Sometimes, childlike wonder points to something adults don’t allow ourselves to see
Abby McCloskey
This year I bought my son an Elf on the Shelf. Do I regret it? Definitely. But it reminded me of something this holiday season, something that is all too easy to forget in our modern age.
My son, an otherwise intelligent child, believes the elf is real in the sense that he moves around the house at night and gets into all sorts of inappropriate positions by morning. Elf can help with various tasks, even in the early hours of the morning.
My son believes the elf was simply enchanted. I never knew this about my child before getting the elf. I wonder how many other things you believe are magical, too?
That’s what most of us crave this time of year. The gifts, the twinkling lights, the feasts, the songs, the long afternoons spent with loved ones. Our hope is that it all means more than the sum of its parts. And maybe if the pieces are big enough we can summon the Christmas spirit too.
A long time ago, people believed that everything was magical. Not in a temporary, seasonal way, but in a way that the whole Earth is full of it. The story of a guiding star, a host of angels, and a virgin birth? This fit perfectly. Depending on how you measure it, everyday magic was the way of the world until the last 1 percent of history. According to scholar Charles Taylor, some things seem to have ceased to fascinate during the Enlightenment. That’s when we entered the Western, modern, materialist era, where only things that can be measured, purchased and understood logically are valuable.
No more rain dances, no more praying to the gods for war, or any superstitious nonsense.
Our entire lives, those of our parents, their parents, and those before them, were lived in this secular period. Human progress and development have been associated with increases in science and technology, medicine, and political freedom. But we seem to lose some of the magic in the process, or perhaps we’re too distracted to notice.
I can’t even say that most of us miss magic, that’s how far we are from it.
But perhaps we are closer to such magic than thought. I’m talking about being open to seeing the supernatural. After all, according to the Pew Research Center, almost 92 percent of us believe that humans have a soul or spirit or something beyond this world. Perhaps this belief would be more readily acceptable to an interviewer than to a colleague. Unless it was purchased at Target and brought home in a box, I’m skeptical as to why it’s so off-limits these days.
Take a closer look and start peeling off the paper. this is it! New York Times‘ Ross Douthat says in one of my favorite books of the year: To believe. He writes about miracles in Africa where lame people can walk and deaf people can hear. Or that people on the verge of death have similar visions of light beyond. Or reports of UFOs in America attributed to angels and spiritual life. Many of us don’t know what to do when we hear stories like these.
Or read the many works of the late philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died earlier this year and argued that we live in a time when virtues have become “parts of a conceptual scheme, pieces no longer devoid of the contexts from which their meaning comes.” It’s like a snow globe broken into pieces. Humanity loses something when everything becomes flat and rational.
Are we so adult that we don’t believe that there might be a lot of things we can’t understand? Is this supposed to trigger a chill of fear or some humility? And maybe—if we can get past the fear that the cosmos is so much more than we can imagine, let alone control—could there really be more room for hope? Sometimes childlike curiosity points to something that adults don’t let us see.
Abby McCloskey is a Bloomberg columnist, podcast host and consultant.
