Everything is Magic
We all live in a fairy tale, whether we realize it or not.
“The supreme adventure is being born.” - G.K. Chesterton.
Imagine the life of a child. Entering a world you do not know, surrounded by people you did not ask for, with rules you never agreed to obey. It is a frightening, confusing time. Hence, perhaps, the screaming and crying.
Yet it is during this period that a child also learns that the world is magic. Every whim is satisfied. Every wish is fulfilled. She feels hungry and cries and soon her belly is full. She feels cold and cries and soon someone warm is holding her or a blanket covers her chilled skin.
The faces of giants loom large around her everywhere she turns, yet they are gentle giants. She can make all of those faces smile simply by bubbling up a small laugh. She holds immense power. A form of magic of her own. A birthright both unique and common.
As she grows, strength quickens in her hands and feet. Her closed fist is a wonder. Her wriggling toes are a mystery. She crawls and then walks and the world welcomes her as if she were an expected regent on an important state visit, because that is exactly what she is. Everything was made for her and everything is magic.
Colors burst from the ground, water falls from the sky, trees carve up starlight and turn it into free candy, birds float in a sky that bleeds from blue to citrine and pink and purple, the sun is both balm and burning menace, worms suicide themselves on puddled sidewalks, caterpillars cocoon themselves and coalesce from sludge to cherubim, overturned rocks send forth an exodus of agitated insects, the moon dusts the snow with silver, and the child can see and smell and touch and live.
For her, there was darkness and then there was light and everything after was magic. Everything is a gift. She knows her happiness is not dependent on her own efforts but on something mysterious, handed down from above. She intuitively understands divine providence.
And then it stops being magic. The child forgets she lives in a fairy tale, forgets she lives in a world that has offered her gift upon gift without her even asking. The wonderful becomes mundane.
She grows up.
She learns to complain about the weather.
Until another child, perhaps her own, comes along and reminds her of the story she is in. A magical world where ugly things without wings become beautiful and learn how to fly.
Every adult needs this spell cast on them again and again. Only a child can awaken a dormant childhood and shake loose the happy memories that have lodged in the crevices of our cynicism. Only a child can call us back to the supreme adventure in this fairyland.
“Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” - Matthew 18:3
“There we do walk into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have no dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a suprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step intoa. world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, and into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family, we step into a fairy tale.”
G.K. Chesterton
May we heed the call to adventure represented by the crying baby. May we always have new eyes to see the truth of our enchanted world.