The Loss of Wonder
There is a certain kind of spiritual amnesia that settled over the Western world after the Enlightenment. Of course it ushered in astonishing scientific gifts, yes; but somewhere in the exchange we misplaced an entire dimension of reality.
Our pre-Enlightenment ancestors never struggled to believe in angels or the unseen world. They accepted mystery the way they accepted the wind: present, powerful, and not requiring an explanation.
One of my favourite examples is Teresa of Avila.
Somewhere in her diary she writes, almost casually,
“I was visited by an angel today.”
There was no fanfare about this, there was no disbeleif, not even a sesne of 'out of the ordinary'. Just a simple statemnt of fact as ordinary to her as a visit from a neighbouring nun.
That ease, that spiritual naturalness, is something many of us have lost. We have become suspicious of wonder, allergic to anything that can’t be peer-reviewed, and quietly embarrassed by the idea that heaven might be less “up there” and more “right here,” shimmering in the space around us.
And so I sometimes find myself wondering, without any cynicism, Where have all the angels gone?
Because in much of modern Christian life, we hardly speak of them anymore. O we hear about them in scripture for sure and we see them glowwing in stained glass windows, they apper in our nativity scenes and on our Chritmas cards. But in our everyday spiritual imagination? Its as if we’ve tucked them away as though they belonged to a more “credulous” age.
Meanwhile — and this fascinates me — many outside the formal boundaries of Christianity have preserved a vibrant awareness of the angelic. Walk into a New Age shop and the angels are everywhere: figurines, paintings, soft-lit wings, gentle messages, cards thick with hope and comfort. And I don’t dismiss this. If anything, I find myself thinking: “At least someone kept the door open.” There is a spiritual hunger there — a longing for guidance, protection, companionship, and mystery — that echoes something deeply biblical. Something we once held naturally before the Enlightenment trimmed our world down to what could be measured and explained.
How might we find them again?
The truth is, the angels haven’t “left” Christianity. We’ve simply forgotten how to expect them. We don't know how to talk about them anymore or indeed how to acknowledge that the unseen world is a living part of our faith, not a decorative footnote.
This is why I return so often to the mystical traditions such as the Christian mystics, the Celtic imagination and to the the deep symbolic world of the medievals. This is not because I am looking for explanations but rather I am seeking re-enchantment. I want a world that feels alive again — porous, luminous and charged with presence.
Quite often as a protestant minister I find myself defending the mystery where really we should be weloming it. And perhaps that is Teresa’s quiet invitation to us today. Not that we want to chase angels as curiosities, nor demand proof or spectacle, but rather to allow ourselves to live with the same open-hearted expectancy that she did. To inhabit a world spacious enough for heaven to brush against earth
in the most unassuming moments.
I'm pretty sure the angels haven’t gone anywhere, its just that we have simply stopped noticing. Maybe we forgot how to dwell in a world where wonder is allowed. So perhaps the question is not, “Where have the angels gone?” but “When did we stop expecting them?”
May we relearn the art of holy attention.
May we recover the comfort of mystery.
And may we live again in a world where it is perfectly natural - as Teresa knew - be visited by wonder.