The faith I found proclaimed a sanctified world, and a redeemed one—an enchanted world, if you want to call it that—but one where meanings were concrete. It offered me not just a sense of emotional intensity, but a direction in which to channel it. It contained magic not for the sake of magic, but rather miracle for the sake of goodness. God died and came back from the dead not because magic was real, but because love was stronger than an unmagical world.

Where everything pointed to this one thing, which is that at some point God was made man, and died, and came back from the dead—which is an utterly absurd thing to say if you are not Christian, and even if you are. Fridays mean that Christ died and Christ is risen and that Christ will come again. So does rose quartz. So does a full moon.

It is a story not just about Not-Nothing, but about Something. It is a story not just about the possibility of a world with meaning in it, but a story about a world where the meaning is, quite specifically, and utterly fully, love.

Tara Isabell Burton’s story of searching for magic and finding God is far more fascinating than the quote above can represent, gorgeously written, and perhaps a sign of things to come for our secular age.