Do You Believe In Magic?
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One Sunday morning when I was 7 or 8, I got up early. Everyone else was asleep, so I grabbed some Corn Chex and turned on the TV. There was this guy in glasses and a brown suit, talking fervently about how God always answers our prayers. You only need to believe hard enough and open your heart to Jesus Christ and accept him as your lord and savior and all manner of miraculous things would be possible, he said, and he was really into it, sweating and crying into the microphone. God can and will do anything for you if you only submit yourself to Him. I was pretty little at this point, so I took him quite literally. And primed as I was by bibbity-bobbity-boo and cartoon talking dogs and stuff like that, I guess this premise sounded reasonable to me. At least, I decided to try it out.
So when I finished my Chex, I crawled into the hall closet, shut the door, closed my eyes. Then I prayed. I submit to you, Lord Jesus. I open my heart to you and ask you only this one thing — I want to be beautiful. Blonde, blue-eyed, and thin. When I come out of this closet, I want everything to be different.
I must've been in there an hour, concentrating so hard that I vibrated with the effort. And ... maybe I was also stalling a little, because I was scared that it wasn't going to work, that I'd come out and look in the mirror and be exactly the same as before.
Which, of course, is precisely what happened. And an acid-green vein of cynicism started to grow across my heart that day, because I began to realize that magic — at least the kind of magic I'd seen in movies and read about in books — didn't exist.
I had to learn the lesson a few more times. I had to fantasize really hard about several pretend boyfriends before it sank in that fantasizing about someone is not an effective way of making them love you. I had to daydream about being discovered as a great singer/wit, and go broke while waiting, before it sank in that I needed to get a damn job.
It wasn't until I was around thirty, I guess, when it occurred to me that expecting someone to discover me and make me a star was not actually a viable life plan.
In fact, waiting around for anything to happen ever is basically the same thing I did after watching Jimmy Swaggart that morning thirty-some years ago. It's wishful thinking. It's future-tripping. It's believing in the wrong kind of magic.
Because, you see, magic is absolutely real. But it doesn't work the way we think. It's not something that — bam! — just happens to you.
It's more like ... something that rallies around you when you focus your effort and love on something, whether it be a painting or a child or a software project. Sometimes you point yourself in the direction you want to go, and you start paddling, and then the wind comes up behind you and fills your sails. That is what magic is.
I’m pretty sure it’s not supernatural — it’s just how nature works. And it rarely comes down like a lightning bolt from the sky. Usually, magic requires that we participate in it. That we take the first step, pay attention, ready our sails to catch the wind as it rises. It requires that we know how to sail. It requires effort and skill. It’s not given so much as earned.
Real magic is even more subtle and lovely and fantastic than what we were taught. It comes out of our very own fingers and brains and hearts when we engage, when we work to learn and understand and shape the forces at play in our lives, even as they shape us.
