{"id":916,"date":"2012-08-19T10:54:54","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T14:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/?p=916"},"modified":"2014-10-29T17:17:25","modified_gmt":"2014-10-29T21:17:25","slug":"where-love-goes-miracles-follow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/?p=916","title":{"rendered":"RS25: Where Love Goes, Miracles Follow"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Detail<\/a>

Detail of Woodpecker tapestry designed by William Morris (1885). (from Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

J:\u00a0 I’d like to begin today with a quote from the text you were reading the other day — the scroll fragment that deals with exorcism as it was usually handled in my time (Dead Sea Scroll 4Q560)*:<\/p>\n

\n

Col. 1<\/strong> [. . .] the midwife, the punishment of those who bear children, any evil madness or d[emon . . .] [. . . adjure you, all who en]ter into the body: the male Wasting-demon and female Wasting-demon [. . . I adjure you by the name of the Lord, “He Who re]moves iniquity and transgressions” (Exod. 34:7), O Fever-demon and Chills-demon and Chest Pain-demon [. . . You are forbidden to disturb by night using dreams or by da]y during sleep, O male Shrine-spirit and female Shrine-spirit, O you demons who breach [walls . . . w]icked [. . .]\u00a0 Col. 2<\/strong> before h[im . . .] before him and [. . .]\u00a0 And I, O spirit, adjure [you against . . .]\u00a0 I adjure you, O spirit, [that you . . . ]\u00a0 On the earth, in clouds [. . .] (Translated by Michael O. Wise)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A lot of words are missing from the fragment, but you get the picture.\u00a0 Illness is ascribed to demons.\u00a0 Cures are ascribed to the power of magical words, words spoken in ritualistic ways by Jewish magicians.\u00a0 The magicians would have used magical amulets, too, and divining tools (though technically these were forbidden by Jewish orthodoxy).\u00a0 Also drugs that were transmitted in the form of incense and smoke.\u00a0 People today forget that opium and other narcotics were well known in my time.<\/p>\n

These magicians were experts in chicanery.\u00a0 They worked in teams, with one man acting as the wandering magician desperate to save people from demons, and others seeding themselves into the crowds to look for vulnerable targets.\u00a0 They would listen to the talk of the people around them, scope out the stories that could be copied by the scammers themselves, then mimic the symptoms so they could be dramatically and publicly “saved” by the magician.\u00a0 It’s an old scam.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 It was the faith healing scam of your day.<\/p>\n

J (nodding):\u00a0 People today read the prohibitions in the Jewish Scriptures against magic and divining and later prophecy and other occult practices, and they assume that Jews in the Second Temple period obediently followed these tenets of Judaism.\u00a0 Archaeological finds prove they did not.\u00a0 From the time of the Alexandrian conquest onward, Jews became a rather superstitious lot, just like their Hellenistic neighbours.\u00a0 Regular people carried magic amulets and regularly spoke magic spells and chants.\u00a0 They also believed in the power of curses.\u00a0 When magicians found formulas that seemed to work, they wrote them down.\u00a0 This is why archaeologists have found so many ancient magical codices and scrolls.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 Biblical Archaeology Review<\/em> has had some interesting articles on this topic in recent years.\u00a0 There’s also some evidence for Jewish necromancy in the early centuries of the common era — the use of human skulls with inscriptions written on them (though these are pretty rare).<\/p>\n

Most practitioners of magic used bowls, it seems.\u00a0 According to BAR, “the largest body of inscriptions from ancient Judaism is the collection of more than 2,000 magic bowls from Talmudic Baylonia (present-day Iraq) from the fifth-eighth centuries C.E. These bowls were inscribed in Aramaic with incantations against demons.”**<\/p>\n

I think it just goes to show that within every religious tradition there are always pockets of people who are drawn to the most extreme ways to try to control the Law of Cause and Effect — which is what magic is all about.<\/p>\n

J:\u00a0 Not that this has changed . . . There are still plenty of pious religious folk who believe far more in magic (the Law of Cause and Effect taken to its logical, gory extremes) than in compassion or healing or forgiveness.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 So Paul’s followers — and the John the Baptist’s followers — wouldn’t have seen anything too radical or different in the magical claims made by Paul and John.\u00a0 They would have expected to hear how they themselves could participate in this new way of controlling the Law of Cause and Effect.\u00a0 It wouldn’t have surprised them to hear claims about name magic and power over demons.<\/p>\n

J:\u00a0 It would have surprised them to not<\/em> hear these claims.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 So you surprised people, then.<\/p>\n

J:\u00a0 Once I got to the point in my life where I deeply trusted God’s love, God’s forgiveness, and God’s infinite goodness, there was only one path open to me — the path of girding my loins with science and faith instead of victory and vengeance.\u00a0 It’s pretty hard to keep looking for victory and vengeance when you’re absolutely convinced God loves all people equally.\u00a0 I had no religious books to guide me — not ones I trusted or respected, anyway — so I had to start from scratch.\u00a0 I had to start from first principles.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 Can you give an example of that?<\/p>\n

