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

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.