When asked what book enchanted...

At Tara Penry's suggestion

When asked what book enchanted so completely it carried us off from everything, I could not think of one. From prominent distress or welling small distractions, what grand work had carried me off? But thinking of this question engaged me. Especially as I started recalling influences such enchantment had on my writing. Was the enchantment intentional? Then I began understanding enchantment as unintentional, a perhaps subliminal saturation. I didn't know I was being enchanted. Is lack of awareness possibly one of its signifiers? Can we be enchanted without recognizing it as such?

But if I wasn't intending enchantment surely those around me were. There was intentionality on the part of those around me.  I was as a baby fish, maybe a small thin line-drawing, one of those symbols early Christians used to signal where they were spiritually, what they believed. I was immersed, baptized in reading the Holy King James Bible, written by prophets, poets, recorders, kings and scribes. At home, at church, at the Sunday-go-to-meeting of my friends, in someone's home painting plaques and listening to parables and Bible stories, playing hopscotch with kids who actually talked about the people in the Bible. I earned what were considered fantastic child treasures, one of which was a lantern with multicolored lights, by memorizing particular versus in New Testament. My best friend's go-to-meeting father would carry us away in the car: carry us with his parables made up on the spot, while driving to the rural town to visit people in a nursing home and sing story-songs with our children's voices. Later, and while scarcely or unconsciously heeding others, gradually softly the collective Work left an impress on me: this was an ancient long multitudinous diverse story, written over perhaps a millennia by many authors, about a single man.

It's influence on my writing was not intentional. I'm not swift or of keen intellect and have little if any in the way of photographic memory. Twenty-five years after beginning writing I crystallized a thought that everything I wrote was related to this book's stories. Maybe I should say everything written was allusive, was metaphor, underneath the surface, yet all there for those to see and hear who are inclined. My subliminal sources were nowhere else. All tributaries coming from this profound collection.

In my fiction it may have been free indirect style from a particular narrator's point of view. Yet, out of many, I have only two novels, both speculative, one not yet published, in which the enchantment is specifically shown. But in creative nonfiction it was my consciousness afloat, as it were, immersed but bobbing slightly above enchanted baptismal waters. See the word sublime—sometimes the sublime was sublimated beneath these waters, sometimes not. Thinking back I began to notice that I'd been writing very peculiar letters as a teenager, friends unfamiliar with the Bible thought they were abstruse, incomprehensible, yet of clear and strong copy. (As I judged —add some salt.) What did all this mean?

It means, according to Tara Penry's description of enchantment, that the Bible "sings into" me. She writes that the root means chant, and is related to the English for incantation, "a large extended family of cantos, cantatas, canticles, and chansons." A "language singing a spell that burrows in." For me the King James Version sends the spell deep into me. It may have made a difference in my written language but I don't proselytize others about this literary aspect —yet maybe in sharing here I'm doing so?

As a youth, writing also was unintentional. I had no thoughts of being a writer. I just wrote. Lots. All the time. An instance of renewed enchantment came when, as a child, I first began hard notice of the opening line of the Gospel of Saint John. In the beginning was the Word. I clearly remember where I was: walking around the larger room with tables and chairs outside cubicles in an evangelical Sunday school. Someone inside had just read it aloud again. The word was a person, a him, without whom nothing was made. I was wandering among the tables and chairs, looking at nothing. Nothing in particular. Was I seeing tables and chairs? Not until later in my memories.

I was enchanted.

Tara Penry asks about co-creating a community "of uplift, inspiration, and admiration."

The Bible did this for me! I remember finding out about teaching the Bible as a work of literature in high school. I went into the girl's room and saw stacks of schoolbooks on the floor, each small stack topped with a Bible. At first I thought, Are these kids becoming like me? But they are smart kids! Tara suggests keeping the heart refreshed. A bit lonely, as a teenager I found this thought refreshing. Till then I was the only one at school who topped her books with the Bible. Thus, strangely, I found out about the literature course—designated college preparatory. At the time... that was not me.

Though I have no memory of actually reading the Great Book during study hall, it was there, on top of everything. Full of meaning for me and enchantment.

And here is a link to the work of a poet also so enchanted.

Or how about David Mills’ “Pulled Quote” from Dorothy L. Sayers?

And maybe Jem Bloomfield’s sermon on detective fiction?