THE PRACTICE OF PRAYING FOR OTHERS: Eight Examples from Late Twentieth-Century America A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies San Francisco, California In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy By Birrell Thomas Walsh September, 1999
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The Practice of Prayer for Others - Eight Examples From Late Twentieth-Century America
A dissertation at CIIS, the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. This is a qualitative research study about the practice of praying, treating and shamanizing for others. A Religious Scientist, a Baptist minister, a Christian Science practitioner, a Reiki practitioner, a "Somatic" Buddhist, a Lubavitcher Chassidic rabbi, a Franciscan nun and a shaman were interviewed. Each participant was asked in detail what they did to pray for others, how they relate to those they pray for and to the Blessing Power, and how their practice has affected them. Each participant was asked to review and correct the material about their practice. Among the findings are the following: -the Religious Scientist worked by systematic identification with Divinity; -the Baptist conversed with God, and asked Him for all her needs; -the Christian Scientist looked for “identity” as the key to healing; -the Reiki practitioner stepped out of the way, allowing Reiki energy to work; -the Buddhist found and gave “space” and “company”; -the Chassidic rabbi brought down light and worked to integrate parts, while praying for the coming of the Messiah; -the Catholic contemplative brought everything to God, within Sacramental experience; -the shaman journeyed to bring back power or missing souls, and removed psychic intrusions. Some experiences were present in all of the interviews: -Each practitioner showed strong self-discipline. -Each prayed for others in the same manner as for themselves. -“Letting go” produced frequent unexpected (though positive) results. -The pleasure, or reward, for the practitioner was keeping company with the Holy. Among characteristics shared by only some of those interviewed were: -Channeling -Contraction as the creation of the universe -Theological reasoning in treatment -Openness and making space, melting within the larger, then reforming -Peace as a sign of completion -"Rising Up into Heaven," and journeys to other realms to get help Participants diverged along the following axes: -Cosmological/non-cosmological -Theistic/non-theistic -Gnostic/incarnational, or "ascender"/"descender." -(Divine) personality/impersonality -Sensory preferences in the NeuroLinguistic Programming sense. -Directivity/non-directivity about results -"Lineaged"/non-lineaged tradition The variety discovered is an existence proof of an extremely various "possibility space" for the practice of prayer. The study will (hopefully) permit sharing of methods and approaches, and preserve them for the future.
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THE PRACTICE OF PRAYING FOR OTHERS: Eight Examples from Late Twentieth-Century America
This project began when I found that prayer for others was my favorite spiritual practice.
It seemed to serve others, while also allowing me to be in contact with the Divinity.
It appeared, occasionally, to work. But I also believed that I was not doing it as well as I
might, and that there was a lot I could learn from other persons who had taken up this
practice. I read a great deal about prayer and treatment for others. I quickly found that
persons across many denominations did it. Although they did not agree on the nature of
the Universe and of Divinity, they did agree that one could act invisibly to help another.
Some of these writings were extremely appealing, but I found that those that spoke to me
were not all from the same denomination. If I was to find my exemplars, I would have to
give up the idea of a perfect religious group that had all the answers. By this time I had
entered a program in Comparative Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
The Institute had been founded by disciples of Sri Aurobindo and attracted Alan Watts,
other Buddhists, Jews, Sufis, Christians, Neo-Pagans, and Feminists as well as Hindus.
The Institute and the program shared my attitude that one profits when one goes
respectfully to other religions.
It was not possible to attribute all effective prayer and treatment to an easy perennialism,
however. The theologies of practitioners varied widely. They often said that their
theology was the essential element in the effectiveness of their prayers and treatments.
Christians might rely on their personal relationship with Jesus. One Buddhist might rely
Introduction
- 9 -
on a community of Buddha-Nature to permit contact between the healer and the one
being prayed for. A Theravadin who did not accept the idea of Buddha-Nature might
practice the beautiful and ancient pre-Buddhist ritual of metta or lovingkindness.
Practitioners of different traditions nevertheless borrowed from each other. Sometimes
they borrowed directly, as when some Christians1 and Jews
2 took up the Buddhist
practice of metta. At other times they were apparently moved by the example of others to
rummage in their own attic and dust off ancient practices. I noticed that when
Transcendental Meditation had become common in the United States, more than a few
Westerners re-discovered The Cloud of Unknowing3, Eastern Orthodox Christian prayer-
disciplines such as the Jesus Prayer4, and Jewish meditation forms.
5 While interest in
these had never been completely absent, they blossomed again in the context of interest
in Eastern meditations.
1.1 Motive
1 Meadow, Gentling the heart: Buddhist loving-kindness practice for Christians
2 Boorstein, That's funny, you don't look Buddhist
3 Ira Progoff had retranslated the Cloud in 1950's (Progoff, The cloud of unknowing: a new translation of a
classic guide to spiritual experience revealing the dynamics of the inner life from a particular historical
and religious point of view), and it gained some popularity by association with his Intensive Journal
process. Brendan Collins tells me that the popular practice of Centering Prayer was actually developed by
three Cistercian monks of St. Joseph's Abbey, Spencer, Mass: in the 1970's: William Meninger, Thomas
Keating and Basil Pennington, based primarily on The Cloud of Unknowing. He recommends Keating, et
al., Finding grace at the center 4 Gillet, The Jesus Prayer
5 Aryeh Kaplan wrote in part to tell Jews that they had a meditative tradition of their own (Kaplan, Jewish
meditation : a practical guide, Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, Kaplan, Meditation and the Bible,
Kaplan, Inner Space: introduction to Kabbalah, meditation and prophecy). Other modern authors have
emphasized that Judaism, like Christianity, has a metaphysical self-help tradition. See Hoch, Unity in Zion:
A Survey of American Jewish Metaphysical Movements for a history of the Jewish metaphysical movement
in America. That tradition continues at this writing in the work of Rabbi Shoni Labowitz - see Labowitz,
Miraculous living: a guided journey in Kabbalah through the ten gates of the Tree of Life.
Introduction
- 10 -
1.1.1 Examples to Follow
My interest was practical: I wanted examples to follow. When it came time to do my
dissertation, I decided to ask practitioners themselves what their experience was. My
purpose was not necessarily to find commonalties at the theoretical, doctrinal level. I
wanted to know what they actually did. What did they experience when they were
working invisibly for others? Did they get any kind of subjective feedback that guided
their work? How did they know when they were done?
I wanted to know what about their relationship with the "Blessing Power." Was it close?
Respectful? Friendly? Awed? Utilitarian? Collegial? And I wanted to know as well
what sort of relationship they had with the people they were praying for.
Finally, I wanted to know how the practice had shaped them. What had they become by
doing this practice?
1.1.2 The Law of Requisite Variety
In addition I hoped to provide people who already have a practice with alternative
methods. As the methods used by religious practitioners are from their own sacred
traditions, it can be a matter of principle to use only one method. It is just the way "our
kind of people" do it. But there is another view, that a successful worker always has
options. In the words of Robert Dilts,
Specifically, the Law of Requisite Variety states that "in order to
successfully adapt and survive, a member of system needs a certain
minimum amount of flexibility, and that flexibility has to be proportional
to the potential variation or the uncertainty in the rest of the system." In
Introduction
- 11 -
other words, if someone is committed to accomplishing a certain goal, he
or she needs to have a number of possible ways to reach it. The number of
options required to be certain the goal can be reached depends on the
amount of change that is possible within the system in which one is
attempting to achieve the goal.6
Sometimes there was something in the spiritual system that required the practitioner to
use one and only one method. But in many cases (I am betting) it was just habit. If a
variety of other practices were offered and well modeled, I expected that people might be
able to adopt or adapt them without giving up their core beliefs.
1.2 Delimitations: What This Study Does Not Examine
1.2.1 Whether prayer works.
This is a valid question, but it is not one that can fit into this study. It is tempting to try to
show the success or failure of my participants before I interview them. An examination
of the literature of "prayer research" shows that that task is a dissertation in itself — I just
did not have the time.
1.2.2 Whether a given religious belief is valid, or true.
Answered prayer is often used to "prove" that a religion is true. Since I will be
interviewing people from different confessions, I will dodge this question.
6 Dilts, Modeling with NLP, p. 9
Introduction
- 12 -
1.2.3 The social contexts of prayerfulness
I will not be examining this issue, although it has been pursued in other studies like that
of McGuire.7 I will be asking instead about the experience of individual pray-ers.
1.2.4 Gender and class issues
I do not expect to pursue questions about gender and class. My teachers and those I
admire come from a number of classes and all genders.
1.3 What this Study Does Hope to Do.
If successful, I would like to create a collection of reports of experience. Each one will
be my best attempt to represent what it is like to do prayer or treatment in a certain way.
Together, they are intended to capture some of the styles of prayer and treatment for
others that are in use in the United States at the end of the second millennium. They are
not necessarily representative; instead they hope to be exemplary.
7 McGuire and Kantor, Ritual healing in suburban America
2 METHOD
2.1 Seeking, then Making, a Method
This study seemed to call for a qualitative method. I had no hypotheses to verify through
a quantitative test. I wanted to get some ideas, not to test them. While quantitative
methods did not seem appropriate, qualitative approaches appeared ideal. They were
based in a trust of the person interviewed. They were willing to allow surprises to
emerge from the conversations. They were aware of the difficulties of understanding
someone whose experience is very, very different.
I began to read about qualitative methods and to ask others for their opinions. Several
courses in qualitative methodology, many books and many long conversations left me
convinced that I would have to create my own qualitative method.
In addition to the course work, I used Creswell's overview of five qualitative methods,8
and materials from various schools in an attempt to find a methodological perspective.
Phenomenology's habit of receptive silence before phenomena seemed the most
respectful attitude, and I gratefully read Moustakas9 and Ihde.
10 I knew I wanted to
imitate their respect for the informant and the informant's experience. I could not stay
with Phenomenology, however, because I could not make the assumption that I would
8 Creswell, Qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five traditions
9 Phenomenological research methods
10 Experimental phenomenology: an introduction
Method
-14-
find an essence. Tim Lavalli suggested that I consider the Grounded Theorists. The
latter proposed that one would come out with a theory, rather than an essence. This
expectation matched my nominalist temperament, so I adopted it. But the Strauss and
Corbin approach to Grounded Theory11
is filled with sociological presuppositions which I
did not want to adopt. I was grateful to find Glaser's12
insistence on the emergence of
themes (rather than a force-fit to sociological assumptions) in his rebuttal to Strauss and
Corbin. As I am not a woman Feminist theory was inappropriate; but Feminists have
created an opening for feeling-based and relational research, and I took advantage of that
opening. Narrative Research13
suggested I look for stories, and Discourse Analysis14
reminded me to look for poetic structure within what I heard. I did not find a school I
could join, but I realized that I had the ingredients for a method I could use.
In the end I made my own methodological stew from these elements. Maxwell15
emphasized that the researcher must reflectively design a personal method based on the
issues of purpose, conceptual context, research questions, method and validity. At
Brendan Collins' suggestion, I did all the exercises in Maxwell's book. Kvale 16
suggested that I return my write-ups to those I interviewed, and ask them to comment and
correct my understanding. Laurel Richardson's article on Narrative and Sociology17
offered me the idea that my research could be "exemplary" rather than informative. She
talked about the functions of narratives, and two of those functions were to provide
11
Basics of qualitative research: grounded theory procedures and techniques 12
Basics of grounded theory analysis: emergence vs forcing. 13
Riessmann, Narrative analysis 14
Gee, The narrativization of experience in the oral style, Gee, Units in the production of narrative
discourse 15
Maxwell, Qualitative research design: an interactive approach 16
InterViews: An introduction to qualitative research interviewing
Method
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examples that others could follow. Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) has focused on
finding and transferring skills.18
That understanding dovetailed with my desire to find
personal examples, and made me realize that I could offer examples to others as well by
gathering these interviews. As I was interpreting people's religious lives, I tried to
remain aware of hermeneutic issues, and certainly practiced Brennerman's version of the
hermeneutic circle.19
There were computer programs that would help in organizing this
research; I chose one called Atlas/ti for its graphical interface, technical excellence, and
humor20
. In the end I determined I would assume that the informant lived in a coherent
world and try respectfully to understand it, that I would try to allow these understandings
to emerge with a minimum of in-advance theory, and that I would return what I wrote to
the informant for their correction and emendation. I hoped this compound method would
help me find and record the experience of others.
Attempting to find examples incidentally addressed one of the issues that besets
Qualitative Research - that of generalizability. Statistical research attempts to be sure
that the study that is being done is representative of the larger universe. To do this it tries
to guarantee that the sample is representative. Qualitative Research most often does not
have sample populations that can be shown to be representative of larger groups, and so
the generalizability of a qualitative study is always a problem. But research that attempts
to find models for imitation does not need to have generalizability. It only needs to show
17
Richardson, Narrative and sociology 18
See, for instance, Bandler, Using your brain -- for a change, Dilts, Modeling with NLP, Knight, NLP at
work: the difference that makes a difference in business, Milliner, Leaves before the wind : leading edge
applications of NLP 19
Brennerman, et al., The seeing eye: hermeneutical phenomenology in the study of religion 20
Walsh and Lavalli, Beyond Beancounting: Qualitative Research Software for Business
Method
-16-
that a single individual reports having done or experienced something. That person can
then serve as an exemplar for others, because their report serves as an indication that such
an experience is possible. The issue of exemplars and generalizability has its own section
later in this chapter.
2.2 How the Literature Has Approached Prayer for Others
This study hopes to explore the life of prayer for others. Two questions in particular
stood out: How do people do this practice, and how does it affect them? In looking at
the existing writings, I tried to find which of these questions was being answered.
I asked as well what I could imitate or borrow for my own study, and what approaches or
attitudes have led other authors away from what I am hoping to study.
The literature about the practice of prayer for others is widely dispersed. It is often found
mixed with other inquiries about theology or history. It can be written from a variety of
skeptical and believing standpoints. It seems that, broadly speaking, there are four ways
to find how prayer for others have been approached.
1. One obvious approach is to read biographies of those who follow the practice.
2. A second is to examine how-to books about pray-ers.
3. A third approach is to seek studies of the process of spiritual healing by some sort
of prayer.
4. A fourth is to study the communities that practice healing.
Method
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2.2.1 Biography
Much of the literature about the life of prayer for others is found in the biographies and
autobiographies of those who have followed this practice. Biographies are acts of
narrative. They place the focus on the development of a life over time, and find meaning
in the changes in those lives.21
Narratives often focus on the second of our questions,
how the life of prayer has affected the one praying.
Biographies have certain constraints. They are written by persons who have interests,
and offered to others whose interests may be the same, or may diverge. In evaluating the
information in them it is worthwhile to remember what those interests are. Many
biographies are written by people who believe in a denomination, and they may take the
life of their subject as proof of the accuracy of the doctrines of that group. I remember
the brief lives of saints that dotted my childhood parochial education. Each miraculous
deed was taken as evidence both that the person was saintly and that the doctrine they
embraced was true22
. The hagiographical tendency to ignore "unseemly" elements can
remove vital information about the person being studied.
There are three book-length biographies of the founder of Religious Science, Ernest
Holmes; and they make a good case study of some of the issues in the biography of
21
Richardson, Narrative and sociology 22
Sometimes just the reverse is true; the author is trying to show that a church and its doctrine are
ridiculous — an example is the life of Mary Baker Eddy by Willa Cather Cather and Milmine, The life of
Mary Baker Eddy & the history of Christian Science In either case, though, the life is used to prove a point
about the organization.
Method
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religious figures. The oldest book was written by his brother, Fenwicke Holmes.23
It is
full of information about Holmes' early life, and not surprisingly about the connection
between the two brothers. It is so full of stories and appears so seamless that it did not
occur to me that it was not a complete story.
