Because we are reading The Acts of the Apostles in Bible class, I have become fascinated with the descent of the Holy Spirit as it was described by Luke (Chapter 2). Here, as mentioned a few blogs ago, a ‘force came as the wind and settled on their heads like tongues of flames and gave them special’ – we might say magical – powers, so much so that a famous magician of the time, Simon Magus, tried to buy these “tricks” from them (Chapter 8). They were obviously not tricks and not for sale, but the abilities were pretty neat, and who hasn’t wished for some super or magical power at some time in their lives? We have to remember, though, that all but one Apostle, John, was killed as a martyr, and John himself was boiled in oil, but, for reasons of the Holy Spirit, was miraculously saved. We have to be careful what we wish for.
Which brings to mind a special power I might have contracted recently, however temporary. It is not really cool, like healing the sick or raising the dead, but still, something special: the ability to read the innermost emotions of people, including those of myself. Of the latter, you might think it obvious, but it’s not: we hide, even from ourselves, our motivations behind personal and social platitudes out of self-defense so that we might not see what insecure and selfish little children we sometimes are. I include myself first and foremost, and it is not pretty. It is also alarming to read the complex of motives and emotions in others. I have to admit that I doubt this ability often, chalking it up to too much caffeine, but sometimes, it is clearly for real. For instance, I saw a woman at church last weekend who had been told that she has only a short time to live because of cancer. Her reverent posture in the pew was readable to everyone, but I felt such a deep sense of not only need, but faith and piety – I mean, something startlingly close to Spirit – that I was overwhelmed and had to turn my attention to something else. It was her special, heart-rending and beautiful time before God. It brings shivers to me still.
I do not regret such moments of insight, and perhaps Spirit is now done with them for me, but I do not like the more trivial aspects of personal insight, which might, as said, be the work of several cups of tea. What is more remarkable, however, was what I read immediately after coming to the conclusion that I might have been given a gift, however transient or small. It is from a self-published book, My Life in the Supernatural, by Jose de Santiago, a man who had been part of our group in Medjugorje (a very active Marian site in Bosnia-Herzegovina). My wife had recently purchased it, and I opened it casually in the middle to get an idea of how it was written. I immediately came upon his description of his own gift of empathy, something he attributed to the Holy Spirit. Then I flipped the pages again and came to a point in which he describes his ability to see people in coffins shortly before their actual death. It made me recall what I had written for the blog on Halloween, the one (immediately above) about ghosts, where I speak of two girls who had prophesied from the Ouija board my death from cancer at age 42. Jose says that he often sees the death of others through the images in the coffin of close relatives or friends of the person to die rather than the actual person. At the time of the Ouija board prophesy, I had been with my roommate Mike, who died of cancer some 13 years later at age 36.
I admit that the latter is not necessarily remarkable, but I think the mention in the book of the former – the gift of empathy – is. This seems to be another meaningful coincidence, or act of synchronicity, whose repeated occurrence in my life is showing more and more that the Holy Spirit is both miraculous and creatively spontaneous. The gift of empathy is also just the sort of gift an average guy might expect from Spirit, one that is not Five Alarm wonderful, but useful as a tool of learning, both for its pain and its insight. It can also be very useful when combined with an ability to see into another’s death.
This gift – both parts to it - comes with a big price, however, and the need for pinpoint discernment. While I have not had the “fortune” of foresight, Jose has lived with this gift for some time, and he has had to be very careful about who is told what and when. What good would it do to tell Uncle Rick that you saw him in a coffin in a dream? That would kind of ruin his week, to say the least, unless he had a lot to get off his chest. Also, as Jose tells it, it is usually not the one in the coffin who is to die, but one who is close. Sometimes, it is obvious – Uncle Rick’s brother, say, is having severe heart problems – but sometimes not. In the opening chapters, Jose foresaw the death of his otherwise healthy older brother a week or so before a severe infection sent him to his untimely death. In this case his brother was represented by a close relative who was in the coffin instead of him. Who, in this case, was to be told? And what, exactly, was the advantage to be gained?
He answers the latter quickly: he, alone in his family, was prepared for the worst. He was expecting it, and in expecting it, he was able to help the rest of his family through it. But, still, the price he has had to pay… He has to see dead people in his dreams. That would really bother a lot of us. [Note: later in the book, Jose tells us that the primary purpose for his foresight of death is to pray for that person or persons so that their souls might pass on to heaven. To aid souls after death is a calling found throughout most cultures into prehistory and probably well beyond.]
With the more limited gift of simple empathy, one still has to suffer through the lies that we tell each other, and how we play social games the way a genius plays 3-D chess. As a by-product, this does clarify why so many people with autism have savant abilities: because they do not have the “gift” of normal empathy, they have all the brain space in the world to be geniuses of another type.
