Think magic is impossible? Maybe we've just been taught to believe that.

Happy whichever spring holiday you celebrate! The redbud tree is not as showy as I'd hoped it would be -- just a few blossoms are adorning its trunk. But it had a tough maiden year in my garden, and I'm hoping for more blooms next year. At least it's leafing out. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Other flowers are doing better, including these volunteer violets (the little johnny-jump-up kind, not the African kind). Volunteers are my favorite flowers.

Lynne Cantwell 2026

My daffodils are done for the year, and so are my grape hyacinths. I'm debating whether to put real money into plants this spring; I still don't know whether my deck will be dismantled this year to fix the bad framing job the roofers did in rebuilding it, and if that happens, I'll basically lose whatever's planted in the beds. Might just stick with volunteers this year.

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Anyway, for most Christians, today is Easter, a sacred day on their liturgical calendar. One of my Christian friends shared a post on Facebook about how Jesus would be treated if he showed up in America today. The original poster basically said that it wouldn't end well, because so many purported Christians would object to the things he actually is said to have believed and done. I think that's true. Regular Americans today who try to embody Jesus's teachings -- healing the sick, ordering the moneychangers out of the temple, exchanging swords for plowshares, and so on -- are often not treated well, to put it mildly. And Christian nationalists have zero use for the idea of welcoming strangers and treating them as actual human beings.

I'm not Christian, as I've said, and while I see where the original poster is coming from -- and even agree with him -- I see an even more basic problem: We, as a society, have lost our belief in magic.

If any holy person or prophet of any religion arrived in today's world, I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that we wouldn't believe them. Wouldn't believe they were who they said they were. Would call them a crackpot. Would call the cops on them. Would have them committed as mentally ill.

But what if they proved who they said they were by performing miracles? It might get them committed faster. Or we'd dismiss it as a trick, or Photoshop, or A.I. Because by and large, we've had our belief in miracles -- in magic -- beaten out of us. Magic and/or miracles might have happened in olden times, but not any more. Certainly not today.

The Church has only itself to blame. It bought adherents at a cost, and one of the things it did to win believers was to decapitate magic. It did that by declaring anything not officially sanctioned by the Church the work of the devil.

People are moving away from the Church these days, but that doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. Because the Church trained us to mistrust our own senses, and that mistrust has become ingrained in Western culture. Oh, we don't say magic is of the devil anymore, or rather most of us don't, but we still feel uneasy when we see it working. Now we're more likely to say that a thing is impossible. Or it's a trick. Or there has to be an explanation; we just haven't figured it out yet.

Think of all the movies that have turned on this plot point. Here's one: God returns, right? Maybe as George Burns. And nobody believes him except a grocery store manager played by John Denver, and the guy's life gets a whole lot more complicated as a result.

You laugh. I mean, I sure did when I saw the movie. But I laughed partly because God's reception was so plausible. 

I'm not saying we should all give every scammer and con artist we run across the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying maybe materialism doesn't have the answer to everything. 

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To be clear, I do believe in science. But I also think there are some things that are real, but science dismisses them out of hand.

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These moments of bloggy magic have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy spring!