A second biography is a collection of fragments brought together by one of his disciples,
Reginald C. Armor. There is no direct conflict between it and the first, but in it you find
out for the first time that Ernest Holmes loved bad jokes:
There was a psychiatrist who had a patient come in for consultation and
treatment. The patient was sitting in a chair in his office, affectionately
holding a duck, when the doctor entered and asked, "Good afternoon. Just
what is your problem?"
"There really isn't any problem with me, Doctor," she said, stroking the
duck. "The problem I came to see you about is with my husband here. He
thinks he's a duck."24
This part of his public persona never came through the biography by his brother. As I
read other writings of Fenwick Holmes25
I came to suspect that there were no jokes in
Fenwicke Holmes' biography of his brother because Fenwicke himself was devoid of
humor. How often does a quality fail to enter a biography just because the writer, lacking
that characteristic, fails to perceive it in the subject?
A third biography, by Neal Vahle, retold all of Holmes' life and reveals information about
the first. Although Fenwick Holmes gives credit to the Trustees of the United Church of
23
Holmes, Ernest Holmes: his life and times 24
Armor, Ernest Holmes the man
Method
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Religious Science for underwriting the book, he does not mention that they edited it. The
Church split into two denominations during the last part of Holmes' life. Fenwicke
Holmes' book was to include a chapter on the division of the denomination into the
UCRS and its rival, Religious Science International. The third biography discloses that
this chapter was deleted by the Trustees. But like Fenwicke's story, the Vahle book omits
reference to Holmes' sense of humor. Both Fenwicke Holmes and Reginald Armor wrote
from within the Religious science movement, and did not speak much about the schism
within the Church. Vahle is outside of the RS movement and brings the matter into the
foreground.
A similar, but subtler, family of issues cloud the questions of prayer style. Everyone who
has studied Ernest Holmes, for instance, knows that Holmes was strongly influenced by
the British judge Thomas Troward. Troward focuses largely on the process of creation,
and Holmes followed him in that. Thus Religious Science seems to focus on the bringing
into being of things, the manifestation of concrete results. It is largely a religion of
"descent", as Gadjin Nagao said of the Mahayana.
Ascent can be understood as an activity or movement from this world to
the world yonder, or from this human personal existence to the impersonal
dharmadhatu, the world of dharmata. Descent is the reverse; it is revival
and affirmation of humanity, or personality in human existence. These
two activities function in opposite directions, so they tend to be
paradoxical, at times illogical, even contradictory.26
25
Holmes and McEathron, Philip's cousin Jesus : the untold story 26
From his essay Nagao, Ascent and Descent: Two-Directional Activity in Buddhist Thought, p. 201
Method
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There is another theme in New Thought, that of ascent. It comes from the work of Mary
Baker Eddy and her breakaway disciple Emma Curtis Hopkins. In order to guess the
degree to which Holmes was interested in ascent, one might wish to know how much he
was exposed to these two writers. Vahle mentions Mrs. Eddy as important, and twice
mentions Emma Curtis Hopkins. Armor's collection of stories does not mention either
Troward or the two Americans. Fenwicke Holmes devotes a whole chapter to Holmes'
encounter with Hopkins, and dwells at length on Holmes' admiration for Eddy. It is all a
matter of emphasis, but I believe that the difference in emphasis is important - Holmes
did in fact create a religion of bi-directional movement, of ascent as well as
manifestation, at least in part because of his contact with these two women's work.
Biography may a good source of information about people, then, but it is full of
emphases and deletions that come from the interests of the author. In this case there were
three biographies available, and we could see some deletions and shifts of emphasis. In
other cases there is only one biography, and we are left to guess at what is missing. If the
hermeneutics of suspicion27
is ever appropriate, it is in the reading of biography.
Biographies of religious leaders tend to spend their latter portions on institutional rather
than spiritual history. The Fenwicke Holmes and Neal Vahle biographies of Ernest
Holmes do just this. The biography of Nona Brooks, the founder of Divine Science, is
similar. In the beginning there is much about her spiritual development and how she
27
I find this expression attributed to Paul Ricoeur (Ricœur, Freud and philosophy; an essay on
interpretation) in Robinson, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Brief Overview and
Critique.
Method
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prayed. Later the focus moves to the extension and success of her Church.28
There is a
similar pattern in the life history of Grace Faus, who brought Divine Science to
Washington DC.29
Again, this emphasis takes place because the books were written for
an audience of church-members. They were influenced and often edited by the
denomination, for those interested in the development of their churches.
Organizational biographies may also overemphasize the uniqueness of their subject. This
is not always intentional; to talk about any one person is necessarily not to speak as much
of others, and one can unfairly be accused of imbalance. But having read accounts of
Jesus in the four Gospels, I found that Geza Vermes' Jesus the Jew completely resituated
my understanding of Jesus. I had never known that there were other Galilean
wonderworkers near his time. Rabbi Gamaliel's son, for instance, was healed by the
prayers of Hinani ben Dosa. And the Talmud preserves stories of Honi the Circle-
Drawer. He acquired his cognomen by drawing a circle around himself and refusing to
leave it until God brought rain to a parched village.30
Another tendency in biographies is to treat the practice of praying for others, or perhaps
the talent for healing, as a gift that cannot be learned. Ruth Montgomery's life of "Mr. A"
treats his skill as inborn.31
While it may be true that some people seem born to this work
28
Deane, Powerful is the Light - the story of Nona Brooks 29
Zevgolis, Grace and Truth - the story of Grace L. Faus 30
Vermes, Jesus the Jew: a historian's reading of the Gospel 31
Montgomery, Born to heal
Method
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— Olga Worrall was healing when she was a child32
— others have learned to pray and
to do so effectively.
One can criticize biographies and of the interests of those who write them, but I like to
recall that Ricoeur's full phrase is "a hermeneutics of suspicion and hope." A good deal
can be learned from any biography. Some biographies do center on the internal life of
the protagonist. Harry Gaze's biography of the still-popular writer Emmet Fox focuses
on Fox's spiritual life33
. Because Gaze was a practitioner of New Thought but not a
direct disciple of Fox, he brought an informed but not adulatory appreciation to Fox's
style of prayer. Gaze also understood that Fox's prayer, rather than his successful church
leadership and writing, was the center of his life. Harry Gaze also wrote a short
biography of Thomas Troward, the British judge who so influenced Ernest Holmes.
Troward declined to create a group of followers, so his biography centers on his thought
and practice.34
Famous pray-ers are also often prevailed upon to write their own autobiographies, and
these autobiographies tend to be more wry and aware of human failings than are the
overly complimentary biographies written by others. W. Frederic Keeler's acerbic and
funny autobiography stays with Keeler's spiritual development. Keeler retired from the
ministry early and remained a spiritual healer to the end of his life. He had a
curmudgeonly sense of humor through which he viewed the foibles of the metaphysical
32
Cerutti, Mystic with the healing hands: the life story of Olga Worrall, Worrall and Worrall, The gift of
healing: a personal story of spiritual therapy 33
Gaze, Emmet Fox: the man and his work 34
Gaze, Thomas Troward: an intimate memoir of the teacher and the man
Method
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movement of which he was part. He also turned it on himself. He tells of having lost the
key to a violin case containing a valuable instrument. Having used his legendary
intuition to ascertain that a certain locksmith was trustworthy, he left the case and
instrument with him. When Keeler returned, the locksmith informed him that the case
had never been locked - something Keeler's intuition had neglected to tell him.35
Conservative Christian healer Agnes Sanford also told her story without much varnish.
She recounted the story of own healing from deep depression. She told about the strains
her healing practice put on her marriage. And though she knows people would think her
a bit mad, she admitted her habit (late in life) of praying for easing of the San Andreas
Fault.36
It seems the key is simply to ask what question the biographer has brought to the study.
I resolved to bring questions of practice and results to my informants, and not to inquire
about organizational or "which doctrine is correct" issues.
2.2.2 Manuals of practice
There is another way to write about lives of prayer for others, however; and that is as
essentially a-temporal patterns, the paradigms of prayer.37
Those who wish to learn how
to pray for others seek to find those patterns, and they find them in manuals that teach
one how to adopt this practice.
35
Keeler, My story: a study of victorious living by means of intuition 36
Sanford, Sealed orders 37
Donald Polkinghorne attributes this distinction between narrative and paradigmatic discernment to
Jerome Bruner. See Polkinghorne, Narrative knowing and the human sciences, p. 17
Method
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Every denomination seems to have lovely books about the skills of prayer and blessing.
This literature focuses strongly on how one is to do the practice, and the stories contained
are sometimes incidental.
In Theravada Buddhism there is a practice of blessing called metta, or "friendliness." It is
one of set of four virtues, the Brahmaviharas, that date back at least to the time of
Buddha, and which are also found in Patanjali38
and among the Jains.39
In the third
century as Christians count the centuries, Buddhaghosa wrote the Visuddhimagga40
,
compiling it from much older material. It contains in its ninth chapter the definitive
description of the Theravadin practice of metta and the other brahmaviharas. Like many
manuals of practice, it is extremely condensed. It discusses developmental strategies,
from the easy to the difficult, for learning the practice of wishing well to others.
There are also tales of the effectiveness of metta practice. While there is nothing about
Buddhaghosa's own experience, we do find stories of others in the text. One tells of
Visakha, a merchant-turned-monk. His practice of metta was so effective that a local
deva begged him not to leave because the practice had brought peace to the area. This
sense that metta has effects on others is much older than the Visuddhimagga. A modern
Theravadin practice pamphlet tells the story of the Buddha's encounter with a lethal
elephant:
Once the Buddha was returning from his almsround together with his
retinue of monks. As they were nearing the prison, in consideration of a
38
Patanjali, Aphorisms of yoga, I.33 39
Gada, Jainism simplified 40
Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga: the path of purification
Method
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handsome bribe from Devadatta, the Buddha's evil and ambitious cousin,
the executioner let loose the fierce elephant Nalagiri, which was used for
the execution of criminals. As the intoxicated elephant rushed towards the
Buddha trumpeting fearfully, the Buddha projected powerful thoughts of
metta towards it. Venerable Ananda, the Buddha's attendant, was so
deeply concerned about the Buddha's safety that he ran in front of the
Buddha to shield him, but the Buddha asked him to stand aside since the
projection of love itself was quite sufficient. The impact of the Buddha's
metta-radiation was so immediate and overwhelming that by the time the
animal neared the Buddha it was completely tamed as though a drunken
wretch had suddenly become sober by the magical power of a spell. The
tusker, it is said, bowed down in reverence in the way trained elephants do
in a circus.41
Some sixteen centuries later, and at the opposite side of the globe, a Presbyterian layman
named Glenn Clark undertook to revive the practice of intercessory prayer in mainline
Protestantism. He was inspired by the optimistic, confident prayers of New Thought. He
was instrumental in bringing New Thought's style of prayer into the larger American
denominations, giving an example of how to carry prayer-methods across confessional
boundaries.42
He spoke and wrote a great deal about the life of prayer, and how one
might live it, in his writings and pamphlets. He also developed training schools for the
practice of prayer, called Camp Farthest Out.43
He also wrote a bit about the lives of
those who practiced what he was preaching; he wrote the story of George Washington
Carver as a model of a prayerful life.44
Clark attempted to make prayer a constant
41
Buddharakkhita, Metta: the philosophy and practice of universal love, no pagination This story is also
told in Narada, The Buddha and his teachings, p. 625 The practice continues today in Burma and Sri
Lanka, according to Fryba, The art of happiness: teachings of Buddhist psychology, p. 157. Fryba adds,
"For a first exercise in metta, however, one should not choose a large animal." 42
The story is told in Braden, Spirits in rebellion: the rise and development of New Thought 43
Clark, The soul's sincere desire 44
Clark, The man who talks with flowers: the intimate life story of Dr. George Washington Carver
Method
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resource for members of his denomination. He taught people to pray in all
circumstances, including sickness and war.45
Buddhaghosa and Clark were both primarily interested in teaching others to practice.
They incorporated stories of people's lives because those lives provided exemplars that
others could follow, and showed the sorts of results that one might expect. But their
focus (like that of others who have written manuals of practice) remained on the patterns
that one should follow to adopt the practice. In my study I decided to imitate these
writers by attempting to find the practice-patterns that my informants follow.
2.2.3 Studies of healing
Another approach to a life of prayer for others is through the studies of the effects of
prayer. Most such studies in our culture have focused on one subset of blessing, the
process of healing.
In the 1950's Franklin Loehr, a Congregationalist minister with a background in
chemistry, attempted to establish that prayer could be tested scientifically. He was able
to do so to his satisfaction, measuring the growth in plants that were prayed for against
control groups.46
His work was preceded by a study of the use of prayer in therapy
groups.47
But it was to be some years before the topic became very popular outside of
small groups.
45
Clark, How to find health through prayer, Clark, et al., The third front through the paths of faith, hope
and love 46
Loehr, The power of prayer on plants 47
Parker, Prayer can change your life
Method
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During those intervening years the widespread use of psychedelic drugs had brought a
new cultural awareness of alternative consciousness, and later studies were likely to
incorporate that awareness of other cognitive states. In the late nineteen-sixties Lawrence
LeShan attempted to discover what made it possible for successful healers in different
traditions to do their work. He published several times on this topic. The first work was
a formal monograph48
and six years later there was a more complete and popular
presentation called The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist.49
The healing method he
studied was based on experiencing a different reality from that which we ordinarily live
within. In common experience there is more truth to separation than to connectedness;
time and space are very real, and so are good and bad. In the reality experienced (if just
momentarily) by the healers LeShan studied, difference and separation were not
particularly real, but unity and connectedness were primary. Time and space could be
discerned, but they were secondary to timelessness and spacelessness.
I decided to imitate LeShan in trying to discern the experienced reality of healers.
A number of studies have been made over the years about the effectiveness of prayer and
other forms of healing.50
Some of this work has been summarized by Daniel Benor in a
four-volume compendium published in Germany.51
Perhaps the most impressive and
48
LeShan, Toward a general theory of the paranormal: a report of work in progress 49
LeShan, The medium, the mystic, and the physicist: toward a general theory of the paranormal 50
Wulff, Psychology of religion: classic and contemporary 51
Benor, Healing research: holistic energy medicine and spirituality: volume I: research in healing, Benor,
Healing research: holistic energy medicine and spirituality: volume II: holistic energy medicine and the
energy body, Benor, Healing research: holistic energy medicine and spirituality: volume III: research in
spiritual healing, Benor, Healing research: holistic energy medicine and spirituality: volume IV: healing in
Method
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most often-quoted is the research of cardiologist Randolph Byrd. He showed (in a fully
controlled, double-blind project) that patients in a cardiac intensive-care unit did better on
many measures of medical well-being when they had been prayed for by fundamentalist
Christians.52
Benor includes other studies of healing work by Christians, Jews, and
seculars. All of the work that he reviews was done within the framework of standard
scientific research.
Larry Dossey, M.D. has introduced many of these studies to a wider audience.53
As a
former Christian who has become agnostic, he parallels many of us in his life experience.
Dossey has a twofold message. He says that there is scientific and secular support for the
efficacy of prayer, and he says that we can pray without returning to the churches of our
childhood. It seems to me that Dossey's role has been to popularize these two ideas in
modern awareness. I hoped to imitate Dossey by avoiding jargon, and by asking the
informants to interpret their denominational languages for us.
There have been other approaches to the study of healing. Robert Dilts was one of the
developers of NLP, or NeuroLinguistic Programming.54
NLP often asks how skillful
persons do what they do, what "strategies" they are using. Dilts brought these questions
to the practices of Jesus of Nazareth and asked, "How did he work? What world did he
the light of recent research. For a review of this work, please see my Walsh, A review of Healing
Research: Holistic Energy Medicine and Spirituality, by Daniel J. Benor. 52
Byrd, Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population 53
Dossey, Be careful what you pray for... you just might get it, Dossey, Healing words: the power of prayer
and the practice of medicine 54
Dilts, Modeling with NLP, Dilts, Strategies of genius, Dilts, Tools of the Spirit, Dilts and Epstein,
Dynamic learning
Method
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work within?"55
Because Dilts inquires within the NLP interest in sensory systems, he
was able to determine that Jesus' relationship with spirit was visual: "Verily, verily, I say
unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do..."56
That is
a surprise to many of us for whom feeling is the method of connection. This is the sort of
surprise that we should expect when we pay careful attention to the way those who pray
experience the world: what seem to be dissonances may be exactly what we need to
notice. I chose to use NLP questions about favored sensory systems and about the marks
that people use to ascertain that their prayer has been a success. These questions about
sensory systems and success-indicators became my only a priori questions.