There is, however, a useful side to this minor talent. Finding that most of us are geniuses of deceit is not a ride in a fun park, but the insight shows how we develop, and how we force others to develop, and in this, we find much of the motivation for why we behave as badly as we do. We have been hurt all our lives by snubs, and so spend much of our childhood and adolescence in learning how to protect ourselves from further humiliation. We then go on in later life to show everyone either how great (or how much better than others) we are, or, for those of us who falter in the social hierarchy, just how much we don’t give a damn. We either strive to rise above others or we resent others based on the painful and complex social interplays that have bombarded us since birth. This is not a recipe for a good, kind and just world. This causes, instead, lasting personal, class, and national hatreds, among other ills.
So it is that we understand that we should be, as Jesus says, like the little ones – not in immaturity, but in simplicity and humility. What power it is to not have to measure our self-worth by others in society; what power it is to simply be as we were intended to be, where we are able to understand this intent in the quiet of a peaceful mind. John Lennon wrote “Imagine” with absolutely no instructions on how to reach his utopia, but we have already been given the necessary technique. We were given it by the great philosophers and prophets of the great religions, and for the West, by perhaps the greatest of all, Jesus. From them we learn not only of the joy of simplicity and honesty, but also the means of attaining that joy – which is to give one’s life, one’s meaning, over to the Holy Spirit, however that is envisioned or spoken of. There is no self to protect in that space. There is only ourselves before the entire cosmos, each of us equally fragile and dependent on a power much greater than our own, or of Caesar’s, or of any other human or group of humans.
I busy myself not with great things…Nay rather, I have stilled and quieted my soul like a weaned child. Like a weaned child on it mother’s lap, so is my soul within me.” (Psalms 131)
Pretty heavy, actually. It is how small gifts, sometimes gifts of painful inconvenience, can turn into great things. It is the small mustard seed, the dash of leaven given to life by the Holy Spirit that can grow into something great, or effect everything around it. This, this spirit, is the super power that each of us can possess. We must come to it like a child on its mother’s lap – so easy, yet so impossibly humble.
That might be too much for me, but I have been told. I, we, have been told how we might find the greatest gift of all, which is not the raising of people from the dead or making the mountain come to us, but being filled with the Holy Spirit. With that, nothing else matters, even death. It, this grace, has no weight at all, but is the weightiest of gifts for those who can reach beyond the subtleties of social sparring.
Because we are reading The Acts of the Apostles in Bible class, I have become fascinated with the descent of the Holy Spirit as it was described by Luke (Chapter 2). Here, as mentioned a few blogs ago, a ‘force came as the wind and settled on their heads like tongues of flames and gave them special’ – we might say magical – powers, so much so that a famous magician of the time, Simon Magus, tried to buy these “tricks” from them (Chapter 8). They were obviously not tricks and not for sale, but the abilities were pretty neat, and who hasn’t wished for some super or magical power at some time in their lives? We have to remember, though, that all but one Apostle, John, was killed as a martyr, and John himself was boiled in oil, but, for reasons of the Holy Spirit, was miraculously saved. We have to be careful what we wish for.
Which brings to mind a special power I might have contracted recently, however temporary. It is not really cool, like healing the sick or raising the dead, but still, something special: the ability to read the innermost emotions of people, including those of myself. Of the latter, you might think it obvious, but it’s not: we hide, even from ourselves, our motivations behind personal and social platitudes out of self-defense so that we might not see what insecure and selfish little children we sometimes are. I include myself first and foremost, and it is not pretty. It is also alarming to read the complex of motives and emotions in others. I have to admit that I doubt this ability often, chalking it up to too much caffeine, but sometimes, it is clearly for real. For instance, I saw a woman at church last weekend who had been told that she has only a short time to live because of cancer. Her reverent posture in the pew was readable to everyone, but I felt such a deep sense of not only need, but faith and piety – I mean, something startlingly close to Spirit – that I was overwhelmed and had to turn my attention to something else. It was her special, heart-rending and beautiful time before God. It brings shivers to me still.
I do not regret such moments of insight, and perhaps Spirit is now done with them for me, but I do not like the more trivial aspects of personal insight, which might, as said, be the work of several cups of tea. What is more remarkable, however, was what I read immediately after coming to the conclusion that I might have been given a gift, however transient or small. It is from a self-published book, My Life in the Supernatural, by Jose de Santiago, a man who had been part of our group in Medjugorje (a very active Marian site in Bosnia-Herzegovina). My wife had recently purchased it, and I opened it casually in the middle to get an idea of how it was written. I immediately came upon his description of his own gift of empathy, something he attributed to the Holy Spirit. Then I flipped the pages again and came to a point in which he describes his ability to see people in coffins shortly before their actual death. It made me recall what I had written for the blog on Halloween, the one (immediately above) about ghosts, where I speak of two girls who had prophesied from the Ouija board my death from cancer at age 42. Jose says that he often sees the death of others through the images in the coffin of close relatives or friends of the person to die rather than the actual person. At the time of the Ouija board prophesy, I had been with my roommate Mike, who died of cancer some 13 years later at age 36.
