Essay

Culture

Weirdness

24 March 2023

6 min read

CajMaj’s search for the unseen

A coffee shop queue encounter inspires Daniel Kim to consider the small moments of magic in the trivia of life.

Daniel Kim

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

On the edge of wintery meadow a couple and a stranger stand apart.

Searching for something.

Daniel Kim.

I was standing in a coffee shop queue one morning when I fell into a conversation with a student behind me. I won’t bore you with the small-talk pleasantries, because one way or another, we happened upon the topic of Magic. As one does. Apparently, he was increasingly, and very sincerely, becoming more open to the possibility of supernatural magic in the world. Weird. He then proceeded to tell me that he’s been practicing Casual Magic. Naturally, and with internal eyebrows raised, I asked him what Casual Magic was. According to my new friend, it’s when you see small moments of magic in the trivial moments of life - little flashes of enchantment that lift your spirits and points you to ‘something more’. He was saying how he’s increasingly found it more important to find things to be grateful for in the mundane moments of the day. It seemed to me a strangely Christian thing to say. I also thought it was a very mature thing to say and a lovely thing to hear on a Tuesday morning. But then he proceeded to tell me that you can shorten it to ‘CajMaj’ which might be the most Gen Z thing I have ever heard. That broke me.

You might be feeling underwhelmed, like I was. I was slightly hoping to get an insight into some strange micro-culture of contemporary pagans muttering incantations under their breath throughout the day, or a crew of David Blaine mega-fans practicing Casual Magic on unsuspecting pedestrians. Turns out, CajMaj is a very familiar concept dressed up in new clothes. We all know what this is referring to.

A swim in the river on a summer’s day; a foggy night turning streetlights into mystical balls of fire; a worn-out family at a funfair sitting on the ground looking tired but content; or even a stray sunbeam cast on a 1970s wood-chip wall while you’re lamenting on the loo about the lack of toilet paper. Yes, even that last one. In a previous life, I was a photographer and still fancy myself as a competent amateur nowadays. These are all my favourite CajMaj moments I’ve captured in the last year. For what it’s worth, my favourite kind of photography is the art of capturing #CajMaj.

#CajMaj moments

Author's own pictures.

Instagram aside, writers, poets, mystics, and philosophers have all written about this experience in different ways.

We have Mac Davis’ song Stop and Smell the Roses, or travel writer Cheryl Strayed's ‘Put yourself in the way of beauty’. If you’re the corporate type, I’m sure you’ve seen The Habit of Gratitude lying around on team building days (although I can’t help but think this is a barely veiled threat to stop complaining about your boss). If you want to get slightly pretentious, German philosopher, Dietrich Von Hilderbrand enjoyed writing about the ‘Poetry of Life’ while James Joyce wrote about the Epiphanies of the everyday.

Recently, in the 21st-century streams of psychology and neuroscience, Dacher Keltner has written about the 'quiet profundity of everyday life' in his book AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it can Transform your Life. For Keltner, these moments of ‘being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding’ are essential to our happiness and even our cardiovascular system. They also make us more selfless, relaxed and more creatively inspired. So wherever you are on the romantic-cynic spectrum, a healthy dose of awe in your life is probably a good idea.

Fun and brave

But there’s just something I love about the new packaging of ‘CajMaj’. I think that’s for two specific reasons. The first is that the phrase is fun. We like to make things serious and overcomplicated but these moments often confront us in little flashes of joy, warmth, and whimsy and the language we use to express that should be equally joyful, warm, and whimsical. The ‘epiphany of the everyday’ doesn’t quite do it for me. Secondly, I like ‘CajMaj’ because it’s brave enough to recognise that these moments might be something outside of ourselves and our normal experience breaking into our world. Now, I’m sure most CajMaj-ers aren’t using the word ‘Magic’ seriously, but my friend in the cafe was, at the very least, using it to express something spiritual and real going on.

This matters.

