ADVICE TO MY DAUGHTER 7: MAGIC

There’s a wonderful moment in the TV movie, Merlin, when history’s most famous wizard impresses a young lady by causing the moon to disappear from the sky and then reappear as a shiny disk running through the fingers of his right hand. Amazed by the sight, the girl exclaims, “Is that magic?” “No,” Merlin replies, “Magic is real. That was only a trick.”

Alongside your love of nature and of fantasy novels, you have always been drawn to magic. I know you had friends whose parents would not let them read the Harry Potter books, but your mother and I did not see any need to ban them. You were never tempted to learn dark spells that would allow you to control nature and other people. What drew you was the promise of a richer magic, a real magic, with the power to connect, to heal, and to restore.

We see the difference between these two types of magic most clearly in The Lord of the Rings. The black magic of Sauron and Saruman is an instrumental, almost a technological magic that seeks to dominate, crush, and defile all that is natural, free, and beautiful. The white magic of the elves, on the other hand, is a sympathetic magic based on a deep sense of connection between themselves and the natural world.

The reason that the elvish cloaks that Galadriel gives to the fellowship render their wearers invisible is not because they are saturated with an invisibility spell. To the contrary, the cloaks
“work” because they have been imbued with the lore of stone and tree and stream. One wafer of lembas is enough to sustain a grown man for a full day, not because it transforms into a four-course email inside of one’s stomach, but because it is blessed with a sacred magic that gives sustenance to body and soul. In fact, Tolkien makes it clear that the power of the lembas is stronger when the traveler relies on it alone.

Tolkien, a committed Catholic with a deep love for the Lord’s Supper (in his letters, he always refers to it as the Blessed Sacrament), describes the lembas as if it were the wafer (or host) used in Mass. Indeed, the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist—that during the Mass the bread and wine are mystically transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ—represents a higher form of magic, of which the lembas is but a shadow.

And behind that higher form of magic is an even higher form to which the Eucharist points: the Incarnation of Christ. My daughter, there is no greater or deeper magic than the Christian teaching that God came to earth and became a man, that Jesus of Nazareth was not just a demigod but God-in-the-flesh, 100% human and 100% divine. Through this sympathetic magic, the division between man and God is healed and all of nature is redeemed and restored.

I would suggest to you, my magic-loving daughter, that the Incarnation lies at the root of all true magic. For what really draws us to magic is not so much the breaking through of the super-natural as the promise that natural and super-natural are somehow fitted one to the other. Magic soothes the aching wound of separation and provides a glimpse of the final end of our life-long yearning for wholeness.