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A review by lizshayne
Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
I adore Katherine May, and not just because she's also an autistic woman fascinated by the theological questions the world asks of us all.
In part it's that she writes with an openness I long for; cynicism and sarcasm were my sword and shield for decades and while I still need the brutal human that gets us through these days and these times, I also find myself longing for the ability to say "here is my still beating heart, handle with care" and trust the world to listen. May writes with that kind of trust.
The thing that stood out most starkly to me in this book is the idea of hierophany; May quotes Mircea Eliade on (and here I paraphrase from memory) that experience of perceiving a thing as sacred. In doing so, we turn it into a hierophany. And I keep thinking of Rav Soloveitchik in Halakhic Man talking about the perception of the sun setting that tells Halakhic man it's time to say ma'ariv. And I think, in order to understand both what Rav Soloveitchik is doing and what so many of his students and followers fail to grasp, is the idea of hierophany. The world is not a clock that keeps halakhic time, but that combines with halakha to create a hierophany. But it's not about elevating the mundane EITHER. It's about seeing and, in the seeing, perceiving the sacred that is already there. The sacred is not an imposition on the natural world, but a wellspring that bubbles out of it to meet the cloud of revelation halfway. (That's where we build the palace of torah, right?)
Reading May makes me think these thoughts. I feel like I need to reread her book now with little sticky flags to put everywhere.
In part it's that she writes with an openness I long for; cynicism and sarcasm were my sword and shield for decades and while I still need the brutal human that gets us through these days and these times, I also find myself longing for the ability to say "here is my still beating heart, handle with care" and trust the world to listen. May writes with that kind of trust.
The thing that stood out most starkly to me in this book is the idea of hierophany; May quotes Mircea Eliade on (and here I paraphrase from memory) that experience of perceiving a thing as sacred. In doing so, we turn it into a hierophany. And I keep thinking of Rav Soloveitchik in Halakhic Man talking about the perception of the sun setting that tells Halakhic man it's time to say ma'ariv. And I think, in order to understand both what Rav Soloveitchik is doing and what so many of his students and followers fail to grasp, is the idea of hierophany. The world is not a clock that keeps halakhic time, but that combines with halakha to create a hierophany. But it's not about elevating the mundane EITHER. It's about seeing and, in the seeing, perceiving the sacred that is already there. The sacred is not an imposition on the natural world, but a wellspring that bubbles out of it to meet the cloud of revelation halfway. (That's where we build the palace of torah, right?)
Reading May makes me think these thoughts. I feel like I need to reread her book now with little sticky flags to put everywhere.