Because if we drilled down to it - what exactly is going on when we experience these moments? Perhaps some of us, when push comes to shove, would want to interiorise and psychologise it. It’s all happening inside our minds and we’re simply projecting deeper meaning onto the world around us. We might think we’re observing something mystical and transcendent out there, but that’s ultimately an illusion. ‘CajMaj’, however, says that maybe, there really is something going on out there, an Unseen Realm, and we’re getting a taste of it. It’s not just happening inside our brains, we are encountering something real but just out of reach. Ultimately, we have the ask this question: “Is all of this just sentimental romanticism, or is it a profound moment of clarity?”

Christians see CajMaj moments as flashes of the beauty and character of God. They are moments of spiritual encounter. But for the Christian, these moments are not just warm fuzzies or general, vague senses of awe and romantic transcendence. They tell us something real about the world. The Bible and Christian history is full of CajMaj, but they are seen as specific moments of clarity and knowledge. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” claims the songwriter in Psalm 19. Jesus himself appealed to these moments to say something specific about God:

“Look at the birds in the air: they don’t sow or reap, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”.

Tim Kallistos Ware, the English bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church, who died last year, wrote that:

“the whole universe is one vast burning bush permeated by the fire of divine power and glory”.

I want to live in that universe. And I believe that I do.

Through a glass

These moments can tell us something about our identity, our value, and our purpose. But they need someone to make sense of it for us – something personal. We all have these moments of transcendence (twice-a-week on average according to Keltner) but more often than not it’s like a light shining through frosted glass. We might know and feel there’s something beyond it but it's blurry and out of focus. Don’t you want to pierce through that frosted glass and see what might lay beyond? That’s the promise of Christianity - and most other religions for that matter.

Today, we tend to be turned off by institutional and formal expressions of religious faith. We generally prefer a more personal, spiritual connection than committing ourselves to external doctrines or religious systems. But these so-called systems, which are often characterised as dry and straight-jacketing, are, in fact, vibrant paintings of what lies beyond that glass, painted by hundreds of generations of theologians, mystics, and artists far smarter and deeper than you or me. You might question if they’re right or not, but they certainly demand engagement. After all, what would be more tragic that spending the rest of your life catching odd glimpses of out-of-focus landscapes when the possibility of bright, illuminating, spiritual sunlight might just be around the corner?

Casual Magic, CajMaj, is just another manifestation of a very human experience, but this experience comes with a promise. The promise of seeing the unseen, of unravelling the mystery of life, of experiencing the presence of God himself. It may be casual, but it ain’t trivial.

#CajMaj

Review

Culture

Economics

Trust

21 November 2025

5 min read

Money’s hidden meanings in a contactless age

The Bank of England Museum reveals the symbolism, morality and power woven into the history of money

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

The Bank of England vaults.

Bank of England.

Our era of contactless payments obscures the symbolism once lavished on money. But the rich history of meaning, morality and power, layered into everyday transactions, is uncovered at an exhibition at the Bank of England Museum

Building the Bank celebrates 100 years of the current Bank of England building, on the site of Sir John Soane’s original structure, completed in 1827. Surveying a century makes past practices seem quaint: until 1973 the institution was guarded by the Bank Piquet military guard. A 1961 photo shows 12 Guardsmen with bearskin hats and bayonets, together with a drummer or piper, a sergeant and an officer, marching into the Threadneedle Streer entrance. Even now, when the wealth of most people in developed countries is contained in data warehouses, 400,000 gold bars are held in vaults deep beneath the Bank.

Faiths have grappled with money’s impact for millennia. Christianity’s relationship with money is tinged with unease, as St Paul’s oft misquoted letter to Timothy illustrates: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Personally, the immobilising feeling of envy, particularly if it is towards friends, does feel exactly like being pierced with blinding toxicity.

Contrastingly, in Hinduism pursuing wealth is one of four pillars of faith, called Artha. In Hinduism attempting to attain material wealth is part of attempting to attain salvation.