Still another sort of prayer-study has been conducted by Spindrift and its successor
organization, Grayhaven. The founders were Christian Science practitioners and a
Christian Science nurse. These investigators attempted to find measurable correlates for
excellent Christian Science prayer. The Spindrift/Grayhaven researchers argue
convincingly that they have been able to make a distinction within the idea of prayer and
healing. They feel that they can test when the pray-er is using a forceful kind of mental
coercion and when, instead, the pray-er is using an awareness of the identity the one
prayed for and the patterning power of Spirit. They also have done work to demonstrate
that their distinctions are applicable outside of their denomination.57
Deborah Klingbeil,
who was one of the Spindrift researchers and founder of the Grayhaven School,
55
Dilts, Cognitive patterns of Jesus of Nazareth: tools of the Spirit 56
John 5:19 57
Klingbeil and Klingbeil, The Spindrift papers: Volume 1 1975-1993 exploring prayer and healing
through the experimental test, Owen, The healer, Owen, Qualitative research: the early years
Method
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consented to be part of my study, and will speak about her experiences in a chapter
below.
2.2.4 Studies of praying communities
In addition to the study of prayer as a process, it is possible to study the communities
within which it happens. Three books have done that particularly well.
Fred Frohock has examined non-ordinary healing in its relationship to the law.58
Focusing on cases in which the state has intervened to protect minors from reliance on
faith-healing, Frohock shows how such situations constitute a crisis for the "liberal state."
They are contexts in which the state must abandon its posture of neutrality about religion.
While Frohock's focus on relations with the state are tangential to my study, his
interviews with participants are models of how to understand views we do not share — of
conveying the reality experienced by others, sympathetically and in such a way that the
others would concur. He manages to present conflicting understandings without
attempting to smooth over or diminish their disagreements. In several studies he reports
the experiences of families that wished to rely on non-ordinary healing for their children.
He reveals them as concerned and thoughtful. He tells the story of doctors who brought
those parents to court to force them to accept medical treatment for their children. The
doctors are also portrayed as ethical people who intervened only after deep, even
agonized, reflection. In doing my interviews I hoped to be able to present apparently
contrasting experiences without diminishing their divergences, and I use Frohock as a
model.
Method
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Thomas Csordas is a cultural anthropologist who has written about Roman Catholic
Charismatic healing. He has created what he calls a "cultural phenomenology."
It represents a concern for synthesizing the immediacy of embodied
experience with the multiplicity of cultural meaning in which we are
always and inevitably immersed.59
Csordas differs from Frohock in that he focuses on a single community and its
experience. He also differs from Frohock in that he interprets what he has found in his
interviews from a reductionist sociological perspective. That is, he tends to treat the
respondents' spirit-based answers as false. Perhaps he would question such a harsh word,
but it seems to be the judgment he has made in almost every case: he quotes the
respondent's explanation in terms of the interaction of God and spirits, and then follows
that with a sociological explanation that does not include or accept the respondent's
interpretation. I do not wish to imitate his example in this.
On the other hand, Csordas is a master of phenomenological summary:
The series of terms used to describe the experiential modality of the
sensorium during resting in the Spirit includes qualities of consciousness
as well as sensations: 1) waves or peace or love up and down one's arms,
feeling washed over from head to toe, things rushing through one
("probably minister angels flushing through the body"), warmth, dizziness
(absence of dizziness in one case of a woman who typically becomes
dizzy if lying on her back); 2) removed from sensation, conscious but not
aware of surroundings, inattentive to surroundings, not aware of one's
body, unaware of pressure from the floor one is lying on; 3) like being in
another world/another dimension/somewhere else, letting go of earthly
58
Frohock, Healing powers : alternative medicine, spiritual communities, and the state 59
Csordas, The sacred self: a cultural phenomenology of Charismatic healing, p. vii
Method
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feelings, forgetting one's self; 4) like being hypnotized, in suspended
animation, massively tranquilized under sodium pentothal but awake,
lifeless. Once again in this domain of sensory disengagement and
transport, the indeterminacy of self creates a crisis for the definition of
person. Again the critical theme is that of control, posed as the question of
whether one is "conscious or unconscious" while resting in the Spirit.60
I hope to imitate Csordas in considering the concrete experiential descriptions that
respondents give, while avoiding what seems to me to be a sociological reductionism.
Meredith McGuire and Debra Kantor are sociologists who interviewed a variety of
persons in healing groups in New Jersey.61
Their interview technique and
methodological considerations are models for the kind of interviews I wish to do. They
attempted to elicit both the experience and the world-views of persons involved with
Christian, Metaphysical and Occult healing. My interviews will differ from theirs in that
I will not be attempting to situate the interviews sociologically, and I will not be
attempting to connect the results with sociological explanatory principles. I will imitate
them in using an extended questionnaire to prompt the participants. I will also consider
the results discovered by McGuire and Kantor in comparison with the results given by
my informants. The prime difference between my research and theirs is that they
interview individuals as representatives of groups. I am interviewing practitioners as
individuals. The membership in a group is one of the true things about each individual,
but it is not necessarily the central thing. It is for that reason that the chapters are named
for individuals, rather than for the denominations those individuals belong to.
60
Csordas, The sacred self: a cultural phenomenology of Charismatic healing, p. 242
Method
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All of these authors have contributed attitudes and approaches to this study. I have not
imitated any of them exactly, but have been influenced by them during interviews and
analysis. The common threads to those influences can be summarized in two aphorisms:
focus on the issues you wish to know about, forswearing other matters; and respectfully
interpret your informant's views even when they contradict your (or other informants')
opinions. Whether those two aphorisms are compatible is an interesting question.
2.3 The Generalizability of the Results: Existence Proofs, Exemplars,
and Jacques Pepin's Cooking
"In the middle of life's journey I found myself in a dark wood."
-Dante, L'Inferno
I was a realist in the midst of post-modernists, looking for a realistic method to discover
people's subjective experience of their religious life. My view of the research was
exactly that which Tierney62
called with some disapproval "the portal" view. It was an
attempt to "seek to understand a world different from ours: such understanding will not
merely enlighten and enthrall us but perhaps will also enable us to come to terms with a
particular social phenomena [sic]".
What was it like to pray for other people as a spiritual path? Because such pray-ers are
rarely interviewed, it was clear it would be an interesting and valuable work. Realists
61
McGuire and Kantor, Ritual healing in suburban America 62
Life History's History: Subjects Foretold
Method
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often favor quantitative approaches, but it was clear to me that a quantitative method
would not do this job. I needed a way to discover the experiences of persons who were
having an adventure unusual in our milieu, and to allow it to unfold as best it could in my
understanding and then in my writing. There was no beginning hypothesis to test, so
there could be no quantitative study of such a hypothesis. And those I interviewed would
be few in number, so I had sampling problems.
2.3.1 Looking for General Truth
How well witnesses can recapture experience is always problematic, as I discover every
time I try to remember someone's name; but that matter is not the focus here. I would
rather look at a second issue about qualitative research: "Even if the witnesses are
credible, how general is the truth we have found?" As a realist, I felt I needed an answer
to this question.
One approach to generality is statistical, but the method I had cobbled together was not
going to give me a valid sample. The small group of people to whom I was speaking was
not likely to be a representative sample even of American religious life. The method I
used to find them was simply that somebody recommended someone else. Although this
method had names ("key informant" followed by "snowballing") and there were citations
for it63
, it could not claim to produce a representative sample.
The hope was to find information that had application and implications beyond the small
group of people who had chosen to speak with me about their spiritual life. It seemed
Method
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more valuable to find generalizable information. "Says who?" might be a reply. Well, in
fact, so say most of us: we usually want general truths because they let us pay more
attention to life and less to thinking about life. If I know that my bus will reliably come
to the corner at eight-oh-five, I can spend the rest of my time making coffee and feeding
the cat. If I have no idea when the bus will be there — and if being on the bus is
important to me — I am likely to neglect the cat and the coffee because I must go wait
for my bus.
Generally-applicable information can be uninteresting — unless we care about the topic.
If we do care, though, it interests us deeply. I was asking these people about their
spiritual lives because what they said mattered to me. And I think that most people who
do inquiry care about the topic they have chosen. Scholarship and research are acts of
passion. We search for informants and ask them to join us in our investigation just
because we do care very much about what we find. If we did not, we would stay home
with the cat.
2.3.2 Doubting The Statisticians
I knew that the people who had spoken to me had something valuable to say. They had
spent their lives devoted to a rare pursuit. Did they have to be dismissed as an
"inadequate and unscientific sample"? A critic with a superficial grasp of statistical
methods might think so.
63
Monette, Applied social research, Rubin, Research methods for social work
Method
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The kind of generality claimed for statistical studies is interesting, though. Statistical
research does not give certain knowledge. Instead, it gives an informed guess. Blaise
Pascal began his study of probabilities after he met the Chevalier de Méré. This
nobleman was addicted to gambling, and he had an intuitive talent for guessing the odds.
Pascal wanted to understand the patterns that Méré was perceiving64
. It was from the
Chevalier's passion for gambling and Pascal's passion for understanding that we inherit
the quantitative method - a strategy for guessing. Careful statisticians understand that we
are forced to guess about the world; their desire is to make the best guess possible. They
would be the first to say that what they are finding is not any kind of certain knowledge.
That means that statistical studies also have epistemological problems: no matter how
rigorous their statistical method, their result remains a guess about the general truth. It is
an informed, disciplined — conjecture.
The guesswork of the statisticians has one virtue: it does speak about general cases. I
knew that my eight informants did not constitute a sample, and might not be
representative of anyone except themselves. Were their stories "just anecdotes"? Would
the results that I was getting be of a lower epistemological status than the results obtained
from a valid quantitative study? I wondered what sort of general knowledge a qualitative
study of their experience might have to offer.
2.3.3 Saved by the Chef
I was working at that moment in a public television station in San Francisco. The station
was taping the second series of Jacques Pepin: Cooking with Claudine. In this show
64
Bernstein, Against the gods : the remarkable story of risk
Method
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Pepin was teaching his daughter something of what he had learned in forty years of
cooking for de Gaulle, the Kennedy family, and millions of people on television. I had
the good fortune to do audio on these shows. I was very excited because I have been an
amateur cook for years. Every night I went home and cooked something he had
demonstrated that day; my wife wished we would tape Pepin shows every week. To
work on a program with Jacques Pepin was to get a master cooking class from the very
best.
In the Pepins' show they re-enacted the master-apprentice teaching relationship by which
Jacques Pepin had learned, first from his restauratrice mother and later from cooking
schools. At one point Jacques showed Claudine how to drain a batch of banana fritters,
fresh from the fat. Claudine was spreading paper towels on a cookie sheet, and Jacques
said:
JP: What are you doing there?
CP: I'm getting so you can drain it...and I'll cut the bananas.
JP: No No No No. That's no good. I don't drain it...People drain it on
paper towels -- This is a mistake. Because what happens, you put it on
top, there is no air underneath, it gets soggy, it gets soft underneath. I
learn that with the Korean people. And the Korean [ JP puts a slightly
elevated cake-rack over the towels] you put a wire rack on top of it, you
know. You put a wire rack so there's air underneath it; it can drain. There
is air underneath, and that's really what you want to do... 65
I had never heard of this technique before. It was new in my world, and I immediately
adopted it.
65
Pepin and Pepin, Jacques Pepin's Kitchen: Encore! Cooking with Claudine
Method
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Is this "just an anecdote"? It happened about the time I was reading Laurel Richardson's
article, "Narrative and Sociology"66
. She argues that personal stories have a variety of
overlapping roles in a culture. Among them are what she calls "cultural stories" and
"collective stories."
Cultural stories provide exemplars of lives, heroes, villains, and fools as
they are embedded in larger cultural and social frameworks, as well as
stories about home, community, society, and humankind.
The collective story, she says,
…gives voice to those who are silenced or marginalized in the cultural
narrative….the collective story displays an individual's story by
narrativizing the experiences of the social category to which the individual
belongs, rather than by telling the particular individual's story or by simply
retelling the cultural story.
Jacques and Claudine Pepin had created an "example" and an "exemplar." The dual role
of their performance is highlighted by Richardson. By showing that something was
possible that I had thought was impossible, they gave an "example." They moved
something from the margins of experience, where impossible things live, to the center of
awareness where it was undeniable. They had created an existence proof. They had also
modeled a behavior which others could follow, and were "exemplars" for other cooks.
66
Narrative and sociology
Method
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2.3.4 Existence Proofs: Give Me an Example
Mathematicians often talk about existence proofs. Those are any proofs that show that
something exists. The most usual kind of existence proof is constructivist; in
Wittgenstein's67
laconic words,
Some existence proofs consist in exhibiting a particular mathematical
structure, i.e., in "constructing an entity".
Existences are important for several reasons. First, you may for some reason want certain
things to exist. If you are seeking way to keep fried food from being soggy, the fact that
there is a way to keep it crisp is relevant to you in and of itself.
But that is still a single case. Is there any kind of general knowledge that can be obtained
by knowing that X exists? It seems to me that there are two important kinds of universal
knowledge that an existence proof gives you.
First, an existence proof shows that we live in a universe in which X is possible. If you
have always believed that crisp fried food is impossible, then seeing the Pepin family's
demonstration means that your believed-universe suddenly gets bigger. As Deborah
Klingbeil (one of women I interviewed) put it, in describing the effect of paranormal
demonstrations on those who see them:
…see, these are the sort of things, somebody shows something like that,
and a person responds, "That's interesting." And then they try it, and their
world gets bigger…
Method
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Second, a demonstrated existence disproves all contrary theories. It is a counterexample.
If there are theories that say X cannot exist, finding X disproves those theories. One
example can prove that many big and pretentious theories just ain't so. You have
falsified them, seven at one blow, as in the Grimm tale. Counterexamples are powerful
stuff.
So finding or creating an example of X has two very powerful and very general
intellectual consequences. It shows that this universe is one in which it is possible for X
to exist; and it demonstrates that any theory that denies X is false.
The existence of X does this even if no one ever finds another X. If your informant is the
only one who ever experienced X - and if your informant is credible — that "anecdote"
by itself has enlarged the universe and laid low many theories. This is a consequence of
what a postmodern analysis might call the demarginalization of X.
2.3.5 "For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done…"68
There is a second a second meaning to the word "example." It is an exemplar, and an
exemplar can be imitated. As soon as I saw the Pepins' method of handling fried food, I
started "doing as they had done."
This possibility of imitation is what makes an exemplar so powerful in the world of
action. If Rosa Parks sits down in the front of the bus, she has not only shown that the
67
Wittgenstein's lectures, Cambridge, 1932-1935: from the notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret
Macdonald
Method
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universe has the possibility of a dark-skinned woman sitting in the front of the bus, and
destroyed all theories that say it is impossible. That would be an existence-proof, but she
has done more. She has also given an exemplar that others can follow.
It is for this reason that the examples found by qualitative research are consequential. If
one informant in a qualitative study has done something, and you record it, you transfer a
pattern that others can use as a model. Pepin had learned from Koreans; the show
transmitted that exemplar to the viewers. This is one of the roles of narrative mentioned
by Laurel Richardson in her 1990 study of the functions of stories69
: they serve as a
pattern that people can follow.
People live by stories. If the available narrative is limiting, destructive, or
at odds with the actual life, peoples' lives end up being limited and
textually disenfranchised. Collective stories which deviate from standard
cultural plots provide new narratives; hearing them legitimates a replotting
of one's own life. New narratives offer the patterns for new lives.
