I. The Film of Familiarity
We are drowning in data, yet we starve for wonder. In our Sunday School classes, our family councils, and our private devotions, we suffer from a peculiar spiritual vision loss. It is not that we are blind; it is that we see so much that we no longer see anything in particular. We have looked at the universe until it has become, not enormous, but merely obvious. It is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth called the “film of familiarity.” It is a thin, invisible dust that settles on our eyes, making the miraculous look mundane simply because we have seen it a thousand times.
We possess the doctrines. We have memorized the answers. We can sketch the Plan of Salvation on a chalkboard from memory—premortal life on the left, the veil here, the three degrees of glory stacked neatly on the right.
But somewhere in the repetition, the film thickens. We begin to mistake the map for the country. We are like a starving man who has memorized a menu and believes he has eaten a dinner. We treat the heuristic sketch as if it were the weight of glory itself. What once felt like discovery now feels like review; the thunderous themes of eternity drift past us like notices on a foyer bulletin board—acknowledged, agreed with, but scarcely attended to.
T. S. Eliot’s haunting interrogation has become our biography: “Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
The very truths that should unmake and remake us lie stacked in the mind—filed, familiar, and functionally inert. Why does this happen? How do truths that once struck like lightning now read like a tax code? The trouble with many of us is not that we doubt the commandments, but that we file them. Thunder is terrifying in the sky; it is quite tolerable when reduced to a numbered subsection in a manual.
C. S. Lewis, the patron saint of the re-enchanted mind, diagnosed the malady with a single image: the “watchful dragons.”
Lewis observed that when we approach religion head-on—when we march up to the front gate of the soul with a clipboard of “thou shalts”—something within us locks the door. We feel guilt, or pressure, or simply the glaze of the over-familiar. Our reason posts itself like a sentry at the gate.
And reason, in our fallen state, is not always the noble faculty we imagine. It can be the soul’s most cunning defense attorney. When we choose badly or harbor secret sin, our reason does not rush to condemn us; it rushes to exonerate us. It constructs arguments. It drafts alibis. It suppresses the truth to protect the ego. It becomes a dragon—guarding the hoard of our own self-will, keeping the sharp, saving sword of the Gospel at bay.
If we desire re-enchantment—if we wish to pierce the film of familiarity and move from dry assent to a living awe—we cannot simply storm the front gate with better syllogisms. We must learn to sneak past the dragons. We must find the back door of the imagination, where the defenses are down and the heart is still listening.
This is not a project of manipulation, but of revelation. It is the logic of parable, type, and shadow. It is the art of the “True Myth.”
II. The Watchman’s Warning: “Straight and Undiluted”
Here, however, a serious objection arises, particularly for the Latter-day Saint teacher: Is not this talk of “sneaking” and “imagination” a strategy for watering down the hard truths of the Gospel? Are we proposing to distract our youth with fairy tales because they cannot handle the doctrine straight?
President J. Reuben Clark gave voice to this concern in his seminal address, The Charted Course of the Church in Education. Speaking to seminary and institute teachers in 1938, he offered a steely warning against diluting the faith for a secular age.
“You do not have to sneak up behind this spiritually experienced youth and whisper religion in his ears; you can come right out, face to face, and talk with him,” he declared. The youth, he insisted, are “hungry for the things of the Spirit,” and “they want it straight, undiluted.” But “straight” does not mean “sterile.” A child does not ask for distilled water; he asks for living water, preferably if it is splashing, sparkling, and liable to get on his shoes.
That warning is vital. If “re-enchantment” meant turning the Gospel into religious entertainment or soft moral uplift, we should reject it out of hand. If imagination meant disguising truth, President Clark would be our fiercest opponent.
But notice what he was actually defending. He was not arguing for a dry, abstract, disenchanted religion. He was arguing for the power of revealed reality. He urged teachers not to “disguise religious truths with a cloak of worldly things” but to offer them “in their natural guise.”
And here is the crux, the twist in the tale: What is the “natural guise” of the Gospel? If reality were left entirely to the modern theologian, he would clothe it in footnotes; God, being more traditional, preferred clouds and trumpets and a burning bush.
It is not a textbook. It is not a manual of ethics. The “straight” Gospel is the story of Gods and angels, gold plates and burning bushes, seer stones that shine in the dark, and a tomb that refused to stay full. To strip the Gospel of its dragons and golden plates in the name of ‘plainness’ is not to make it naked; it is to dress it in the drab costume of a bank clerk. The “natural guise” of the Restoration is, by definition, enchanted. It is the account of a farm boy walking into a grove of trees and seeing a pillar of light that made the noon sun look like a candle.
When we shrink this cosmic drama down to abstract principles and behavioral management, we are the ones disguising the truth. We are the ones diluting it.
To “sneak past the watchful dragons” is not to hide the Gospel; it is to reveal it in a way that bypasses our modern cynicism. It is to do precisely what President Clark demanded: to present the Gospel in its full, terrifying, joyous, and utterly real glory, rather than as a “colorless instruction… in elementary ethics.” Re-enchantment does not lower the bar; it raises it. It demands we present the truth so vividly that it cannot be ignored.
