At an early hour on a weekend morning, my eldest daughter and I were in our car driving home. We had dropped off two house guests with an early train to catch and were ourselves excited to now turn our attention to mixing flour and eggs and butter.
It was Pancake Saturday.
There was a stretch along our chosen route where the highway disappears, and the road becomes lined with thick trees. There, even strangers from faraway cities know instinctively that skittish deer hooves prance just out of sight.
“Watch for deer,” I said.
“Do you see one?” she asked.
“No — but it’s the right time of day. They’re out there.”
We drove along that shadowed road and saw nothing but grass and trees and wayward bushes. It’s not a long path but it does culminate in a sharp turn, and it’s there a driver must be cautious: Anything can be waiting on the other side.
And waiting, something was.
It took my eyes a moment to make sense of what they were seeing. There was a car parked on the opposite side of the road, hazard lights on and blinking. The driver — an elderly man with unruly white hair — stood in front of his car. I thought he might be checking for damage, looking under the hood, inspecting the tire. But instead, his attention was held by something on the other side of the road. His hand was outstretched; he leaned forward just so.
And what was he doing? Barely a foot away from his fingertips was the nose of a female deer. It was walking toward him, slowly but confidently, led like a horse by its beloved rider.
I slowed my car, careful not to spook deer or driver, and watched as the man ushered the deer behind him, leading it up the grassy knoll and away from the road.
I kept driving, still unsure about what I had witnessed. Should I have stopped to check on the man? On the deer? To offer help? It wasn’t clear to me that any was needed.
“That was weird,” I said.
“That was weird,” my daughter agreed.
We told the story to every person we encountered that day and the next. The image of that man leading the deer is enchanting, mysterious. I play it back in my mind: Was the deer injured? Had he hit it? There was no evidence of such an accident. Had he simply pulled over to lead a vulnerable creature to safety? Was it summertime Santa, making his usual rounds through Maryland?
I’ve heard it said that a Catholic imagination is one tasked with reenchanting the world. We train our eyes to see the ordinary dripping with grace, the sacred hiding behind every corner. We weave stories that reveal a God intimately connected to and dwelling within the world. Such an imagination truly does see God present in all things, delighting in us, laboring with and through us.
Have you had a moment like the one I had on Saturday? Have you been tempted to dismiss it as weird or odd? That would be an understandable reaction; after all, what’s the real moral of a man leading a deer on the side of the road? I don’t think there is one.
But I do think moments such as these are opportunities to recall that we do live in an enchanted world. That there are strange and wonderful occurrences happening all around us, many of which we know nothing of.
And so, rather than dismissing the strange and wonderful, why not turn with a disposition of awe and curiosity? Because while the moral may not be clear, God is there all the same.
God delights in us and desires that we delight in a world full of wonder. This week, look for the enchanted moments — and see if you can’t reenchant your own corner of the world, inviting God to show up in surprising, perhaps puzzling ways.
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Eric A. Clayton is the award-winning author of Cannonball Moments: Telling Your Story, Deepening Your Faith and My Life with the Jedi: The Spirituality of Star Wars, an exploration of Star Wars through the lens of Ignatian spirituality (Loyola Press). He is the deputy director of communications at the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. His essays on spirituality, parenting and pop culture have appeared in America Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, U.S. Catholic, Busted Halo and more, and he is a regular contributor to Give Us This Day, IgnatianSpirituality.com and Dork Side of the Force, where he blogs about Star Wars. His fiction has been published by Black Hare Press, Small Wonders Magazine, Air and Nothingness Press and more. Sign up for his Substack “Story Scraps” here. He lives in Baltimore, MD with his wife, two young daughters and their cat.