Herbert Baker, architect of the Bank of England, embodies moral ambiguity around faith and money. Buried in Westminster Abbey, and architect of Church House next door, Baker established his reputation working for Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape Colony 1890- 96. Vicar’s son Rhodes is now seen as paving the way for apartheid in southern Africa, and imposing an economically exploitive, racist, and imperialist system on the region. Baker also worked with better- known Edwin Lutyens on government buildings in New Delhi from 1912, declaring of the British Raj’s new seat of power “it must not be Indian, nor English, nor Roman, but it must be Imperial”.

After World War One, Soane’s bank was too small to house the increased staff numbers needed to service the ballooning national debt and financial complexity of the Roaring Twenties. Bordered by major roads at the heart of the City of London, the institution’s footprint could not expand, so Herbert created a design incorporating some of Soane’s classical aspects, but with floors at a greater depth and height than its processor.

From grand gestures to tiny details, classical mythology is a key element of the Bank’s design. Sculptor Charles Wheeler modelled doorknobs showing the face of Mercury. Mercury is the patron deity of finance and communication. Tiles for an officials’ lunchroom show a caduceus, with two bright blue snakes, tails entwined, framing Mercury’s face. Caducei are the symbol of commerce, representing reciprocity and mutually beneficial transactions.

Forty caryatids, the classical female form used in place of a pillar in Greek architecture, were salvaged from Soane’s building and reused. Some caryatids are in the area where old banknotes can be exchanged, besides the museum, now the only part of the Bank open to the public.

Outside, on the dome at the northwest corner of the bank, a gilt bronze statue of Ariel, named after the spirit of the air in The Tempest, represents “the dynamic spirit of the Bank which carries Credit and Trust over the wide world.”

The image of banks as depositories of trust and positive relationships took a pasting worldwide during the 2008 Credit Crisis and lean years that followed. But in 2015 former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, argues that banking services are a key part of functioning communities, and banks should be able to put people before profit. “At the heart of both these expectations is the value of the person as sacred, and all other things as secondary to human dignity. It is a value rooted in many faiths and especially in our Judaeo-Christian tradition. Of course profits have to be made, but they need to be measured not only in terms of their absolute return on capital employed, but also in terms of the human cost of achieving that return.

“Large institutions with adequate balance sheets working to maximise returns from those who can most afford it do not produce a sustainable society in the long term. Such an approach is narrow-minded and short-termist, because sustainable societies are essential to the large companies within them. It is also an immoral approach.”

Mosaics created by Boris Anrep idealise the Bank’ of England’s sunnier intentions towards the wider community. Anrep also designed mosaics for Westminster Cathedral, Tate Britain and the National Gallery. For the Bank, a tiny coin from the reign of Henry VIII known as the George Noble, the first time St George and the dragon appeared on English coinage, was magnified into a roundel showing the galloping saint, visor up, lancing the prostate dragon at the base. The George Noble was one of 50 designs, based on advances in coinage, gracing the Bank’s corridors.

At the main entrance, a mosaic showing a pillar, representing the Bank, is guarded by two lions, referencing the sculpture from Mycenae. The Bank’s global role, and place at the centre of the then British Empire is shown by the constellations of the Plough and Southern Cross, representing the southern and northern hemispheres.

An image of the Empire Clock Baker made for the Bank, - now disassembled - shows an ornate dial, marked in 24 sections, with the sun representing India and an anchor symbolising the port cities of Singapore and Hong Kong.

In 1946 the Bank of England was nationalised, formalising its role as a public institution, operating in a post war decolonialising world, totally different to the one its building had been designed for just 20 years before.

Systems and symbols around money mutate with the times. Money’s intangibility in our time of app and tap payment, makes its power less distinct than in the days of gold sovereigns. But we fool ourselves if we say money is unimportant, because all of history says otherwise.

Building the Bank, Bank of England Museum, until 2026

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