What is Magic? Part 1: Brian Doyle

In the original tag line of this website, I boldly claim “there’s magic in the world, if you know how to look.” Or maybe it should be how to see. Seeing involves looking, whether with the eyes or the heart or the hands, although looking does not guarantee seeing. I should change it.

There’s magic in the world, if you know how to see.

That feels more true.

That still brings me back to the question of what is magic, exactly?

There are probably as many definitions as there are definers.

This morning I came across Brian Doyle’s definition in his Book of Uncommon Prayer. In the preface, he writes of his intention:

I pray that in the pages that follow I will be able to catch and speak something true and honest and genuine and blunt about seeing and celebrating and savoring the slather of Your gifts upon me and us; and will be able to sing, even creakily and croakingly of the holiness everywhere evident and available, and will be able to remind readers that we are handed miracles beyond number, every blessed moment, if only we can train ourselves to open and see and hear and taste and feel and smell and absorb them, and so be blessed ever deeper by Your mercy and profligate generosity and wry subtle humor.

Brian Doyle was a devout Catholic. I am an animistic pagan. Prayers to a heavenly father leave me cold. In fact, I struggle with the concept and practice of prayer—which will be a topic in other posts. But I came to Doyle through his novel Mink River which touched me with its deep celebration of the magic in the everyday world. I horrified a few friends when I joked that if anything would lead me to becoming a Catholic, it was the writing of Brian Doyle.

But he appears to be of the strain of Irish Catholicism that embraces the sacredness of an enspirited world. And that resonates deeply with my own animistic world view.

Doyle’s definition of magic speaks of the “holiness everywhere evident and available,” and that “we are handed miracles beyond number, every blessed moment,” if only we learn how to perceive that holiness and those miracles.

Yes, my soul responds, my eyes welling with tears* at the beauty and truth of his words.

In Doyle’s view, magic is the gift of a loving God. In mine, magic is the gift of the enspirited world in which we live. His concept of God is not alien to my concept of a world embodied by spirits who want to love and support us. Blessings are to be found and celebrated either way. Two people can look at the same phenomenon and describe their perceptions in different terms, yet still appreciate the experience.

*I readily admit that my eyes well with tears easily at anything and everything that touches me, which is a lot of things. No longer full-fledged weeping as was common when I was much younger, but the impulse is still there and outside my conscious control.