They also say something very important for social beings like us: They say that if you do
it, you will not be alone. There are others like you.
The cases I have given above are admirable, leading to good cooking and desirable social
change. There are more ominous roles for exemplars: copy-cat crimes, dysfunction
transmitted through families for generations, and ethnic hatreds learned in childhood
from one's elders.
68
John 13:15
Method
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Whether the exemplar given is good or bad, it does remain as a possible model. And that
exemplar may persist into the distant future. When I began my research on spiritual
practices, I was inspired in part by a document written by the philosopher Philo, giving us
our only knowledge of a Jewish-Egyptian monastic community in the desert near
Alexandria70
. Philo wrote his essay while Jesus was alive; I took it as an exemplar two
millennia later. Exemplars are a cross-temporal and intercultural form of knowledge.
2.3.6 Exemplary Research
Persons from other epistemological traditions might accept qualitative research without
all this extra talk. But I think of myself as an epistemological realist. As a realist I was
trying to understand what sort of knowledge was produced by qualitative research. The
criticisms I had heard suggested it was inferior knowledge, because it lacked
generalizability.
But qualitative research does give general knowledge. It produces what in the austere
language of mathematics is called "existence proofs, " and restores significance to the
unusual and perhaps statistically anomalous. Qualitative research shows that certain
phenomena exist, and falsifies any theory that does not acknowledge its findings. By
threatening to falsify any theory that does not make room for what it has found,
qualitative research can set criteria for general theories. Whatever else they do, general
theories must have a place for the examples discovered by qualitative studies.
69
Richardson, Narrative and sociology 70
Winston, Philo of Alexandria: The Contemplative Life, The Giants, and Selections
Method
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Qualitative research also provides models to be imitated. What has been done can be
done again. In finding these exemplars we offer patterns for others to imitate.
Each of these roles involves examples, and qualitative research seems always to provide
examples. Perhaps a realistic name for all qualitative inquiry would be "Exemplary
Research."
2.4 The Plan of the Research
This is the statement of purpose and the action plan I created after doing the exercises in
Maxwell.71
It became the concrete plan that guided my research.
2.4.1 Intention
The purpose of the dissertation is to gather the experiences of persons who pray or treat
for others, so that they can serve as exemplars for others in our culture and the future.
2.4.2 Selection of Participants
I will be interviewing five to eight people, from different religious groups. They will be
persons I discover who meet four criteria:
A. "Working" for others is a major part of their practice.
They pray or treat for others often, and consider it part of their religious
practice.
71
Maxwell, Qualitative research design: an interactive approach
Method
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B. They have been doing this practice for some years.
They may have developed the practice over time, but they have been
doing it for more than two years.
C. They are well-known in the field of prayer and healing, or they are known in their
community as successful.
Either they are a well-known figure such as a researcher or an elected
figure in their denomination, or they have a reputation for efficacy in their
community which I can check by asking one or more members of their
community. Or both.
D. They have signs of balance.
Some possible signs are a sense of perspective or humor, and a lack of
fanaticism. I include this difficult-to-specify criterion because I hope to
find practitioners who will serve as models for other people.
2.4.3 Research Questions
I will be trying to answer the following research questions.72
I may not ask these
research questions directly of the participants, unless the interview questions (which
follow) and the followup questions which amplify each interview question do not elicit
enough information.73
I use the word "prayer," "treatment" and "Blessing Power" in the
following questions; in the interview I would use the terminology of the informants, and
the words they have given me in the first interview question.
72
The distinction between research questions and interview questions I learned from Maxwell, Qualitative
research design: an interactive approach. 73
This follows the "Funneling" strategy of Smith, Semi-Structured Interviewing and Qualitative Analysis.
Method
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2.4.3.1.1 What do these practitioners actually do when they pray or treat for others?
This is a question about strategy, in the Neurolinguistic Programming sense.74
Do they
have a preferred sense to represent their experience - visual, perhaps, or feeling? How do
they enter the prayer or treatment state, and when (and why) do they leave it? What do
they do within the state, and how does it differ from what they do otherwise?
2.4.3.1.2 What is their relationship with those they pray for?
Do those they pray for have to be present? Consenting? Likeable? How do they
"contact" them if they are distant? Is their connection with this person permanent? What
is the feeling quality of their connection?
2.4.3.1.3 What is their relationship with the Blessing Power(s), in what kind of
experienced universe?
Is the Blessing Power personal or impersonal? Is the blessing a gift or the result of a law
in the universe? What kind of characteristics must the universe have for the prayer or
treatment to be meaningful and successful?75
2.4.3.1.4 How has this practice changed them over the years?
How did they begin to pray, and what has changed in their experience because they do?
How do they deal with success and failure? What do they love about the practice? How
has it shaped them?
74
NeuroLinguistic Programming has gathered and developed a variety of methods for discovering the
strategies by which skillful people perform their arts. See Bandler, Using your brain -- for a change, Dilts,
Modeling with NLP, Dilts and Epstein, Dynamic learning, Dilts, Changing belief systems with NLP,
Gordon, Therapeutic metaphors: helping others through the looking glass.
Method
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2.4.4 The Interview
2.4.4.1 Interview Methodology
I will visit the interviewees when possible. When it is not practical to visit them in
person because they are far away, I will telephone them at a prearranged time. My
handout and prior conversations will have explained the purpose of the interview. I will
tape the interviews. I will obtain a written permission to record the interview and to use
the information.
There will be two interviews. In the first interview I will be asking the following
questions. The second interview is discussed under Analysis.
2.4.4.2 The Interview Questions I Plan to Ask Them Include:
I will ask the summary question (which are capitalized below) first. The questions that
are grouped beneath each summary question are followup questions in case more
prompting is necessary.76
2.4.4.2.1 "PLEASE TELL ME A BIT ABOUT YOUR PRACTICE."
What do you call your practice?
What do you call what I have referred to as the "Blessing Power?"
How long have you done the practice?
How often do you do this practice?
75
Examination of the nature of the experienced reality was the basis of the model developed by LeShan.
See LeShan, The medium, the mystic, and the physicist: toward a general theory of the paranormal,
LeShan, Toward a general theory of the paranormal: a report of work in progress 76
This follows the funnel method of Smith, Semi-Structured Interviewing and Qualitative Analysis
Method
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2.4.4.2.2 "JUST WHAT DO YOU DO IN YOUR PRACTICES?"
What distinguishes the state of prayer or treatment from other conditions?
What does the state of prayer feel like?
What would you tell someone else to do in order to pray or treat as you do?
Do you follow a customary program or ritual when praying for others, or is it created ad-
hoc each time, or is it a mix?
2.4.4.2.3 "HOW DO YOU ENTER THE STATE OF PRAYER OR
TREATMENT?"
When do you do it?
Under what circumstances do you do it?
Where do you do it?
Do you do it alone? With others?
What are the preliminaries? Are they necessary?
Some people chant, visualize, breathe in a particular way or visualize? Do you have any
such custom?
Are there customary postures or gestures associated with this practice for you?
Are there certain words you use in prayer?
2.4.4.2.4 "HOW DO YOU CONTACT THE BLESSING POWER(S)?"
Can you reach this Power at will, or must you wait on it?
Is there more than one Blessing Power?
Is the Blessing Power a person?
Method
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Do you feel a relationship with this Power?
Is the Power essentially a law of nature, like gravity?
Do you feel you are a separate entity than this power?
Does the Power have an emotional quality?
Do you enjoy the contact with the Power?
How do you recognize this Power, and distinguish it from other entities?
2.4.4.2.5 "HOW DO YOU WORK WITH THE PERSON YOU ARE PRAYING
FOR?"
Do you work only when the person is present?
Do you ever decline to work on a person?
How do you "contact" and identify a person you are working on at a distance?
If you work at a distance, how do you identify them
Is the contact (with the person treated for) like the contact with the Blessing Power?
Do you need to know the person you are working for personally?
Can you treat a person who has not consented in advance?
Is there any person for whom it is not appropriate to pray?
Does the contact persist after you have completed a treatment?
2.4.4.2.6 "WHAT GUIDES A TREATMENT WHILE YOU ARE DOING IT?"
Is there an inner experience that lets you know you have completed the treatment?
Is there an indicator by which you know you have succeeded, or that all is well?
Is there an indicator that tells you there is a problem with the treatment?
Do you always experience success subjectively?
Method
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Do you repeat treatments? How do you know if you need to do so?
2.4.4.2.7 "WHAT HAVE YOU HAVE SEEN HAPPEN BECAUSE OF YOUR
PRAYERS AND TREATMENTS?"
Do you feel it is appropriate to test the effectiveness of your practice and prayers?
What results have you seen or heard of that you would call successes?
Can you tell me about some prayer interventions and their results?
Do you have any validations that would convince a skeptic?
2.4.4.2.8 "HOW HAVE YOU LEARNED TO PRAY?"
Are there teachers or books that you value and in whose path you try to walk?
Did you have a teacher or teachers?
Are there favorite books you turn to often?
Have you learned from people outside your communion?
Have you taught any others?
2.4.4.2.9 "HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH DIFFICULTY AND FAILURE?"
Do you experience any uncertainties?
Have you experienced what seems to be a failure of prayer?
How do you understand or deal with such apparent failures?
How do you understand such things?
Are there times you just cannot pray or treat? What do you do then?
Do you experience depression or "faith crashes"?
Do you ever refer a person to others?
Method
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2.4.4.2.10 "HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH NEGATIVE EXPERIENCES DURING
AND ASSOCIATED WITH PRAYER?"
Do you have negative experiences during prayer?
Do any negative personal qualities come up?
How do you deal with these experiences and qualities?
Are these negativities ever transformed into benefits?
2.4.4.2.11 "WHAT DO YOU VALUE ABOUT YOUR PRACTICES?"
What about your practice do you love?
What kind of person should follow this practice?
What would you like to share with others?
What do you expect/hope/look forward to in your practice?
How has this practice changed you?
2.4.4.2.12 "WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO PRAY NOW FOR THE SUCCESS
AND USEFULNESS OF MY DISSERTATION?"
(Here I ask them to pray for my dissertation. I really do want them to do so. And in
addition I get to hear their language of prayer.)
Method
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2.4.5 Analysis
2.4.5.1 Analysis of the First Interview
I will transcribe the interviews myself. I will code each interview separately, using the
software Atlas/ti.77
It is a program that lets the user mark quotations within text and
group those marked quotations by theme. It will be used as I try to answer two kinds of
questions.
2.4.5.1.1 What Exactly Do They Do?
This question uses the tools of NeuroLinguistic Programming to try to get a sense of what
they do. I will be attempting to find the sorts of verbs they use (Visual, Auditory,
Kinesthetic) and their sequence in an attempt to guess how they represent their
experience subjectively. I will try to find what sets prayer or treatment apart from other
states, how they begin and end it, and what they do within it. I will try to discover the
nature of their tests for success and failure. This is an a priori set of questions, and the
answers it will elicit cannot be called emergent.
2.4.5.1.2 What is their relationship with those they pray for, and what is their
relationship with the Blessing Power(s), in what kind of experienced universe?
These questions will be asked within a Grounded Theory framework. During the open
coding I will look for and mark in vivo themes using the Atlas software. From those
themes I will extract axial codes that group these themes and provide preliminary
categories. From those axial themes I will then move to the highest level of abstraction,
77
Muhr, Atlas/ti: the knowledge workbench - visual qualitative data analysis, management and model-
building For a comparison of this software with other Qualitative Research software, see Walsh and
Lavalli, Beyond Beancounting: Qualitative Research Software for Business
Method
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selective coding, and attempt to find the story that accurately represents what the
informant has told me. The axial and selective codes will be emergent; I have no idea in
advance what they will be.78
I will use Phenomenological79
and Narrative80
techniques, as well as discourse analysis,81
to supplement my understanding of what is happening in the interview.
After I have done my coding, I will write up my understanding of what they interviewee
has told me.
2.4.5.2 The Second Interview
I will send the interviewee a copy of what I have written, and arrange a second interview.
In this meeting I will ask what is right and what is not so correct in what I have written. I
expect that their responses will significantly change the "spin" of what I have written.82
I
may bring questions that have arisen in interviews with other participants to find what
this person thinks of the issue, allowing the interviewees to react to each other's thoughts
and experiences.
78
The primary current reference must be Strauss, Basics of qualitative research: grounded theory
procedures and techniques, a useful manual that unfortunately is embedded within a variety of social-
science assumptions. The co-discoverer of the method registered a vigorous dissent and argument for a
more "emergent" methodology in Glaser, Basics of grounded theory analysis: emergence vs forcing.. I
followed Glaser's wing of Grounded Theory because my studies do not fit easily within Strauss and
Corbin's framework of sociological assumptions. 79
Moustakas, Phenomenological research methods 80
Richardson, Narrative and sociology, Riessmann, Narrative analysis. 81
Gee, et al., Discourse Analysis. 82
In bringing the analysis back to the person who spoke with me I follow the recommendation of Kvale,
InterViews: An introduction to qualitative research interviewing.
Method
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I will transcribe the second interview as well, and code it as I coded the first. The result
of the two interviews will be used to create a final (for the moment) representation of the
practice of each participant.
2.4.5.3 Comparison and Connection
In the final section of analysis I will try to show how the practices overlap and how they
differ. My intention will not be only to find common practices: divergences will be as
informative as the similarities. And this theoretical coda is not the heart of the
dissertation: the important part of the work is in the chapters on each individual. This
final section will be used only to note obvious points about similarity and difference. As
with the Grounded Theory portion of each chapter's analysis, it is impossible to say what
this section will contain. It will emerge only from the interviews, their analyses, and the
corrections the participants give me.
2.5 Expectations
No one goes into this kind of research without a few guesses about what will be found.
Here I try to confess my prior expectations, or at least the ones that have become
conscious, as if I were one of the informants:
I expect that analysis will not reveal an agreement in ideology among the
pray-ers. I expect that there may be more overlap among their practices
than there is in their ideologies. Even in the case of practices, however, I
expect that the similarities may be more like what Wittgenstein calls a
"family resemblance" than a sharing of any single feature. I expect that
each person interviewed will share at least one or two elements of practice
with some others. I expect that there may not be a single element of
practice which all share, but that there may be considerable overlap of
elements - just as some members of a family share eye-color, while others
share hair-type or height.
Method
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2.5.1 Leaving the Record (More or Less) Untampered With
This method was revised January 28, 1999, after advice from Brendan Collins, and
meetings with Daniel Deslauriers, my dissertation support group, and many other friends.
It is the plan with which I entered the dissertation, though not exactly what I did. More
about the deviations from the plan appears in the final chapters.
2.6 How The Following Interviews Are Written
2.6.1 The Organization of the Interview Chapters
I write this much later than the rest of the introductory chapters. Most of the introduction
and method chapters were written before the interviews, and (except for minor editing) I
have let them stand. I write this part after the interviews have been completed and
largely written up.
The interviewees have been asked very similar questions, and one possibility is to present
their responses to those questions. The result would be a sort of table, even if it were
presented in prose: "To this question the first person said this, and the second said that,"
and so on.
However, it is my intention to find out what the life of prayer-for-others is like for
different practitioners. Those practitioners differ, not only in their answers to the
questions but also in which questions seem important; so I am attempting a different sort
of organization. At the risk of being totally subjective, I am trying to organize the write-
ups in terms of the themes that emerged from the transcripts. I attempt to make their
Method
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discourse, rather than my questions, be the spine of the writing. One result is that the
chapters about individuals may barely reveal that they were asked, in most cases, very
similar questions. Even the prayers that each offered for my dissertation are not always
mentioned. I am grateful for those prayers, and believe they are very helpful, but I talk
about them only when they are part of a theme that seems important.
To avoid unchecked projection of my agendas onto their experiences, I have been asking
the eight participants to review and check what I have written. I feel that their opportunity
to correct my impressions gives me a corresponding liberty to record more than simply
their responses to my questions. I have been trying to find the flavors and textures of
their prayer lives.
