More on Magic and Myth

     I fear I was a little too hard on magic in my last entry. In fact, I love magic and have always been fascinated both by the productions of magicians and by the magic of a good story well told. (Quebec has an excellent storyteller in the person of Fred Pelerin. You can find him on Youtube.)

     Magic (and fantasy as well) opens up the world to new possibilities not imagined before and invites us to question the limits of our perception of reality. Fantasy and magic serve important functions in our search for the truth, the divine, and the good. They are indispensable. Story-telling is absolutely fundamental to society and magic is the very fabric of any really good story. It moves story from being just a recounting of events to the immeasurably more significant role of opening up those events to their meaning and mystery.

     If, in my last entry, I said I was getting tired of magic and fantasy, it is because all too often we stay at the level of curiosity about the magical or fantastic dimensions and do not to the work of transformation I tried to outline there. And this is indeed tragic.

     In the work of Michel Tremblay, the Chronicle of the Plateau-Mont-Royal, the author introduces us to the magic of  three sisters (and their mother) who sit quietly on their second-floor porch knitting mittens. He then introduces the magical element of their knitting—over more than a century it appears--as a weaving of the thread of life that will tell the story of the various characters in the novel. Initially, this leads us to dismiss the characters as illusions; yet we are never allowed to trivialize them. They represent something very important and that is the very stuff of Tremblay’s story. We have to work with the magic to get at the meaning of the story.

     The same is true for much of what we find in religious stories. There is almost always an element of magic in the stories. Initially we are drawn to the story because of its magic; then we have to dig deep behind it for the treasure it contains. Life itself is not very different.