls us to be content with the record of what they had, as we anticipate the day when faith will finally become sight.

Dreher’s friend Marco, the one who’s always quoting Chesterton and delighting in flowers and wild rabbits, is a widower. He reflects on the anticipation of his wife’s bodily resurrection, “I don’t think it’s going to be a situation where we’re all wearing long white cassocks. I think there will be my real wife, in flesh and bones, and my children, and my people, and my place—I’m sure of this. It has to be this way, because Jesus Christ said that we have to believe in the resurrection of the flesh, not only of an abstract idea of the resurrection. So, if you believe these things, there is meaning to all things.”

One very last coda to this very long review: If you look carefully at the image I chose for this post, you’ll see that it’s focused on a solitary priest holding a starry candlelight Mass. He is caught at the pivotal moment when he lifts up the consecrated host. The photo is one in a series by a devoutly determined young Catholic photographer named Anthony Mazur (more here), who spent months of nocturnal planning before he was finally able to catch the moment. He credited Dante for his inspiration as he sought to summon up the old discarded image, where the planets are kept in orbit by unseen hands, and the priest reaches through the clouds to give us the pane degli angeli—the bread of angels.

“This moment,” Mazur comments on the final result, “is the focal point of all eternity and the universe, uniting it past, present, and future.”

As Pink Floyd might say: All that we touch, and all that we see. All that is saved, and all that is lost. All that is now, and all that is gone, and all that forever shall be.