It did not seem likely at the beginning that those flavors and textures would be variations
on some basic theme, and I have not found them to be so. I will say more of this lack of
commonality in the final chapter.
2.6.2 Onymity or Anonymity?
Should academic studies of individuals always be anonymous?
If one looks at psychological studies, it would appear so. There seems to be a medical
model that is extended into research. When one goes to a doctor, it is wisely customary
that what one says is private. The lineage of Psychology in our culture flows from
Method
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Medicine, and the privacy rights of psychological "patients" derive from that of medical
patients.
If the doctor should speak about a patient's condition, that privacy requires that all
identifying information be removed. When ones does medical research, the subjects must
not be named, because they are patients. If Psychology is a branch of Medicine, those
"on whom" one does psychological research are also patients, and must not be named.
There are other models of research, however: the ones that come to mind are the study of
Art, History and Journalism. Each has its own rules, and those rules differ from each
other. If one reproduces a work of art, for instance, without crediting a known source,
one has committed a serious breach. Authorship of a work of art in our culture is a
permanent possession of its creator. One must name the author or be guilty of
plagiarism. Although permission to reproduce can be given, the name of the artist must
be associated with the creation; not to do so is a form of theft.
As an undergraduate I majored in History. In historical studies one must if possible
reveal the names of the ones whom one is quoting. Anonymous sources in history are
suspect, because no one knows just who those persons are. One does not know the
relationships and connections of their lives, their status and position in their society, the
influences that made them who they are and the consequences that emerged from their
choices.
Method
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Historical students continually attempt to identify a nameless source. Any clue is seized
upon and valued. An author who has attempted to disguise a source, on the other hand, is
reprehensible. Responsible historical research is "onymous."
Journalism takes a middle road. I have spent more than thirty years around journalists, as
a technician on news crews and on news sets. I have also written in a computer news
magazine for fifteen years. The rule in journalism is that it is preferable to give the names
of informants , but there are situations in which it is acceptable to disguise a source.
Information which is attributable is more believable, for exactly the same reason it is
credible in historical research: one can place the informants and evaluate what they say
from one's knowledge of their positioning. There are situations in which one publishes
anonymous information, however. If the informants can only say something from within
the protection of namelessness, one can use their information without attribution. In this
case the responsibility of evaluation falls on the reporter and the editor; one believes a
publication's anonymous sources because one trusts the onymous editors and writers of
that publication. The "Shield Laws" that protect a reporter's notes, and prevent
authorities from asking the name of the reporter's source, are an indication of the value
the culture places on this kind of semi-onymous information.
The world of research then has a spectrum of responses to the question, "Should a source
be named?" Roughly it is this:
Method
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Anonymity <—————————————————————————> Onymity
Medicine Journalism History Art
Which is the appropriate position on this spectrum for research on a life of prayer? If my
research were done in a Psychology department, I would have to observe the customs of
Psychology. It is not, however: it is part of a department of Philosophy and Religion.
That field of study is part of the Humanities, I would argue, and closer to History and Art
than it is to Psychology. So the departmental custom would suggest that my sources
should be named.
It is certainly true that my research is a collection of interpretive biographies. Such
biographies are clearly somewhere in the right-hand three-fourths on the spectrum, from
journalism to art. One might also argue that the lives that these individuals have crafted
are works of art, and that, even if they have given me permission to reproduce what they
have said, they retain the right to be named as the creators.
I have given very extensive quotes, as part of my intention is to provide material for
others to interpret. These interviews were done at the same moment or before the
permission was signed. It was the speaker's understanding that their name would be
used. If I were to give such extensive quotations without attribution, would I verge on
plagiarism?
Method
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One might argue that it might be legitimate to tell such stories about anonymous persons
if one could give the reader some sort of positioning information, something like "This
person is a member of a religious order in the Roman Catholic Church, and has prayed
the Rosary for others daily for twenty-five years." That would position the person as a
member of a class, and suggest that somehow what is presented represents that class.
What is said is from one member of that class, but we have no way to justify the
implication that what they have said is typical of the members of that class. It is more
honest to say, "This is the thought and feeling of an individual, named Margaret, or
Shneor, or Deborah, or Antonio"
In the end it seemed best to let those I was interviewing make the decision, and to abide
by their choice. The final version of my consent form, which was approved by the
Human Research Review Committee at the California Institute of Integrate Studies, is as
follows:
I have agreed to be interviewed on tape by Birrell Walsh as part of his research on the practice of prayer and treatment for others.
I understand that part or all of what I say may be published academically
and commercially, and I agree that such publication is acceptable to me.
I understand that I may be anonymous if I choose, except as provided by
law.
(Please initial one choice)
_____ You may use my name
Method
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______I prefer to remain anonymous. You may not use my name. I understand that my denomination may be mentioned in it, and my role in
that denomination.
_________________________ ___________
Signature Date
__________________________
Printed Name
_________________________________
_________________________________
_________________________________
Address
Each of the persons I have interviewed has indicated on the form that I may use their
name, and so I have done so. If someone already interviewed changes their mind, I will
of course honor that choice as well.
2.6.3 How the first interview differs from the other interviews
My first interviews were with Margaret Stortz. Held in 1996 and 1997, more than two
years before the others, they were a trial run and a pilot study. I have re-written them for
this document, but after some thought I have left in a lot of information about just how I
found themes and arranged them. This same process went on in all the other interviews,
Method
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but it seemed appropriate in at least one case to show the churnings and shiftings of ideas.
I hope that doesn't get in the way of appreciating Dr. Stortz' austere spirituality.
2.6.4 "Um"'s and "Uh"'s
In the following interviews there are many "Um"'s and "Uh"'s and other speech debris. I
have removed some of them; but some I have left in to indicate turns in thought, or
moments when the speaker decided to reformulate something.
Speech is a very different medium from writing. Even the most articulate person will
seem scattered if their speech is transcribed literally. Let the record show that each of
these people was very articulate indeed! I hope they will forgive me for keeping some of
the artifacts of their speech.
2.6.5 The use of very long quotations
In the chapters that follow, I used very extensive excerpts from the interviews. My
intention is to concentrate on the participants rather than on my interpretation of them. I
recall that when I have read books about interesting people, I have always wished the
quotes were longer and the commentary shorter.
3 MARGARET STORTZ: "CONSTANTLY GO BACK TO
YOUR SOURCE"
Margaret Stortz has been a licensed Religious Science practitioner since 1971. She was
until her recent retirement the Minister of the First Church of Religious Science in
Oakland. She was also the President of the United Church of Religious Science, the
larger of the two Religious Science denominations. She has been a frequent columnist in
the denomination’s monthly Science of Mind Magazine. I first interviewed her in
December, 1996, at her church in Oakland, California. We spent a bit over an hour
talking about her practice of spiritual mind treatment. At the end of that time I asked for
a treatment for the success of my dissertation, and she gave one. We met again in 1997,
and she looked at an earlier draft of this chapter and commented on it.
The interviews with Margaret Stortz were the basis for my dissertation proposal. In 1999
I re-examined the interview transcripts and rewrote this section, with her agreement.
Religious Science is part of the American Metaphysical movement, a group of
denominations that believe in changing conditions by thought. Among them are
Christian Science, the Unity School of Christianity, Divine Science and several others.
Religious Science was founded in the first quarter of this century, the last large
denomination of the movement to come into existence. It was created by Ernest Holmes,
Margaret Stortz
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a former Congregationalist from New England.83
Holmes found the writings of British
religious philosopher Thomas Troward84
so convincing that he created a church based on
them.
Margaret Stortz was also a convert. She was raised a Lutheran, but that denomination did
not speak to her.
When I went to the Lutheran church as a girl, it filled a great deal of music
for me: I learned to sing there; I learned to play the organ there; it filled
that. But there was something in me that it didn't fill. I remember being,
mmh, probably about fifteen years old, and this particular little church had
a communion rail. And I'd go up and I'd practice the organ, and in
between I'd kneel at this little rail. I'd look up at some of the pictures or
statuary or whatever, and I'd say, "Why can't I feel those things?" And it
never came.
Like many people she was not satisfied with the spirituality of her childhood. But there
were portents of a future religious life:
…when I was a young woman, a girl actually, I recall talking with a
boyfriend of mine. And we were, I don't know, sixteen, seventeen,
eighteen, somewhere in there. And I can't remember just what we were
speaking about. I do remember his comment, and the effect that it had.
He said something to the effect, he said, "Margaret, I don't know you're
going to do with your life, but I know it'll have to do with something
religious." And at that particular point, I must have had what some people
would call some form of opening. It's almost as if I would, I had had a
heavy cloak on me, that was invisible. And it was almost as if it fell off.
And I was able to stand up, and feel very light.
83
Holmes primary text is Holmes, The Science of Mind 84
Troward's best known books are Troward, The creative process in the individual, Troward, The
Edinburgh lectures on mental science A biography of him is found in Gaze, Thomas Troward: an intimate
memoir of the teacher and the man
Margaret Stortz
-64-
She did not immediately find a doctrine she could accept. She married and raised a
family. It was in her thirties that
…a friend of mine handed me the Science of Mind textbook. And I read
into it, first in the areas that seemed of most interest. And...I discovered
that everything I'd ever thought in an unformed, unrecognized fashion,
was there. So that suddenly, all the hopes and dreams and so on, you
might say, at deep levels, crystallized very quickly. It was almost as if,
from the opening, from the intuitive opening that that young man touched,
it moved through the arenas of my life until suddenly, when I was about
thirty years old, Boom, there it was. And so, I started to come to the place
where that was taught, which was here. And I took their class-work, and
all of that was now just an orderly progression. There was no question
that I would do anything but that. It seemed absolutely natural. The next
steps, you might say. And everything I needed to become a practitioner
fell into line.
3.1 The Craft of Treatment
The first impression for anyone who interviews Dr. Stortz is that she is no-nonsense and
businesslike. When I interviewed her in 1996 she exuded a seriousness and focus that
was reflected in her large, attractive and apparently prosperous church. Her religion was
very much the same — treatment was a craft, and she carried it out with seriousness.
3.1.1 What are practitioners?
More than many denominations, Religious Science is focused around a single practice.
That practice is called "Spiritual Mind Treatment," a process for bringing things and
situations into manifestation by conscious and focused thought. It is considered a
learnable skill, and "practitioners" are taught in a regular training program. While anyone
can do spiritual mind treatment, practitioners are professionals at it. They give treatments
to clients, using a process that will be described later, and they charge them for the
Margaret Stortz
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service. Many, though not all, practitioners are listed in the denomination's Science of
Mind Magazine.85
Practitioners are not self-appointed in Religious Science (as they are among, say,
Christian Scientists, though CS practitioners generally seek a sort of approval shown by
listing in the Church's journals). Instead they are trained by the local churches to which
they belong, over a period of time, in a course prescribed by their denomination:
MS: Currently, in the United Church of Religious Science, it takes the
taking of all, of all what we might call the certified classes, Foundation
Class, Spiritual Practice, Self Mastery, Roots of Religious Science —
those all take 120 hours. Then it takes taking a practitioner course for two
years, which is ninety hours each year. So that's another 180 hours. It's
about 300 hours.
BW: On the average how many years would it take a person to do that?
MS: It takes two years for the practitioner course itself; eighteen months to
two years for the others.
3.2 A Melody in Five Notes
The process known as “Spiritual Mind Treatment has a customary pattern of five steps.86
They are:
"Recognition
"Unification"
"Realization"
"Thanksgiving/Acceptance"
85
They are now (1999) also listed at the denomination's website, http://religiousscience.org/ 86
Jaeger and Juline, You are the One: living fully, living free through affirmative prayer: a workbook
Margaret Stortz
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"Release"
3.2.1 A Pattern of Prayer
I asked Dr. Stortz to treat for the success and usefulness of my dissertation, and all five of
these steps were present in the treatment which Dr. Stortz did for me. I use the treatment
Dr. Stortz did for my dissertation to illustrate the five steps.
3.2.1.1 "Recognition”
The practitioner or person treating begins by recognizing that the only real entity is God,
despite the appearance that there are many beings. Religious Science is a strongly
monistic group. They believe that everything spiritual, mental-emotional or physical is
part of God. In this they have obvious analogies to those forms of Hinduism that
recognize the physical universe as a manifestation of mind.87
When I interviewed Dr.
Stuart Grayson88
in New York, he said that to him Religious Science is in fact the
practice of Vedanta. Monism is its first principle of Religious Science, the major premise
from which everything else flows.
The person treating begins by standing in ordinary reality, and affirming (from that
ordinary reality) that there is another, true reality that is unitary. When she began the
treatment for my dissertation Dr. Stortz said:
… And I invite you to close your eyes, to rest, to start with a comfortable
position, and to know with me: That there really is only one life, God's
life, which by its nature is always in manifestation. Creative power of
87
Thomas Troward, the British judge whose writings inspired Ernest Holmes, was a judge in the Punjab.
He spoke Punjabi and read Indian religious classics. See Gaze, Thomas Troward: an intimate memoir of
the teacher and the man 88
Dr. Grayson is a member of the other major Religious Science denomination, Religious Science
International. Their disagreement with Dr. Stortz' denomination, the United Church of Religious Science,
is about governance rather than doctrine. For Dr. Grayson's style of treatment see Grayson, Spiritual
healing: a simple guide for the healing of body, mind and spirit
Margaret Stortz
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God is always in action, always in motion, always creating form after form
after form, maintaining, supporting those forms. You and I are part of
those forms. And so I accept and know that the essence of God is that by
which we were all made…
3.2.1.2 "Unification:"
In this step a deductive application is made of the first step. If God is all there is, then
God is also fully in each part. This is very difficult to make sense of in modern terms,
but it was a common thought in Hellenistic times. As Porphyry said about the year 250,
“When the indivisible is present in the divisible, it is entire in each part”89
then we are
God. It is not that we are a part that somehow contains the whole. It is more that there
are various ways of perceiving reality: when we perceive holistically, using what might
be called the unitary topology90
, there is nothing but the One. The first step in treatment
asserts that unitary reality. The second step says that the unitary reality must be fully
present in oneself. All of God’s powers are present in each of us, and it is with God’s
power we work.
While the first step asserted that a Unitary Reality existed, the second step is an entry into
that reality. The practitioner now asserts that the unitary reality is immediately and
personally true. Specifically, if God is creative, we are creative. If God’s word makes
things happen, so does our word. If the universe responds to God’s word, it responds
also to ours – because our word is God’s word.
Dr. Stortz did not label each section of her treatment, but it seemed to follow the five
steps exactly. Her (apparent) second step was:
89
Porphyry, Launching-points to the realm of the Mind, p. 56
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and that the mind of God is the mind we use, the life of God is the life we
live, therefore I know I can speak my word on behalf of Birrell, because
we occupy one mind and we share a divine unity. The words I speak must
produce what I declare. They cannot return to me void. They are acted
upon by the infinite activities, by the power of God, by the law of mind.