III. The Archetypal Example: The King and the Lamb
If we wish to see how sanctified imagination disarms a hardened heart, we must turn to the scriptures. The Bible is not written as a systematic theology; it is history, vision, parable, and song. One story gives us the pattern.
Consider King David in 2 Samuel 12. David has taken Bathsheba and arranged the death of her husband, Uriah. He is living in unrepentant sin. Yet he is not a man without a conscience; he is the “sweet psalmist of Israel.” How does he endure himself?
The answer is that his “watchful dragons” are fully awake. His reason has built a fortress of excuses: I am the king. War is complex. The circumstances were exceptional. He has, as Paul would later put it, “held the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18).
If the prophet Nathan had marched into the throne room and read David the Ten Commandments, David might have agreed with every word—while quietly exempting himself. The law, delivered frontally, strikes the frontal lobe, where the dragon reigns. The commandments can bounce harmlessly off the skull like hailstones on a helmet; a story, on the other hand, has the impudence to slip in through the ear.
So Nathan does not begin with law. He begins with a story.
He tells David of a rich man with flocks in abundance, and a poor man with nothing “save one little ewe lamb.” The poor man nourishes it; it grows up with his children; it eats of his own meat and drinks of his own cup. Then, when a traveler arrives, the rich man spares his own flock and steals the poor man’s lamb to feed his guest.
Watch the dragons. They do not roar. They do not even stir. David is listening to a tale, not a charge sheet. He can, for a moment, forget himself.
And because he forgets himself, he finally sees himself. He does what he cannot yet do with his own sin: he judges the case clearly. He feels the kingly rage of a man who loves justice. “As the Lord liveth,” he cries, “the man that hath done this thing shall surely die.”
Only then does Nathan spring the trap. “Thou art the man.”
The truth is already inside the fortress. Before David can raise his shields, the arrow has found his heart. This is not “whispering religion” in the sense of timidity. It is a thunderclap delivered in a form that ensures it will be heard. This is the power of the re-enchanted narrative: it allows us to see ourselves by looking at something else.
IV. Restoration Narratives: The Word Made Tangible
We see this divine strategy woven throughout the Restoration. We speak of the “still small voice,” and rightly so. But the Lord does not content Himself with abstractions. He does not merely whisper ideas; He drops miracles on doorsteps. Heaven is far too courteous to shout in our ears all the time, so it leaves things on the porch—plates, compasses, pillars of light—and waits to see whether we will open the door. He gives us “types and shadows”—solid, visible things that demand we engage our imaginations to understand spiritual law.
Consider three examples of how scriptural imagination slips past our modern dragons.
1. The Fruit of Desire (1 Nephi 8) Many of us know the “Dragon of Duty.” We think of the Gospel as a moral chore chart. Our reason signs off on the rules, but our hearts remain cold. We obey, but we do not delight.
Lehi’s dream of the Tree of Life does not begin with a rule. It begins with an appetite. The Lord does not begin His lesson with a blackboard, but with a banquet.
He does not describe the fruit in terms of doctrines. He speaks in the language of taste and sight: it was “most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted,” and “white, to exceed all the whiteness that I had ever seen.” The vision does not lecture his intellect; it awakens his desire. Before Nephi ever identifies the tree as “the love of God,” Lehi experiences that love as the satisfaction of the soul’s deepest hunger.
This is what Lewis called Sehnsucht—that bittersweet, piercing longing that makes every lesser pleasure taste like ashes. By presenting holiness as delicious, the dream slips past our suspicion of commandments. It reminds us that we are not keeping rules to impress God; we are seeking food because we are starving.
2. The Compass of Providence (Alma 37) We also face the “Dragon of Complexity.” We imagine that divine guidance must be abstract or philosophically dense. When revelation feels small or simple, we doubt its reality.
The Lord’s answer to Lehi in the wilderness was not a treatise on revelation. It was a brass ball in the sand. It is one of the Lord’s oldest jokes that when we demand a theory, He hands us a thing.
The Liahona is a masterpiece of divine pedagogy. Alma calls it a “type” and a “shadow.” (see Alma 37:43-45). It is a tangible, enchanted object that teaches the doctrine of diligence more powerfully than any lecture. It works “according to the faith and diligence” of those who heed it; it fails when they are slothful. It condenses the abstract principle of “heeding the word of Christ” into a device you can hold in your hands. It is the Gospel “straight,” as President Clark demanded, but also the Gospel incarnate.
To imagine that trembling needle is to understand, in miniature, how the Holy Ghost actually guides: sensitive, responsive, quietly insistent, requiring our active response.
3. The Pathos of the Vineyard (Jacob 5) Finally, we contend with the “Dragon of Abstraction.” We nod when told that God is love, but we quietly picture Him as a distant administrator. To cure this, the Lord does not simply repeat, “I care about Israel.” He gives us Zenos’s allegory of the olive tree.
Why a long story about grafting, roots, dung, and branches? Because prose theology can tell us what God is like; a story can make us feel it.
