Beyond Enchantment: A Spirit of Compassion

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

I focus once again on Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). The more I read it (or, actually, re-read it) the more convinced I become that King puts his finger on the true pulse of what a mature Christian life is all about. Specifically, it is about compassion.

I have talked in earlier posts about the idea of the unavailability of perfect justice in this world, taken as a cornerstone of Christian understanding. I found I was having a hard time pinning down exactly what I mean by justice ... or, rather, by injustice. It gradually dawns on me that my definition of injustice is this: anything that is capable of evoking our compassion.

It seems to me that most of us begin life pretty much blind to injustice ... except, of course, when we ourselves are its victim. Nor does real, human compassion exist as much more than a seed of potentiality within us. What causes that seed to germinate? King suggests an answer: we become "enchanted" by a verbal text, seek to exemplify it fully and to live by it perfectly, and eventually run aground on the sheer impossibility of ever doing so completely.

Then ensues a Dark Night of the Soul, followed by a Second Baptism. The First Baptism, that of Righteousness, is what happens when we take up the task of living strictly by a verbal rule or text. The Dark Night is what overtakes us when we find that such rules from on high — in Christian terms, the Word of God — cannot fully subdue either our sense-experience of this world or our impulses to do otherwise than obey rules. Only then are we ready for a Baptism of Fire and Spirit.

These are things spoken of in the Gospels and by Christian mystics down through the ages. But we hear very little about them from the pulpit today. A Second Baptism? Why, even the First Baptism tends to take place in infancy, in most churches, prior to the onset of mature experience. Not much commitment at that stage to living righteously, in accordance with a verbal text.

Yet there are in the Gospels the experiences of Two Baptisms. The second one, the Baptism of Fire and Spirit, corresponds to Jesus's threefold temptation in the desert by Satan, after his own First Baptism at the hands of John the Baptist. At that time Jesus had consented to live solely by his Father's word: Christians now call that body of text the Old Testament. A voice from Heaven had proclaimed, "This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased."

Yet Jesus would have to do more than live that Word. As Flesh, he would have to suffer and die. He would be the victim of such a colossal injustice that his death and resurrection would save us all. Extrapolating from what King says about this, one feels justified in imagining it could not have been possible had Jesus the Man not learned to get beyond the mere enchantment of the divine Word. He had to understand what it was like for us, in an unjust world, in which every verbal formula eventually stubs its toe on the hard rock of woe.

Compassion is only possible when we see that words and formulas alone don't bring full justice to this material world. Righteousness can be taught by rote. Compassion cannot. Perhaps paradoxically, the Christian answer to this difficult truth is not cynically to abandon all words and formulas and rotes, but to travel beyond them as a creature of Word and Spirit, of righteousness and compassion.