https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iFcEwx7U1AU
One of the aspects of modernity or the modern world has been to make us believe that the world doesn’t have, it’s not a song, that the world is not a pattern, it’s not a poem, that it’s kind of this weird arbitrary, you know, layout of facts that have, you know, like billiard balls that hit each other and that have no meaning to them. And that meaning is actually put back on top of the world. And so in a way, the way that I kind of view the term re-enchantment is almost the opposite of how you described it, which is rather kind of reliving the fact that the world is actually a pattern, that it is a song, it’s a dance, it’s a story, and that we need to dive back into stories. And the example you gave about, let’s say, being capable of telling a good story, the good story of your own life, the good story of your own encounter with others and with Christ and with the saints, that’s exactly what I’m talking about in a way. Not just tell it, but really kind of live the world as a story rather than, you know, this kind of cold arbitrary world that a lot of the materialists have wanted us to believe the world is. So that’s my pitch for the word. I get now the thing about singing, a song, because chant in French is literally song. So the world has a song in it. It is within a song, in chant. And we need to participate in that mostly. That’s what we need to do, to recognize that this is reality and then find a way to sing our part in that song, to bring that hymn of worship to life in the world. But I think that the resistance you have is appropriate in the sense of, especially I think some of the images that people were posting on the Facebook with posts were the best ones, which is the Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer who is like enchanting the brooms and everything. And I think that’s a perfect image to show the difficulty of how people tend to understand it, which is almost really in the magical, in the bad aspect, which is that we as people have the power to impose a narrative on the world. And this is actually something that we’ve seen happen more and more in social media and just regular media, where there’s a kind of wizard aspect, where you see people trying to force a story on reality and try to make us believe things, which are actually just this kind of imposed, reorganize things in an actually dishonest way to make us see a pattern forcefully. And I think that that really is the difficulty. And as Christians, we need to really discover the true pattern, the true song, which is there in the world, rather than as using human power to just kind of impose these narratives on the world. So that’s kind of how I see it. You know what I think is true is that the real pattern, the true pattern is embedded in reality. And we are definitely being threatened and even coerced by stories that are not true. Like in the US, the story that the whole country was founded in order to spread slavery. It’s just not true. It’s a heartbreaking story. Maybe you can tell is a story true or not. Does it create hope? Does it create joy and wonder? Does it make you love other people or does it make you hate them? There’s some really elementary sorts of tests we can use to find out whether or not this is a true story, a true song. Yeah, and also true stories have many sides, let’s say. I would try to help people see that, for example, some of the great epics, like the epics of the Trojan War, like the Iliad, there’s a way in which you can actually sympathize with all the different sides of the story, even in a conflict. There isn’t just this simple demonizing of the other, but really a way in which the different elements of the story point to something bigger than what they are. And those have always been the great stories. And the simple stories are those where it’s so simple and clear, especially in the modern political narratives. Okay, they’re the bad guys. We just need to destroy them and then everything will be fine.