In Jacob 5, we hear again and again the cry of the Lord of the vineyard: “It grieveth me that I should lose this tree.” We watch Him dig and dung and prune. We sense His exhaustion and His strange, stubborn hope. By the end, we know—viscerally—that the scattering and gathering of Israel is not just a timeline; it is the heartbreak and perseverance of divine love.
As Tolkien’s idea of “sub-creation” invites us into a fictional world so that we can return seeing the real world more clearly, Zenos invites us down into the soil of the vineyard so that we can see the heart of the Father. The story re-enchants history itself.
V. Analogies for the Modern Saint
How, then, do we bring this home to our classrooms, dinner tables, and ward councils? We must relearn the art of the living analogy—the image that wakes us up.
Lewis provides a powerful tool in his essay “Meditation in a Toolshed.” He describes standing in a dark shed when a beam of sunlight breaks through a crack in the door. There are, he says, two ways to relate to that beam. You can look at it, watching the dust motes dance, measuring its angle. Or, you can step into the beam and look along it. When you do, you stop seeing the beam itself and start seeing through it—out to the leaves, the sky, and the sun beyond.
Reason looks at the beam. Reason is forever measuring the window; imagination is forever wanting to jump out of it. It studies Church history, analyzes Hebrew syntax, and maps the cultural background of commandments. All of that is good and necessary. But imagination looks along the beam. It steps into the story and sees the world by that light. We need stories like the ewe lamb or the Liahona not just to illustrate points, but to move us from studying the beam to standing inside it.
The sanctified imagination does not replace doctrine; it launches us from flat ink-lines into lived terrain. It takes us to the dust of Gethsemane, the hill of Cumorah, the waters of Mormon, and the shadows of Liberty Jail.
This is the Incarnation Principle. God did not send a syllabus to save the world. He sent a Son. Heaven’s great scandal is that the curriculum arrived crying in a manger. The Word was made flesh, not footnote. A syllabus can be filed; a Baby must be fed and worshipped. In the same pattern, the Lord gave Joseph plates you could heft, a Urim and Thummim you could touch, and witnesses who could feel engravings under a cloth. These are not decorations on the margins of theology; they are theology translated into touch and sight. They are the “bright shadows” that lead us back to the light.
VI. Conclusion: Recovering the “True Myth”
C. S. Lewis traced his final step into Christian faith to a long, late‑night walk in Oxford with J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. In a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, he recalls that he had long been stirred by the old pagan tales—stories of sacrifice, of gods who die and rise again—but only on one condition: that they stayed safely outside the Gospels. The moment they appeared in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, the enchantment vanished.
What Tolkien and Dyson pressed upon him was the astonishing alternative. The gospel, they argued, is not less than myth but more. As Lewis later put it, “the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened,” God’s own myth rather than one of “men’s myths.” Through that insight he came to see that the Christian story does not choose between imagination and fact; it weds the two. In Christ, the deep music of myth and the solid timbers of history are joined in one and the same story.
This is the inheritance of Latter-day Saints. We belong to a faith that is a True Myth through and through. The Restoration is not a set of propositions; it is a saga—a farm boy, a buried book, angels in the night, a God who still speaks. It is the one religion modernity should have found incredible and instead has merely found inconvenient.
In such a faith, we are called to be “sub-creators,” in Tolkien’s phrase—to shape words, images, and stories that echo the great Story. Whether we are teaching Primary, talking with our teenagers, or bearing testimony, we will not argue the dragons into submission with tax-code theology.
We must tell the stories. We must hold up the images: the fruit, the compass, the vineyard, the lamb. We have tried long enough to save the rising generation with graphs; perhaps we might dare to try galaxies, gardens, and graves rolled open at dawn.
In doing so, we are not retreating from President Clark’s counsel, but fulfilling it. We are giving the youth the Gospel “straight,” in its “natural guise”—the guise of wonder. For the straight truth is that we live in a universe held together by the word of Christ, where stones can shine, trees can weep, and a boy in a grove can see God.
In such a universe, we must, like Nathan, be brave enough to finally say, “Thou art the man.” We must still call for repentance, covenant, and change. But we will be heard only if we have first been loving enough—and imaginative enough—to tell the kind of story that can slip past the watchful dragons and wake the heart. For in the end, the dragon we must outwit is not doubt, but dullness.
1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:6–7.
2. T. S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock,” in The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), 96.
3. C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1970), 66.
4. J. Reuben Clark Jr., “The Charted Course of the Church in Education,” in Charge to Religious Educators, 3rd ed. (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1994), 3–16.
5. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tolkien On Fairy-stories, expanded ed., ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London: HarperCollins, 2014), 52–55.
6. C. S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1970), 212–13.
7. C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 18 October 1931, in C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 1, Family Letters 1905–1931, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 977–78. See also C. S. Lewis to Bede Griffiths, 21 December 1941, in C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2, Books, Broadcasts and the War 1931–1949, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 505, where Lewis calls Tolkien and Hugo Dyson “the immediate human causes” of his own conversion.