J:\u00a0 It’s a process of reexamining everything you once believed in, so it’s not simple and it’s certainly not straightforward.\u00a0 It’s like being handed a huge lapful of intertwined yarns and being told you have to untangle all the different threads and sort them by colour and weight before you can do anything else.\u00a0 At first it looks like a gigantic job, an insoluble task.\u00a0 But eventually you realize that if you’re patient and observant and careful in your actions, you can gradually sort out the mess.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 You mean you’re not supposed to take a hatchet to the ball of yarns and split them apart in one fell swoop?<\/p>\n

J:\u00a0 That was the Roman way.\u00a0 Got a mess?\u00a0 Fix it with a sword!<\/p>\n

No, this way — the angel way — was much more tedious.\u00a0 The idea was not<\/em> to fix things by destroying annoying people and places.\u00a0 The idea was to untangle all the threads, examine them individually, see the ways in which each was unique and relevant to healing, then weave them together into something new — into a beautiful tapestry instead of a useless, tangled mess.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 How very un-Roman of you.<\/p>\n

J:\u00a0 It was also un-Jewish.\u00a0 And un-Greek.\u00a0 And un-Egyptian.\u00a0 So I got in everyone’s face with my theories.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 I’d like to go back to the point you raised about God’s loving all people equally.\u00a0 How did you get to this place of understanding?\u00a0 And how did it affect your ministry?<\/p>\n

J:\u00a0 I came to understand the meaning of God’s love through my experiences as a mystic.\u00a0 I didn’t set out to become a mystic, but it turned out that way.\u00a0 My heart kept opening wider and wider to the experience of compassion for others, and I started noticing how much pain regular people were in — the women, the children, the slaves, the poor, the ill, the disadvantaged. \u00a0 I couldn’t not care.\u00a0 I couldn’t turn away from their hearts.\u00a0 I decided I had to do<\/em> something.\u00a0 This was the “faith” part of my journey.<\/p>\n

Once I claimed this knowledge fully, and made it part of the very fibre of my being, part of my core essence, I had the strong foundation I needed to reexamine and reappraise all questions about healing through the lens of my trust in God.\u00a0 I had to take it one question at a time, but the important thing is that I was willing to ask hard questions.\u00a0 I was willing to challenge cultural assumptions.\u00a0 I was willing to accept the evidence of my own senses in place of somebody else’s words.<\/p>\n

I’ve always found it bizarre that Christianity has insisted on calling me “the Word” incarnate when I was the person least likely to\u00a0 rely on words or law or philosophical “truth.”\u00a0 I believed in what the world of science and nature taught me.\u00a0 I had little respect for words.\u00a0 Hypocrisy had a way of appearing as a magic cloak of many words.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 Albert Einstein once said, “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”\u00a0 (I have this saying on my fridge.)<\/p>\n

J:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 This relates to the brain’s function.\u00a0 If you tell the brain that only Cause and Effect exist, it will only look for Cause and Effect.\u00a0 If you tell the brain there is Divine Love which interacts in unpredictable and heart-stopping ways with Cause and Effect, the brain will be able to see what’s actually there.\u00a0 It will be able to see the quantum events that are taking place all around life on Planet Earth.\u00a0 It will be able to see miracles.<\/em><\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 The brain won’t reject the evidence that’s in front of it.<\/p>\n

J:\u00a0 Miracles are invisible — literally invisible — to the brain of a person who has staked everything on the Materialist view of Creation.\u00a0 This includes devout Christians who uphold the teachings of Paul.\u00a0 Paul was a Materialist who didn’t believe in the mystery and immensity of Divine Love — its curious blend of order with chaos, linear with non-linear, female with male, mind with heart, logic with passion.\u00a0 Paul couldn’t see love.\u00a0 So he also couldn’t see miracles.\u00a0 Love and miracles go together like two peas in a pod.\u00a0 You can’t have one without the other.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 Where love goes, miracles follow.<\/p>\n

J:\u00a0 As anyone who has ever known real love will tell you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* Michael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook, trans., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation<\/em> (New York: HarperCollins\u2013HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), p. 566.<\/p>\n

** See the Book Review by Michael D. Swartz on page 70 of the Sept.\/Oct. 2010 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review<\/em>.\u00a0 Swartz is reviewing an exhibition catalogue called Angels and Demons: Jewish Magic Through the Ages<\/em>, edited by Filip Vukosavovic (Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 2010).<\/p>\n

-3<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div>
<\/div><\/div>
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

J:\u00a0 I’d like to begin today with a quote from the text you were reading the other day — the scroll fragment that deals with exorcism as it was usually handled in my time (Dead Sea Scroll 4Q560)*: Col. 1 [. . .] the midwife, the punishment of those who bear children, any evil madness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[160,24,113,70,106,28,159,247,12,59],"tags":[288],"class_list":["post-916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cause-effect","category-divine-love","category-healing","category-healing-miracles","category-historical-jesus","category-jesus-teachings","category-materialism","category-miracles","category-mystic","category-realspiritik","tag-paul-versus-jesus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=916"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1919,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916\/revisions\/1919"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}