3.2.1.3 "Realization:"
The ambiguity of the word “realization” is deliberate. It means both “to come to know
something that is true” and “to make something real.” Because Religious Science
believes that thought creates, the ambiguity of this word exactly captures the creative
process. When one knows something, it comes to be in the external world. In this third
step one affirms that what is desired is already present, using the present tense rather than
the future. This affirmation in the present tense is based in part on Mark 11:24
“Therefore I say unto you, what things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye
receive them, and ye shall have them.”(KJV). A widely used manual of this style of
treatment, in teaching how to do treatment for money, says of this step:
Maintaining a sense of your unity with a Presence and Power greater than
you are, know that Abundance and Support exist in place of your money
problem. Contemplate this idea, ridding yourself of all doubt or
reservation. Become deeply convinced that this new and positive
experience you desire is unfolding for you.91
The Realization step is often the longest part of a treatment, because the idea that is to be
manifested is described in great detail. Dr. Stortz’ treatment for my dissertation
continued:
… And so I accept and know, and accept along with Birrell, that all the
energies, all the guidance, all the direction, all the footsteps, all the
90
Janich, Topology 91
Jaeger and Juline, You are the One: living fully, living free through affirmative prayer:
a workbook, p. 36
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thought that is needed to create the best possible project, to create the best
possible outcome, to create the best possible dissertation, is taking place
right now. Something that adds to the quality of life, something that
brings good to all who touch it, this is a revelation of God, in the truest
most invitational sense, because together we open our minds, because
together we open our minds and open ourselves to the goodness of God in
this particular arena. And know that God is making Itself known with
love, with joy, with wisdom, with a sense of enthusiasm and, and interest
and innovation. I know and I also accept that this wonderful piece of
work is accessible to all who want and need it, that it does indeed have a
good life. It is blessed, because with joy and openness we receive all that
God has for us. And that whatever Birrell needs to know, he knows;
whatever he needs to do, he does. If God says "Go" he goes; if God says,
'Stay" he stays. All is in good order; all is in perfect working order. And I
accept along with Birrell that the divine activity is revealing itself in his
spiritual life, for the best possible path that his creative spirit shall take, be
it in the realm of licensed practitioner, or even something else that may
loom ahead that is even more wonderful. I accept with him the openness
to divine innovation, the way as he puts it to blaze trail, to know new
things, to see new visions, to think new thoughts, to be the place where
God shows forth in more wonderful ways of revelation, in him, through
him, as him, then ever he or I or anyone else could have imagined.
3.2.1.4 "Thanksgiving/Acceptance:"
This step is often brief. Its purpose seems three-fold: to express genuine warmth, to
reaffirm that what has been said is already so, and to disconnect the one treating from the
creative state for return to ordinary experience. The person treating no longer speaks as
the one who is creating the desired manifestation. Instead, she speaks as the one
receiving and accepting the reality. Implicitly she has returned to ordinary reality and left
her awareness of the Unitary reality. Dr. Stortz said:
… For all this and the greater good that God always has, the great "more"
that God always has, I give deep and grateful thanks even as I now accept
an experience of this. And for all of it I say "Thank you, God."
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3.2.1.5 "Release:"
This step is simply to leave mind , or Mind, to manifest what one has done. It means
letting go of the treatment. This step is often reduced to one phrase, as it was in this case:
So it is.
The release, Dr. Stortz suggested during the second interview, is related to a lack of
investment in the outcome.
BW: How do you avoid the investment? How do you release, if that's
what you do?
MS: I step aside, you might say, in my mind, and remind myself, when you
get invested in something it's because your ego's invested in it. It's because
somehow, whether you meant for it to or not, you get the little sense that,
egotistically, "I've gotta make something happen here" - for lack of a
better generality - "I've gotta make something happen here." When I
remind myself of Jesus' commentary, which is "[This?] is not I, but the
Father within, who do the work," when I can remember that, and I've
practiced to do this, then I don't have a real ego investment in it. And
when I don't, there's no investment in the outcome. We try to teach that.
BW: What's it feel like to have no investment in the outcome?
MS: It feels as if you've, you've, been the open door. You've been the
conduit for something to be recognized, for words to be formed, for a
thought-form to be made, about something that it wanted. And simply to
be that. It comes in this way, it goes through you, it goes out there. It's
like the wind going through the door.
This five-step treatment is taught throughout the Religious Science churches, not as a
required pattern but as a convenient one.92
It is taught to newcomers in the Religious
Science movement. There is no implication that one needs to be a practitioner or even a
member of the Religious Science movement in order to use this pattern of treatment.
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There is even a website sponsored by the Religious Science Church’s World Ministry of
Prayer in which one can just fill in the blanks, following online suggestions to make a
five-step treatment.93
The patterned-ness of the treatment does not mean the work is rote, or that it does not
take awareness. The entire purpose of the five-step pattern is to move the person treating
to a consciousness that will allow the desired result to manifest. The formation of this
consciousness is critical, because Religious Science believes that thought genuinely does
form reality. Just mechanically repeating the words may be a beginning; but it takes real
acceptance – “realization” – to make the treatment effective.
3.2.2 Variations on the Theme
If the five steps are a basic melody that is played over and over again in the practice of a
Religious Science practitioner, the actual treatments are full of variations and
syncopations.
For instance, in her treatment for me, Dr. Stortz moved rapidly and repeatedly between
the positions of creator and receiver.
I know and I also accept that this wonderful piece of work is accessible to
all who want and need it, that it does indeed have a good life. It is blessed,
because with joy and openness we receive all that God has for us.
92
Costa, Excuse me while I call God. For other patterns of treatment, see Carter, Your handbook for
healing, revised and expanded edition 93
Available in 1999 at http://www.wmop.org/
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“Knowing” is the Religious Science term for the creative awareness that makes
something happen. In the first sentence she is "knowing" something into existence; in the
second sentence she is receiving that which she has just brought into being.
It is the background monism of Religious Science that makes possible this dance among
postures. Religious Science’s belief that all is God makes it sensible to be at one moment
identified with the Creator of the Universe, and at another to be identified with the
grateful recipient – because in Religious Science both identifications are true.
In particular, it allows the treatment itself to be at once an act of creation, in which the
practitioner is making something, and an act in which the practitioner is receiving the
ideas for the treatment. The treatment bears fruit at first in ideas for the treatment itself.
In fact I had a teacher that used to say, he used to use watermelons, as an
example. You plant the seed, you cultivate and so on; you get a
watermelon. But the watermelon actually in his mind was always a side-
effect, because then you got more seeds, from the watermelon. So the
creative process is always, always going on.
Religious Science also understands God’s goodness to flow from God’s unity and
universality. There is no room for anything else in a fundamentally unified universe.
Like Christian Science, Religious Science affirms that God is all that is real. Unlike
Christian Science, Religious Science affirms that physical reality is part of God. So
underneath apparent pain – which is a real, but not a necessary experience in their view –
lies the unity of Fundamental Mind. As we recognize that unity, we also access its
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goodness. If we swim in the ocean, we get wet; if we access God’s universality, we come
back dripping with good. The trick is always to turn towards God.
So if you want to make it as clean as possible, in your spiritual mind
treatment you constantly go back to your source as cleanly as you can.
Then the ideas that go into a treatment will be both powerful and good.
3.3 The Experience of a Practitioner’s Life
3.3.1 Sensory Representation Systems
Dr. Stortz had a wide variety of sensory language in her discourse. It was not, however,
randomly distributed.
Most of the language she used while doing treatment was kinesthetic and auditory.
The words I speak must produce what I declare. They cannot return to me
void. They are acted upon by the infinite activities, by the power of God,
by the law of mind.
The language of treatment itself most frequently employed words about words, as in this
excerpt, and about the activity of God or Mind. She used visual language, but primarily
in "checking steps." That is, when Dr. Stortz referred to people whose treatment skills
were more apparent than real she said that
Some people seem that way, that they can roll off a wonderful treatment,
and then I look at their lives... So I would be hesitant to say, on listening,
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I would say on somebody else's treatment, I could discern whether it was
in a good state or less so.
In this case she declines to make a judgment based on her own hearing, but is willing to
make one based on seeing. She is, however, willing to make judgments based on the
verbal reports of others. When I asked how she knew a treatment had been successful,
her first reply was based on such a report:
BW: Is there a way by which you know that a treatment has been
effective?
MS: The people will tell me.
While visual and auditory and kinesthetic expressions were all common, she did not
make any references to taste or smell at all. The majority of statements about experience
of giving a treatment were made in terms of kinesthetic experience. Favorite expressions
were "uplift," "opening," flowing" and "fitting together."
In describing the consequences of treatment, she often spoke of external referents:
…And all kinds of things fall into place: this person signs the contract, or
this person stops complaining, or this person gets out of the way, or things
line up. It's not uncommon to see things line up, when before there were
all kinds of logjams. Divorces settled. Or somebody who has been
resisting you stops resisting. In other words, there's a much better flow,
when all things are aright.
Dr. Stortz’ treatment language, however, does not have checking steps – she is declaring
something into existence, rather than looking to see if it has arrived. The suspension of
checking is an important part of treatment, because belief is essential. There are a
number of references in Religious Science and New Thought literature to not checking
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before something has had time to mature. The most common metaphor is planting a
seed, and the damage one would do to that seed if one were to dig it up daily to see if it
were growing. In many ways the “Release” step reflects this commitment to not checking
before the work matures.
3.3.2 Emergent Themes
There were fifty-three themes that I found in the text, in addition to the a priori questions
that I had brought to the interview. These fifty-three were what Strauss and Corbin,
quoting Glaser, call "in-vivo" codes.94
In most cases I simply used Dr. Stortz' words to
mark the text in which they occurred. In some cases I used the in-vivo code from another
place to mark a different piece of text. But these codes were all created from the Dr.
Stortz’ words or close paraphrases. Having found these in-vivo themes, I attempted very
carefully to conceptualize them into categories. I tried, when possible, to use names for
the second-level categories which also reflected the actual language of Dr. Stortz.
3.3.2.1 Openness
One category that emerged early was "openness." I originally thought that this openness
would apply only to the person receiving the treatment, and that it would be a metaphor
for receptivity.
It was found in that context:
... there may be in that person a sense of openness to what is going on.
That's why we do it. Whether people are tuned in or aware or not - the
94
In qualitative research, the process of marking text as having a theme is called "coding." When the
name of the code is in the informant's own words, it is called an "in-vivo" code. See Strauss, Basics of
qualitative research: grounded theory procedures and techniques
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openness can always be there. There might be a little place somewhere in
somebody who's attuned to this that says, "Help me." You know, there's
the door.
This openness is not confined to a willingness to receive. It is also found in the process
of giving a successful treatment. The idea of "opening” then becomes transitive rather
than intransitive; one does not just “open" receptively, but actively makes room for the
desired change:
...if one person in a circumstance here holds another place, holds life,
holds an opening for something different to happen, then it changes the
energy in the whole setup.
There several other in-vivo codes that I included in the category "openness." One was
free:
… It's like turning another cheek, and saying, "Wait a minute. Let me
just change the energy here." And when that happens, everything around
is free. Free to respond in a different way. And frequently does.
There was possibility:
... If anybody, if in the mind of people at present there's a little thing
that's called 'possibility' that shows up in their minds, then those lines of
resistance and intransigence dissolve. And you get something going.
A third was letting go, a theme Dr. Stortz emphasized strongly:
BW: And you find that ummm... as a practitioner do you find that most
situations change easily?
MS: It depends. It depends on how much resistance there is to change,
resistance to change and/or holding on to what is. Releasing what is and
resistance to change is very great. It's not that people don't believe there's
a greater power. I used to think the big biggie would be having people
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believe that there's a power greater than they are. Not a bit. People have
accepted that at some level, most of the time. They may not know what it
is, but they have some sense of it. It's the practice of not resisting change
and letting go of what is - that's the big one.
During her second interview, Dr. Stortz made it clear that a practitioner can tell both
when a treatment is working and when it is not yet doing so:
I can say as a generality from my own experience and dealing with
practitioners and teaching practitioners - the way that they sense it, that it
works is, as I mentioned, the sense of internal alright-ness, that takes
place in them, a sense of completion. A sense of something having moved,
if you will, whether it's completely manifested or not, something's moved
in here. So that' s the inner, internal sense that you get, that something is
in place. Whereas, you can be doing something in front of somebody, and
it's as if you're, you're talking to a wall. And so, you don't get the sense
that something has made its way into whatever needs to happen. That
you've spoken it, and it lies, as I've also said in here, in abeyance in Mind;
there it is, but it may not have created, there may not have been an
opening to it, so there it lies in wait, you might say.
When I asked Dr. Stortz for the subjective signs by which she knew that a treatment had
been successful, one of the two signs she gave was that there was a sense of enlargement:
… If, let us say, in the delivery of a spiritual mind treatment, whether it's
in front of somebody or by myself, if ..if it's perfect - and by that I mean,
if everything falls together, the words, my senses, the atmosphere, the
person I've brought in, in mind - if everything simply falls easily and
effortlessly into place, and becomes larger, and that place becomes larger
than any of the constituent parts - myself, the words, my thoughts, the
person and so on - then [unintelligible three syllables] then I think, "That
was perfect. Everything fit together."
Later she said:
… In describing the indescribable, that's where I've come: to describing
what makes a perfect circumstance. In my mind, a perfect situation is
larger than any of the constituent parts. It's larger than me, it's larger than
my thoughts, it's larger than my words, it's larger than the person who may
be involved. It becomes a greater circumstance. Everything becomes
elevated to a much larger level than any of the constituent parts.
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A final quality that I grouped with openness is receptivity/expectancy. I did this partly on
the basis of its opposition to "closedness," and partly because Dr. Stortz linked the two in
the following passage:
... if for instance I have... somebody comes to me, and they come with the
idea, "Now, if she says it, it's going to be so." Now what that really, what
that means to me is that they don't complicate it. They don't complicate
the coming. They come with a deep expectancy. And if the expectancy is
there, the fact that I do the treatment is almost immaterial. It's the fact that
the expectancy, I happen to be on the other end of the expectancy, it could
it maybe that if "Mary Dokes" was sitting here, the expectancy might not
be present, but half the way, half the work is through that. So, if they
have a high expectancy, and a reasonable amount of trust in what I do,
then they've made a very broad way, to be open.
Clearly receptivity/expectancy shades into another category, that of "belief." I allow it to
remain in the category "openness" because Religious Science often speaks of a kind of
expectancy that does not completely define what is expected. Dr. Stortz elsewhere
connects openness with this undetailed expectation of good:
... And if enough people are, let us say, open to good, general good
without saying "it's gonna look like this, or it's gotta look like that; and
you guys have to shape up," they quit doing that and open, open the lines
of mind, to a greater expansion of awareness, people who aren't so tightly
bound in mind can receive that.
There is even a name, in Religious Science and other Metaphysical churches, for a
treatment that is too insistent on spelling about all the details of what must happen. It is
called "outlining," and one is frequently warned against it.
The category of "openness" then had these qualities: Open (as not-closed), freedom,
possibility, letting go, enlargement, and expectancy/receptiveness. As I was turning this
category called “openness” over in my mind, it kept occurring to me that the appropriate
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name for this category was not a noun. The best name for the whole category was
"open," which might be a verb or an adjective. We have a custom in English and other
Indo-European languages that categories should be named for nouns, as nouns represent
substances; and substances have a higher ontological status than do accidental
predications represented by verbs and adjectives. It seemed to me that this custom need
not be followed in all cases. Therefore, I switched the names of the category and one of
its qualities. The name of the quality became openness and the name of the overall
category became “open.”
3.3.2.2 Good Order
There were two marks that Dr. Stortz used to recognize a "perfect treatment." One was
that the situation as she experiences it enlarges, a quality I have included in openness.
The other is that things fit together into "good order." Some examples of good order are:
If, let us say, in the delivery of a spiritual mind treatment, whether it's in
front of somebody or by myself, if ...if it's perfect - and by that I mean, if
everything falls together, the words, my senses, the atmosphere, the person
I've brought in, in mind - if everything simply falls easily and effortlessly
into place, and becomes larger, and that place becomes larger than any of
the constituent parts - myself, the words, my thoughts, the person and so
on - then I think, "That was perfect."
…In other words, there's a much better flow, when all things are aright,
when the person has a good expectancy, and I don't have any concerns
particularly either - then we're all in a state of flow, and a lot of things fall
right into line.
…it can be husbands, it can be wives, it can be quarreling into resolution,
it can be solving of contracts, it can be the right job, it can be the
resolution of something that's been hanging fire - lots of things like that.
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This "good order" or harmony is one of the best-known beliefs of the Metaphysical
religions.95
In fact, Ahlstrom96
called them as a group the "Harmonial Religions."
