Surely there must be Magic
Some thoughts on how magic has shown up in my life and why it must be in the story.
I’ve always been a little shy of talking about how much I believe in magical things. Not imaginary things, but the connection between us and something and somewhere else that provides wisdom, sometimes peeks into the future, and, for me, provides a deep understanding that there is more than we understand at play around us. I often think of my also strong belief in science as a place where we keep track of how little we know. Every discovery is miraculous evidence of what we didn’t know. Like how we now understand that reindeer see the world in glorious ultra-violet light that is invisible to us and dogs can smell some cancers growing. They always knew they could do those things before we understood that it was happening.
Many times in my life I have had an idea of what was going to happen when I needed it most. My favourite story of this is was when I was working at my second job in my horse racing career. It came at a time when I was really low and had no idea how I was going to be able to go forward. I was in my mid-20s and having difficulties with a senior management member who was having an affair with a member of staff. He expected us to all be quiet it about it around his wife. I didn’t agree that it was my responsibility (I could care less about his personal life). He didn’t take that very well and started to put pressure on me to make me quit. It became like one of those scenes in a movie where the walls start pushing in to eventually smush you. It was scary and difficult and I didn’t know enough at the time to file a complaint about it.
A friend and I went to a tarot reader. She told me that I was going to move very soon and I would be surrounded by mountains and oceans. It was such a relief to hold that for a while. An idea of a way out when I couldn’t see what to do. And then a call came out of the blue, just like that. And I was packed up in my car on my way to Seattle surrounded by mountains and oceans with that dude in my rearview mirror never to be seen again.
Some people can just reach through the veil and pull things back. Fully formed ideas separate from themselves. I don’t know where it comes from, or why it isn’t always there or perfect. I do know that it helped me believe in the “more” of the world as a palpable thing, not some prescriptive god who felt less real or connected to me than Aslan or Gandalf in the stories of my childhood.
I enjoy the connection. It taught me curiosity and the humble understanding that there is so much beyond my grasp. I already KNEW those guys at the front of the room in the Catholic Churches of my youth didn’t know everything. And they were certainly explicitly wrong about a lot! So I found this way of uncertain connection to be so much more calming and welcoming.
I have loved sitting in Spiritualist churches listening to people receive comfort from across time and space and death. I let their christian bits wash past me, but took such pleasure in being surrounded by others who felt it so very normal to be open and welcome what can push its way through the veil that day. I’ve seen really lovely things.
This curiosity and understanding how little I knew of the whole of the world played out for me not just in a spiritual sense, but in my relationship to nature and animals and landscapes my whole adult life. And I have been delighted and amazed with what I have learned from it.
So in our story surely there must be magic?
The appropriation of it is already there. In our story I hope to uncover an imagining of what access to magic the monks took from the people they encountered to replace with the abracadabra of the host into the body and the wine into the blood of Christ. The real trick was the monks created a pay for access model and began to discredit the other ways.
There’s such contempt in believing that everyone isn’t responsible/intelligent/discerning enough to engage with the experience of magic directly. That the appointed few could only be trusted to do it on our behalf. It’s so paternalistic.
In our story the rise of a very privileged class is happening in Erna’s lifetime. The christian monks go from wood and wattle dwellings to gold leaf in the books and their monasteries being powerful policy centres for western Europe. Erna must begin her life so full of belief and feeling a part of the wonder. Before she notices the push to exclude and move people further and further away from the magic she encounters.
What will she do about it that makes her a forgotten saint?