I admit that the latter is not necessarily remarkable, but I think the mention in the book of the former – the gift of empathy – is. This seems to be another meaningful coincidence, or act of synchronicity, whose repeated occurrence in my life is showing more and more that the Holy Spirit is both miraculous and creatively spontaneous. The gift of empathy is also just the sort of gift an average guy might expect from Spirit, one that is not Five Alarm wonderful, but useful as a tool of learning, both for its pain and its insight. It can also be very useful when combined with an ability to see into another’s death.
This gift – both parts to it - comes with a big price, however, and the need for pinpoint discernment. While I have not had the “fortune” of foresight, Jose has lived with this gift for some time, and he has had to be very careful about who is told what and when. What good would it do to tell Uncle Rick that you saw him in a coffin in a dream? That would kind of ruin his week, to say the least, unless he had a lot to get off his chest. Also, as Jose tells it, it is usually not the one in the coffin who is to die, but one who is close. Sometimes, it is obvious – Uncle Rick’s brother, say, is having severe heart problems – but sometimes not. In the opening chapters, Jose foresaw the death of his otherwise healthy older brother a week or so before a severe infection sent him to his untimely death. In this case his brother was represented by a close relative who was in the coffin instead of him. Who, in this case, was to be told? And what, exactly, was the advantage to be gained?
He answers the latter quickly: he, alone in his family, was prepared for the worst. He was expecting it, and in expecting it, he was able to help the rest of his family through it. But, still, the price he has had to pay… He has to see dead people in his dreams. That would really bother a lot of us. [Note: later in the book, Jose tells us that the primary purpose for his foresight of death is to pray for that person or persons so that their souls might pass on to heaven. To aid souls after death is a calling found throughout most cultures into prehistory and probably well beyond.]
With the more limited gift of simple empathy, one still has to suffer through the lies that we tell each other, and how we play social games the way a genius plays 3-D chess. As a by-product, this does clarify why so many people with autism have savant abilities: because they do not have the “gift” of normal empathy, they have all the brain space in the world to be geniuses of another type.
There is, however, a useful side to this minor talent. Finding that most of us are geniuses of deceit is not a ride in a fun park, but the insight shows how we develop, and how we force others to develop, and in this, we find much of the motivation for why we behave as badly as we do. We have been hurt all our lives by snubs, and so spend much of our childhood and adolescence in learning how to protect ourselves from further humiliation. We then go on in later life to show everyone either how great (or how much better than others) we are, or, for those of us who falter in the social hierarchy, just how much we don’t give a damn. We either strive to rise above others or we resent others based on the painful and complex social interplays that have bombarded us since birth. This is not a recipe for a good, kind and just world. This causes, instead, lasting personal, class, and national hatreds, among other ills.
So it is that we understand that we should be, as Jesus says, like the little ones – not in immaturity, but in simplicity and humility. What power it is to not have to measure our self-worth by others in society; what power it is to simply be as we were intended to be, where we are able to understand this intent in the quiet of a peaceful mind. John Lennon wrote “Imagine” with absolutely no instructions on how to reach his utopia, but we have already been given the necessary technique. We were given it by the great philosophers and prophets of the great religions, and for the West, by perhaps the greatest of all, Jesus. From them we learn not only of the joy of simplicity and honesty, but also the means of attaining that joy – which is to give one’s life, one’s meaning, over to the Holy Spirit, however that is envisioned or spoken of. There is no self to protect in that space. There is only ourselves before the entire cosmos, each of us equally fragile and dependent on a power much greater than our own, or of Caesar’s, or of any other human or group of humans.
I busy myself not with great things…Nay rather, I have stilled and quieted my soul like a weaned child. Like a weaned child on it mother’s lap, so is my soul within me.” (Psalms 131)
Pretty heavy, actually. It is how small gifts, sometimes gifts of painful inconvenience, can turn into great things. It is the small mustard seed, the dash of leaven given to life by the Holy Spirit that can grow into something great, or effect everything around it. This, this spirit, is the super power that each of us can possess. We must come to it like a child on its mother’s lap – so easy, yet so impossibly humble.
That might be too much for me, but I have been told. I, we, have been told how we might find the greatest gift of all, which is not the raising of people from the dead or making the mountain come to us, but being filled with the Holy Spirit. With that, nothing else matters, even death. It, this grace, has no weight at all, but is the weightiest of gifts for those who can reach beyond the subtleties of social sparring.
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