The Power of Story

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

More now on Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word.

A point King dwells on is that we are "enchanted" by the stories we read or hear. To King, a work of fiction "does not need to prove — it reveals" (p. 18). Reading a story is a form of hypnosis in which we temporarily lose our everyday selves in a "higher world" made of words. This higher world for a time shines its light into our own world and illuminates our lives.

Such a higher world differs from the one we usually experience in that it makes total sense — so much so that, like a geometric proof or a Beethoven symphony, it possesses an intrinsic inevitability, a hidden necessity. The outcome of a story is cast in stone; we can't change it. Bad as we may feel for the characters, we can't change what they do, or how their deeds affect them.

Every storybook has its own inner destiny. Every storybook can reflect our own lives back to us in a uniquely objective way. Without stories, as free subjectivities we would be as supreme monarchs are: above all laws and bounds. "A subjectivity cannot see itself — until it forgets itself; then it sees itself and its deeds through the eyes of another" (p. 17). We forget ourselves when we read stories. They in turn give us the objective mirrors we need, by which to judge our lives and deeds.

Just such a life-illuminating story is that of Jesus in the Gospel of John. Our modern minds want the claim this and the other gospels and Bible stories make on us to be subject to some sort of external proof. But like a geometric proof or a work of fiction, the Bible's warrants for belief are intrinsic to the subject matter. The internal definitions and axioms of Euclidian geometry are all that are needed to make its theorems so. The presuppositions on which Shakespeare bases his Hamlet make its outcome just and inevitable. Likewise, the basic assumptions of the Bible are all that are needed to make its truth real and its promised outcome foreordained.

When we read the Bible, just as when we read a work of fiction, we typically find it "believable" while we remain immersed in it. We engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief" for the duration of the immersion — for the story's basic assumptions do in fact make some sort of sense to us, even if we're not religious believers. The Bible, like many another story, has the power to enchant us.

The real question is not whether the Bible is "true." The question we need to ask ourselves about the Bible is whether we grant its "truth" preeminence in our lives and world after the enchantment is over. Do we believe that the way the biblical "light from above" reveals us to be, warts and all, is meaningful and valid? If so, then the religion of the Bible is true for us.

Dead Men's Bones and All Uncleanness

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In re-reading Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word for perhaps the third time in the course of a decade, I came to the section "Paul and Other Pharisees" expecting no jolt. Yet that's exactly what I got: though I'd read it before with no special response, I suddenly found myself identifying with perhaps the worst imaginable of all obstacles to true spirituality, Christian or otherwise: being a spiritual phony.

At this late point in his book, King has already laid out his general schema for the spiritual life. The life of the spirit is what lies on the far side of an enchantment. Any enchantment involves denying the stuff of this world while immersing oneself in, say, the holy words spoken by God. Spirituality begins only once one has stopped doing that and come down to earth.

Our enchantment by word comes with our original baptism, the familiar one that takes place by water. We may then fall under the divine spell. After that first divine spell is broken, we may experience the second baptism, the one by fire and spirit. We return to the world changed in a graced, spiritual way that was not hitherto possible.

In "Paul and Other Pharisees," King details how the apostle Paul's journey matched this general schema. Paul was originally Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee in the land of Israel in Jesus's time. Like other Pharisees, he was concerned only with putting on what we today would call a believable "act." He would cross all the i's and dot every t of the Torah, which was the Law that had been handed down to the Jews from the time of Moses. Saul took the ritual Jewish observances of diet and purification as marching orders. To him, as to all Pharisees, "holiness was a matter of following the script."


Jesus railed against such misbegotten righteousness, against treating the "great mass of ... unwashed poor" — those with "little time to study the texts or practice washings or other legal requirements" — as if they existed only for the purpose of providing an appreciative audience for the superior virtues and deeds of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus told these religious poseurs that they justify themselves before men only. The Father in Heaven isn't fooled: "God knows your hearts."

It gets yet worse. Jesus said to these poseurs, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. So you also appear outwardly righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity."

Saul of Tarsus became the apostle Paul when, on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from his eyes and he saw Christ's crucifixion as canceling his need to put on a false face, to be justified in human eyes. His inner deformities, whatever they were — the ones he had been trying desperately to hide from others and himself — were as nothing compared to the monstrousness of the public hanging of the Son of God on a cross, naked, to die in agony.

God loves us, in other words, in spite of all our inner unworthiness. That's what Paul knew on the road to Damascus. But we just don't get it, until, as with Paul, the scales drop from our eyes.

That's what gave me such a personal jolt. I realized that that's exactly the way I am: a poseur. Deep down, I have a well-suppressed sense of my own worthlessness, which I compensate for by pretending to myself, like the Pharisees did, that I am a superior soul in all sorts of ways.

I can summarize the façade I would present to myself and others with two words: "above reproach." I fancy myself to be evolving, spiritually or otherwise, in such a way as to be on the verge of some sort of pristine spotlessness of soul. If I can just succeed in keeping up that image alive with other people, I myself need entertain no private doubts.


This is not something I think about myself. It is rather an unconscious shaper of all that I do ... and resist doing. Fr. King's book has merely brought it to the surface of my everyday awareness.

This deep feeling of unworthiness, shame, guilt: it puzzles me. It's not as if I have even done anything all that bad. Just the opposite. My confessable sins have always been minor ones. I am at this point reasonably sure that they have little if anything to do with the deep sense of worthlessness I try not to feel.

Nor do I believe I'm worthless, at any rational level. My rational mind is perfectly capable of seeing that my deep shame is bogus.

Yet it's there. I think of mine as the kind of ineradicable shame that those who have been abused sexually or otherwise as children are prey to, yet as far as I know that sort of thing never happened to me.

I do know that once, in a time of extreme emotional pain, I "recovered" a memory of being rejected in some sense by my mother. This happened, if at all, at some time in my early childhood. But who can tell whether such memories are real? My only point here is that things which "happen" to us early on can scar us, even if they were purely subjective responses to innocent events.

If whatever scarred me early on were wholly idiosyncratic to my own life, what I have to say here would be of little use to anyone. But I believe many people become Pharisees, something like me, even if their reasons aren't exactly the same. Many, many people are scarred and scared, and many of us make up for it by constantly arranging to be above reproach. The more scarred and scared we are deep down, the more like Pharisees we are apt to become.

The irrational logic behind this sort of thing is that we crypto-Pharisees are afraid we stink. If others see the "dead men's bones and all uncleanness" that we carry around within us — the unspeakable urges, the weaknesses, the missing items of goodness, the visceral hatreds, etc. — they will stop applauding our outward acts, and then where will we be? So we redouble our efforts at appearing wholly beyond reproach.

For me, oddly enough, that has always included giving the appearance of not being a goody two-shoes. It didn't take me long as a teenager to see that goody-two-shoes types draw scorn, not applause, in this modern day and age. So I vowed to be "just bad enough" to pass muster with my age peers. For example, I was enough of a rebel to smoke cigarettes at age fourteen ... but I didn't let my chums know I was sneaking those smokes behind my parents' backs! It was a clever strategy for seeming to be above reproach in two worlds simultaneously. So one doesn't have to come across as a goody two-shoes to be, unbeknownst to others, a crypto-Pharisee like me.