The good order is expressed in Dr. Stortz’ discourse with static metaphors (“fitting
together), moving metaphors ("flow") and metaphors that begin with motion and come to
a static conclusion ("falling into place, ""line up"). Good order is of course found in
results:
And all kinds of things fall into place: this person signs the contract, or
this person stops complaining, or this person gets out of the way, or things
line up. It's not uncommon to see things line up, when before there were
all kinds of logjams. Divorces settled. Or somebody who's been resisting
you stop resisting. In other words, there's a much better flow, when all
things are aright, when the person has a good expectancy, and I don't have
any concerns particularly either - then we're all in a state of flow, and a lot
of things fall right into line. It can be husbands, it can be wives, it can be
quarreling into resolution, it can be solving of contracts, it can be the right
job, it can be the resolution of something that's been hanging fire - lots of
things like that.
The good order is definitely supposed to be found in the external world, in response to
treatment. Religious Science’s founder Ernest Holmes was very clear about the need for
real results.
But we should not fool ourselves about any demonstration... The kind of
demonstration we believe in is the kind that can be checked by a
physician, if one so desires. If we are treating for the removal of a cancer,
we have not made a demonstration until the cancer is gone and the
wholeness of the body is evident to everyone. This is not a process of
saying “Peace” when there is no peace.97
95
For a history of these groups, see Braden, Spirits in rebellion: the rise and development of New Thought 96
Ahlstrom, A religious history of the American people 97
Holmes, The Science of Mind, p. 175
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But as with the prior category, “open,” this category of "good order" is not only present
externally in the result. It is also sometimes found before the treatment has been done. It
shows up in that case as rapport:
… Many times, if I'm conversing with somebody who's come for a
spiritual mind treatment, and we really weave together the energies
between us, so that there's a wonderful rapport, then the treatment is just
an extension of that very thing.
And finally, good order may be part of the treatment itself:
At this point, because (and I can only speak for myself) because of having
done this so long, there's a there's a place of readiness, you might say; so
that when I when I set myself to giving a spiritual mind treatment it is as
if all things set themselves in place.
As with the category “open”, there are several qualities to the category "good order."
There is the image of meshing, or fitting together. This possibly static image of fitting
together was one of Dr. Stortz’ most commonly used expressions during the interview.
Mm-hmm. yes, if I feel, if I come to the place where I have that sense
that 'this is perfect, it all fits together,' then I'm done.
There are mobile-going-to-static images like line up or set themselves in place or fall
together.
…And all kinds of things fall into place: this person signs the contract,
or this person stops complaining, or this person gets out of the way, or
things line up.
Then there are fully mobile images like flow and [breaking up] logjams. What is
particularly interesting is that these images are found together, interwoven in descriptions
of what is clearly the same situation:
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… they've made a very broad way, to be open. And all kinds of things fall
into place: this person signs the contract, or this person stops complaining,
or this person gets out of the way, or things line up. It's not uncommon to
see things line up, when before there were all kinds of logjams. Divorces
settled. Or somebody who's been resisting you stop resisting. In other
words, there's a much better flow, when all things are aright, when the
person has a good expectancy, and I don't have any concerns particularly
either - then we're all in a state of flow, and a lot of things fall right into
line. It can be husbands, it can be wives, it can be quarreling into
resolution, it can be solving of contracts, it can be the right job, it can be
the resolution of something that's been hanging fire - lots of things like
that.
I included in the category of good order those images that seem to imply that the fit or
flow is no problem. I call this quality easy:
if everything simply falls easily and effortlessly into place…
A final quality that I have tentatively included in good order is “centered”.
…. I sense, I have a greater sense of well-being, a greater sense of being
able to return to spiritual center, if you like, more quickly. So it's not a
question of never being upset, never being disturbed. Life disturbs.
People die, disappoint you, so on. It disturbs you. But, through practice
like that, I can approximate my spiritual center more quickly. I don't have
to drift off, and be away for weeks and months at a time. Depending on
the nature of what I'm handling, it can bother me for a portion of the day,
or less. If it's big time, I can be disappointed for a while. But even in the
disappointment, it doesn't have to skew my capacity to think clearly, or to
come back to center.
I include this quality with some hesitation, as Dr. Stortz used the expressions center and
centered only of herself.
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3.3.2.3 Continuity
I kept getting the impression that the various major players and goals of treatment were
not as separate as I might have expected. For instance, the pairs:
Practitioner/Client
Before-State/After-State
Treatment/Non-Treatment
were not as widely divided as one might expect.
To think about these matters, I tried to think about the different sorts of distance that can
exist metaphorically between two conceptual things.98
This “distance” can be conceived
as separation (How far apart are they?), as difference (How distinct are they?), or as
“barrieredness” (How high or wide or deep is the barrier that separates them?).
For instance, in some kinds of Christianity, the gap between “saved” and “not saved” is
huge. The distance is effectively infinite, so wide that only an infinite being can bridge
it. Consider also the difference between a priest and the laity in Catholicism. There is a
major distinction between the powers and abilities of a priest, and those of a lay person:
The priest can turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The priest can
forgive sins. Some priests can confer the Holy Ghost. Lay people can do none of these
things.
On the other hand, there are religious traditions in which there are no barriers at all.
Buddhism frequently speaks of the identity of Samsara and Nirvana. The mind of the
98
I think this is the process of "imaginative variation" recommended by Phenomenology. See Moustakas,
Phenomenological research methods
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boddhisattva rests unbarriered, says the Heart Sutra.99
In traditions in which non-
distinction is emphasized, the distance between two things is zero and there are no
distinctions at all. The metaphysical movement in America has had some people who
take this position – they are called “Absolutists.” Whether in Buddhism or the
Metaphysical movement, one can notice that the abolished barrier is often replaced with
another: those who perceive the non-difference are separated from those who don’t.
Gnostics are separated from those who have not seen.
In general the Metaphysical tradition has lowered barriers without abolishing them. They
seem to have a universe characterized by the quality of "continuity." The difference
between a practitioner and a client is not one of kind or of transmitted power. It is simply
one of practice. Dr. Stortz explicitly approved of people practice their own activity, and
then told the story of one of her students who did so successfully:
... And when people practice their own activity actually that's the very
best. In class work, what is pleasing is to see people say, "Well, let's see:
I've been doing this for eight or ten weeks now. And I decided this, this
holiday - we were talking about holidays last night in class - one woman
said, “Every Thanksgiving we go to whomsoever's house and we always
get into huge fights, my husband and I. And I was in the car, and we were
doing exactly that. " and she said, “This time I said, 'Now wait a minute.
I've been learning all this stuff. I've been learning how to think differently
and so on. Let me just change my mind about this, and hold it in a
different way. I can do that.'" And she did. And then the whole energy
shifted. So that's part of what goes on.
Another continuity, another way in which a practitioner and client are linked, is in mind.
In this idealistic system, there is only one mind and all beings share it.
99
My translation is from the Sanskrit given in Conze, Buddhist wisdom books: the Diamond and Heart
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…It's my belief that as we're unified in mind. Even though we're in two
different places, and we occupy different space, in mind we are linked. So
I can speak the word on behalf of so and so because of that shared unity.
I'm doing the talking, in place of somebody else, but they're here in mind
with me.
As the client and the practitioner are close, so also are other things that might have been
separated. For instance, the before-treatment state and the after-treatment state are not
totally distinct. A successful treatment’s conclusion is, to some extent, pre-existing in
two ways. One of them is the already-discussed openness of the client that makes
successful treatment possible:
I can feel on my end for instance, "Boy, that that did it." And if over here
- and it doesn't happen very often - but over here if there is a great
resistance at some level or a great fear, then I say that the treatment lies in
abeyance. It's there, but the door has to be open, on the other end, you
might say. When Jesus said to the disciples, 'If you go into a place and the
people receive you not, then you shake the dust off your feet and leave,"
and that to me was talking about the same thing. He could go, with the
master awareness, for instance, he could go from town to town. People
would say, "Who are you? You are the carpenter's son. Why should we
listen to you?" So even though he brings with him the awareness of what
he's using, if he doesn't have any receivers over here then... Otherwise it
would have been only necessary to go from town to town, wave his hands,
and say, "Everybody in this place is healed [unintelligible: "if need be"?]"
So that tells me that you need somebody who's open and receptive to
what's going on. It also means that I can speak my word on behalf of
spiritual leaders, world leaders and so on, who don't know me, haven't a
clue as to what I may be doing, all in the idea that we're using one mind,
and there may be in that person a sense of openness to what is going on.
That's why we do it. Whether people are tuned in or aware or not - the
openness can always be there. There might be a little place somewhere in
somebody who's attuned to this that says, "Help me." You know, there's
the door.
A second kind of pre-existence of the solution in the midst of the problem is the
willingness, in fact the desire, of God to manifest as a solution:
Sutras.
Margaret Stortz
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… For all this and the greater good that God always has, the great more
that God always has, I give deep and grateful thanks even as I now accept
an experience of this. And for all of it I say 'Thank you God." …
Because the success of the treatment pre-exists in these ways, the “before-treatment”
state and the “after-treatment” state are not completely distinct.
Finally, treatment itself is not that far or different from non-treatment. Dr. Stortz asked
me to emphasize that people are always treating:
… I'm going partly by what Ernest Holmes says, and partly by my
experience. All thought is creative. This is the thought of Ernest Holmes.
It, practically speaking that is so. Prayer is the conscious intention to
make contact with the presence of God for a particular reason, for a
particular outcome. This is the conscious intent to use the divine energies.
Every time we think, we use the divine energies, whether they are
consciously used, or by default. So generally speaking, every thought is a
prayer. So since we essentially pray all day, every day, the idea would be
"What kind of prayer am I creating? And how could I improve the quality
of my thought, so that my life will become more enhanced?" And with
real knowledge and real intention then you have the reason for working
with Spiritual Mind Treatment…
The category "continuity" means that the distances (between client and practitioner,
treatment and non-treatment, before and after) are neither zero nor infinite. The travel
between them tends to be continuous and gradual. One works by increment rather than
by sudden jump. Improvements may be dramatic, but they are not discontinuous. More
of this will be said later, in considering the effect on the practitioner of a life of treatment.
3.3.2.4 God-Agency
To what is one “open,” and from what or whom does “good order” come?
… Because together we open our minds and open ourselves to the
goodness of God in this particular arena.
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There is amazing change in Dr. Stortz’ language patterns during the treatment. Outside
of the treatment, she mentioned the word “God” only twice, in the expression “intentional
contact with the presence of God.” She also spoke briefly of “Universal Energy,” in a
manner that was not particularly theist. But in these twenty-seven lines of treatment, she
mentions the word God sixteen times.
In treatment language, the implied agent changes. Outside of the treatment, her language
implies that the agents are people who act by changing their thoughts or by choosing to
be open. Circumstances and other people respond
When one takes the energy away from a problem, and gathers it into a
place of wholeness, or a holy place if you like; then it means that you've
changed the energy. You've moved out of a level of blow for blow, or
word for word, or epithet for epithet and stepped over here. It's like
turning another cheek, and saying, "Wait a minute. Let me just change the
energy here." And when that happens, everything around is free. Free to
respond in a different way. And frequently does. There's almost always
immediate responses in the people around you…
Within the treatment, however, her language almost always positions God as the actor:
... And know that God is making Itself known with love, with joy, with
wisdom, with a sense of enthusiasm and, and interest and innovation.
God directs and people respond:
If God says "Go" he goes; if God says, "Stay" he stays.
God provides and people receive:
…with joy and openness we receive all that God has for us.
Finally, God is expected to improve the treatment itself, to bring even more and better
things than are asked for. I think this latter point shows the degree to which agency has
shifted between the extra-treatment and the intra-treatment language. Outside the
Margaret Stortz
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treatment, Dr. Stortz asked me what I wanted, and implied that we would open the door
to it. Inside the treatment, however, it is God who decides what to do:
… to be the place where God shows forth in more wonderful ways of
revelation, in him, through him, as him, than ever he or I or anyone else
could have imagined. For all this and the greater good that God always
has, the great more that God always has, I give deep and grateful thanks…
How is it possible to reconcile these two different kinds of agency? How can the creature
direct the Creator, as the orthodox Christian would ask? I believe the answer lies in the
Religious Science insistence that we are not different from God. Theist mystics often say
this. But to take it literally implies that one has access to God’s power and wisdom and
love because one shares in it. The language that Dr. Stortz uses is the language of one
who takes this identity literally.
There is an ambivalence about this identification in the Metaphysical literature. When
Religious Science’s founder, Ernest Holmes, studied with the fabled healer Emma Curtis
Hopkins, she told him
…of a convention she held in Chicago, and there was a student, an
Absolutist, who began screaming, “I am God,” and she said, “There, there,
George, it is all right for you to play you are God, but don’t be so noisy
about it.” 100
The Metaphysical movement is quite aware of the psychic inflation to which this attitude
can lead. They therefore tend to encourage people to be humble at the same time they are
100
Holmes, Ernest Holmes: his life and times, p. 197
Margaret Stortz
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presumptuous. In practice, this means that as they create, they may switch the active
agent from “I” to “God.” They then draw on God as "a power greater than they are."
3.3.2.5 Craftswomanship
Within treatment, Margaret Stortz' role seems to be that of a craftswoman. It is her job to
make the best treatment she can, and to let Mind take matters from there. The balance
can be difficult to find, but it is always her job to make the best possible treatment. She
thinks about the treatments, and may return to them:
If I am not satisfied with something I've done, I'll come back to it later.
Over the years she has developed "a spiritual muscle" that allows her to enter the
treatment state quickly and effectively, even when distractions are present.
So that when you flex the same spiritual muscle over time long enough, it
knows what you want; and it will move you to that place.
Like anyone who practices a craft, she has learned when work is done just right:
…if I come to the place where I have that sense that 'this is perfect, it all
fits together,' then I'm done.
The real test is not subjective but in how the treatment has served those for whom it was
made: "People will tell me." Her object is always a useful, applied spirituality.
Her practicality showed during the second interview, when she discussed why she uses
the step-by-step treatment pattern of Religious Science rather than the powerful spiritual
leap of Christian Science:
Margaret Stortz
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I believe it's possible, as in Christian Science, to go from A to Z, from
where you are to where you want to be, with nothing in between. If you
have a, a powerful enough consciousness that you can to it, sssst, there
you are. For most of us, that is not practical. Most of us need to take the
walk from A to B to C to D and so on and so on, to get from A to Z. And if
we need to do it that way, that's what you do.
Her insistence on complete practicality while dealing with an infinite Spirit
brings that Spirit to focus and effectiveness in daily life. This is exactly the
tradition of Religious Science. The symbol that Ernest Holmes designed for
his movement101
looks like a letter V superimposed over an equals sign. The apparent
equals sign divides the picture into the three levels of Spirit, Subjective Mind, and
Manifestation. The V represents the wide power of Spirit above coming to focus in the
concrete world below. As Dr. Stortz said,
Something that used to be extra-ordinary now becomes ordinary.
Her practiced craft makes it possible reliably and repeatedly to make contact with God:
When I gather my thoughts, when I gather them consciously and
intentionally, to give a spiritual mind treatment - all prayer in my mind, all
prayer or all spiritual mind treatment, is intentional contact with the
presence of God. Other things become sometimes accidental, sometimes a
hunch or a flash, which you can't legislate. This you can.
3.3.2.6 Cumulativity
What happens when a person performs Spiritual Mind Treatments over a lifetime? How
does it shape a life?
I asked Dr. Stortz if each treatment had an effect on the one treating. She responded:
101
Copied here from the United Church of Religious Science website, http://religiousscience.org/
Margaret Stortz
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Always. An old friend of mine used to say, and this was in the days when
you had carbon-paper and carbon copies, she used to say, "When you give
a spiritual mind treatment, you send out a copy. The original stays with
you." And I always thought that was very appropriate. Because whatever
the treatment may be, and for whomsoever it may be, the first take goes
through me, anyway, since I'm the one who's forming it. It's my particular
use of mind that gets exercised first. So it always does something to me.
Preparation for treatment is a simultaneous withdrawal and attending. This preparation is
in itself much like a meditation. It becomes an accumulated skill, like a carpenter's
know-how:
…I've come to a place where I can pretty much set aside external
concerns, and move into that, because of the practice of doing so. That's
another spiritual muscle, the state of acquired readiness, over time, to be
able to set aside daily concerns, even immediate concerns, to be able to do
that. That's what practice will do for you.
BW: And when you have set them aside, um, is it simply making
something absent, making daily concerns absent, or does something else
become present?
MS: That's more like it. It's not that these things become absent; it's that
something else becomes present. And I become more aware of the thing
at hand, that I become more aware of the inherent universal energies that
are always present anyway. They're clouded. We would — in my
estimation — we would be aware of these universal energies (as intuition
or whatever you want to call it) all the time if we were not taken up by the
concerns of everyday living. So to set them aside, make way for this,
makes you aware that it's there anyway.
Each treatment can be a strongly positive personal experience:
… And one can feel a tremendous amount of joy. Now at all times, no
matter what's taking place, whether you're halfway there or not, at the at
the close of delivering any treatment, if it's if it's been done appropriately,
there should be a sense of feeling better, right away, from the one who's
doing the delivering. Frequently from the one who's sitting in front of you
receiving it. You have no way of knowing, if they're at a distance. But
there should be right away a sense of lift, relief, better. Just having done
it. Just having passed the ideas through you.
Margaret Stortz
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The positive effects of treatment can be dispersed if one thinks inappropriately during
daily life. As implied in the section on continuity, above, treatment and non-treatment
times are not so separate as not to affect one another:
… Assuming that personally I do not do too many things to dissipate what
I'm doing. It's like taking a step forward and taking a step back and
taking a step forward, and so on. How much in the livingness of my day I
do to undo what I've just done for myself.
All of these experiences, repeated again and again, have an additive effect. Dr. Stortz
said, "I believe these things are cumulative."
They can accumulate, Dr. Stortz noted on reading a draft of this paper, because God is
always working, responding to our thoughts. She called her awareness of this reality
"the expectation that God is in action all the time," and considers it a key part of her
practitioner's consciousness.
Doing treatment daily is a like lot doing exercise — the results last beyond the moment.
Hard spiritual work pays off. The full quote from which the above five lines were taken
is:
MS: … Now over time, since I believe these things are cumulative, over
time they add to your well-being, and sense of well-being, anyway.
Assuming that personally I do not do too many things to dissipate what
I'm doing. It's like taking a step forward and taking a step back and
taking a step forward, and so on. How much in the livingness of my day
will I do to undo what I've just done for myself. But it's a permanent
addition to my self any time that I engage in spiritual mind treatment for
myself or someone else, it's a permanent accumulation in consciousness to
me. Now I can undo a certain amount of it, as I said; but if I don't do that,
it puts me another notch up, and then another notch up. And then over
time I can see the accumulation of living a life like that, if I engage in that
a good deal.
Margaret Stortz
-93-
BW: What accumulates?
MS: What accumulates that could be recognizable, and I'm putting, I'm
giving to you a rational, giving you rational commentaries around things
that aren't totally rational, so I'll do my best. I can approximate a state of
clear thinking very quickly, more quickly, than lots of people. I always
have a sense of belonging to something larger than myself, so that no
matter what is taking place I can if you like retreat into that. I can touch it
for a length of time or for a brief period of time during the day. I sense, I
have a greater sense of well-being, a greater sense of being able to return
to spiritual center, if you like, more quickly. So it's not a question of
never being upset, never being disturbed. Life disturbs. People die,
disappoint you, so on. It disturbs you. But, through practice like that, I
can approximate my spiritual center more quickly. I don't have to drift
off, and be away for weeks and months at a time. I can uh, if I...
Depending on the nature of what I'm handling, it can bother me for a
portion of the day, or less. If it's big time, I can be disappointed for a
while. But even in the disappointment, it doesn't have to skew my
capacity to think clearly, or to come back to center. So it give me a
greater level of well-being, that becomes normal now. Something that
used to be extra-ordinary now becomes ordinary.
As the livingness of everyday life can (because of continuity) cross the boundary of
treatment if one does not isolate oneself by gathering one’s thoughts and withdrawing a
bit, so also treatment’s effects cross into the daily life of the practitioner.
… And then over time I can see the accumulation of living a life like that,
if I engage in that a good deal.
Among the effects that Dr. Stortz has found to accumulate are:
One can enter the treatment state more easily.
One can think more clearly
One has a sense of “belonging to something larger.”
One can contact that “something larger” at will.
One can retreat into it.
One can be disturbed, but one can re-center more quickly.
Margaret Stortz
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One has a sense of well being.
The sense of well-being is extraordinary, but one has it ordinarily.
Dr. Stortz finds that her practice and her well-being are not limited to her alone. They
obviously affect her clients and her students, as detailed above. They also have
cumulative results for the whole human race:
…All right, consider the willingness of a number of people to add a
certain energy to a consciousness of well-being. This is a lot of people
participating in this, which adds their drops you might say, their drops of
water into the ocean of consciousness. And consider some of the things
that are taking place in the world and have been over time, that are quite
remarkable. I have to feel that at some level, these things have been
shifting and moving the general race consciousness up another notch. And
if enough people are, let us say, open to good, general good without saying 'it's gonna look like this, or it's gotta look like that, and you guys have to
shape up," they quit doing that and open, open the lines of mind, to a
greater expansion of awareness, people who are, who aren't so tightly
bound in mind can receive that. Under the level, a lot of people's
awareness is this sense of "Something's happened." They don't know what
it is, but something's up. And I think it's the age of consciousness, really
the age of spiritual consciousness, making its way known in a time that
perhaps never has because of the ability of human communication to
dispense itself everywhere in a way that was not possible before. You can
gather millions of people together, by putting out in publications,
television, magazines and so on, saying "Guess what folks, we're all going
to pray." [Unintelligible] And you get a bunch of people doing it. It all
has to count for something.
This is the familiar theme of an “age of consciousness.” It is different, however, for Dr.
Stortz than it is for many who talk about such an age. The elements, which she believes
are bringing about this changing era, are part of her daily practice: change of thought,
willingness to pray, openness. She has seen their specific effects in her work as a
practitioner. So when she generalizes to the species, she is doing so on the basis of
concrete experience, rather than of theory.
Margaret Stortz
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3.3.3 The Story I Found
Interviewing Dr. Stortz as a practitioner, I found a number of themes. People come to her
for help with disordered lives. Her craft is to withdraw from daily life and open to the
concrete good order of God. Perhaps it would be better to represent the treatment as a
state or condition of:
Open Good Order
Acceptance Fitting Together
Receptiveness to Harmony
Enlargment Flow, Ease
This treatment takes place by the Presence and agency of God in a universe
characterized by continuity, and cumulativity. When her work is well done, good order
is established in the life of her client. Although disturbance and disappointment are still
possible, the continuous practice moves her gradually and reliably to an experience of
clarity, well-being and centeredness.
In 1996, the same year that she met with me, Dr. Stortz published a book of essays and
poems.102
OUR FLIGHT
In the warm wings of my knowing,
I rise up.
I seem clear,
But I'm struggling.
What holds me back?
I have already cast light on my dimness.
What else holds me — or who?
Hands are grasping at me
And voices cry to me.
They are the hands and voices of others,
And yet they are mine as well.
I believe I could move on alone, but perhaps I cannot.
102
Stortz, I am enough & other wisdom for daily living
Margaret Stortz
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The hands and voices
Which are mine and not mine
Must rise up with me.
One Life, One Voice, One Mind, One Flight.
In her retirement she has given up her role as a minister and as president of her
denomination. She continues her work as a practitioner.
4 JEAN DELANEY: "BECAUSE HE SAID, ASK."
Rev. Jean Delaney works at an interdenominational ministry in Knoxville's Montgomery
Village, which she calls "a housing development, like a project." Her ministry is to both
the physical and the spiritual needs of the residents. She meets with people in need. She
drives people to the hospital. She helped to create a child-care center for residents who
are being forced off welfare, including obtaining a $60,000 grant. She is extremely
active in the community and in her Baptist church.
She talks about all these roles, but in each of them it is clear that she is a partner — a
junior partner — with God. Her prayer life is constant, and threads through everything
she does at work and at home. And the quality of that relationship is ease. The God she
knows and asks for help is close, a family member, a strong and trusted Father.
I had a sense that there was a non-stop conversation going on between her and God.
Wherever she goes and whatever she may be doing, she is likely to be talking with God.
There is no need for a special, set-aside ritualized prayer situation:
BW: …when some people pray, they have customs or rituals that they
use, maybe a certain gesture or posture. Umm, is that true for you?
JD: Mm-mm (negative.) No, because sometimes I'm sitting down.
Sometimes I may be laying down. As I said, I've stood at the sink and
prayed. I've stood on the street, and prayed with people. So no, I don't
have a certain posture. Wherever I am, and there's a need… that's where I
pray.
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And conversation is the correct word, too. Of the people I interviewed, Jean Delaney's
prayer style seems the most auditory. She has a verbal relationship with God. In her
speech, metaphors based on sound (there were 376 of them) were almost twice as
common as those based on vision (68) and feeling (123) combined ( = 191). Most of
those auditory expressions were based on speech, reports not only of her conversations
with God, but also of her exchanges with other people.
Rev. Delaney does not think that speech is privileged. I mentioned that I had
interviewed people who preferred to pray in visual and kinesthetic ways as well:
BW: OK. Yeah. Umm, this is really interesting, in part because, of the
people I have spoken to, one person gets pictures, one person gets
feelings, and now we have you who get words.
JD: (laughs)
BW: It seems to come every possible way (small laugh).
JD: Of course! And we should never limit God. See, He'll only come in
a way that person can receive Him.
Spoken language is her way, though, and the conversation with God is an ongoing part of
her day.
4.1 Just Doing It
Jean Delaney prays on just about any kind of occasion. Her text for this is I
Thessalonians 5:17, "Pray without ceasing." While some of the people interviewed
Jean Delaney
-99-
learned to pray as adults, Rev. Delaney has been praying this way since she was a child.
I asked her where she learned to pray, and she said
JD: At church. I grew up in First AME Zion church, where our pastor
taught us that praying was communicating with God through Jesus Christ.
And that we could ask God anything, we could tell him anything. And I
grew up fasting and praying, as a child. And have thanked the Lord for it.
I started out like during the Lenten season and our pastor started us out
when we were young children. This has been a life of continuation. Umm,
I haven't always done the right thing, I haven't always been … at the right
place. But I thank the Lord for His continuation, for having me in the
palm of His hand, and using me… That prayer life came from DOING,
just doing it. And I look back and see what God has brought me from and
how He's answered different prayers.
She has taught her family to pray, as she learned:
BW: … Have you taught others to pray?
JD: My little granddaughter and my adult children have followed my
example. Especially my daughters. I haven't taught them by saying "Do
this." It's been by doing prayers before them and with them. When my
cousin will come over, my little granddaughter will say, "Come on
Grandma, we're going to pray. We're going to pray, Grandma."
4.2 God-Encounter Stories
The relationship with God is not necessarily verbal in both directions. Rev. Delaney
prays to God verbally. God responds to her in a variety of ways. The most common way
is that God acts; God makes something happen. Much of our interview was her
description of what God had brought about in her life. In a two hour interview, she
described or mentioned 32 different situations in which God had directly acted in her
experience.
Jean Delaney
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There was a lady that came to Montgomery Village ministry. That's
where I minister, that's where God called me to. A lady came in one day
and she needed help with food and not-food, and she was having problems
with her leg. And while I was working with her, the Lord said, "Pray for
her leg." And I said, "Debbie, do you mind if I pray for you?" and she
said, "No, Rev. Jean, go ahead and pray." So I just prayed and asked the
Lord to help her, because she'd been having a lot of pain in it, umm, you
know, how to remove the pain, let the swelling begin to go down, uh,
begin to knit back the cartilage or bones or whatever is the problems, He
knew and I didn't, but if he would begin a work in her leg, and mainly take
the pain away. Once I finished with the prayer, then we went on and I
needed to do, she did what she needed to do, then she left.
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: Well, the very next day she came back. And she said, "Oh, I just need
to hug you." And I said, "What's wrong?" and she said, "Do you know,
after you prayed for me, my leg began to stop hurting."
Sometime she does not understand what God is doing. One morning she found that she
had driven from her house on a very familiar route, but had explicably taken a wrong
turn:
JD: …And (small laugh) when I got up there I thought, "Lord, what am I
up here for?"
BW: Uh-huh
JD: "How did I get here?" and then I said, "Lord, I know you've brought
me up this way for a reason!" And, I said, "But Lord, you'll have to show
it to me, whatever it is." So I'm driving down Magnolia Avenue, still
headed toward my mother's house, and had gone several, several, several,
several blocks… and I came upon a situation where there were seven
carloads of police, and this is a little after six AM, now, there were
SEVEN carloads of police. They were parked at this 7-11 or a
convenience store. And when I got there, the intensity to pray grew, as I
was coming up on this particular scene, not knowing what had happened.
Later I learned a lady had been robbed and had been shot…
BW: Mmmm…
Jean Delaney
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JD: And the Lord brought me to that point, to pray for that lady.
She has come to understand that God will take her to surprising places. Often the results
will become obvious, as in the following story:
JD: Umm, I had taken one of our residents to a mental health center, near
where the ministry is, at UT Hospital and had dropped her off, and later
she called me for me to come back and pick her up. Well, instead of me
turning right, I kept going! And I ended up over by the hospital; and I
thought, "Lord, what am I doing here? What am I doing here, Lord; I
passed the turn. I've just gone right by it? How can I go right by the
turn" (laughs) …
BW: (laughs)
JD: So I thought, "OK, Lord. Now I've passed the turn; I'm over here by
the hospital. There must be somebody here you want me to see." And
sure enough, when I drove up, there was another one of our residents,
leaned over on the trash can. And she didn't have a way home, and didn't
have any money for a phone call. She didn't know that there were phones
on the inside, that they have now, where people could make calls to get
rides. And, when I got to her, I said, "Elaine." And she said, "Oh, Rev.
Jean!" She said, "You're not going to believe this." She said, "I was
saying, 'Lord, if I could just call Rev. Jean, she would come pick me
up…'"
It is part of her understanding that God does not do such things as random good deeds,
but as part of a larger pattern that intends to let people know of His love. She went on:
JD: Can you imagine me missing a turn? (laughs) To go pick up
somebody?
BW: That's wonderful! (laughs)
JD: It's wonderful, because you know what it did? It let her know that
God was concerned also about her.
God leads her daily, sometimes to concrete action and sometimes to prayer for others.
Jean Delaney
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There does not seem to be too much difference between prayer and action for her,
because she is led to both by the Spirit. As with the story of being led to the
convenience-store robbery so she could pray for the woman who had been shot, she has
often been led to pray for people — sometimes for people she did not know.
JD: But one night, I was sitting here on my living room floor, pinning up
some curtains, for a lady, because I used to sew for a living.
BW: Mm-hmm.
JD: And while I was pinning that I was hemming for a lady, the name
"Darryl Dawkins" kept coming to mind.
BW: OK
JD: And I got up and I went in and I said to my husband, "Bill, WHO is
Darryl Dawkins?" And he said, "He's a basketball player." Well, for
days, the Lord would have me pray for this man. To this day, I never
knew what the results were. To this day, I have never met him. But
periodically the Lord would bring this young man's name to mind. And I
would pray for him.
I looked up Darryl Dawkins on the Internet, and discovered he played for Detroit in the
National Basketball Association. Why Jean Delaney was called to pray for him, I do not
know, nor does she.
Sometimes she would be drawn to contact someone just when they needed her prayers:
JD: Well, the Holy Spirit will bring …people's names to my mind and like
I said, people that I don't know. I've had other experiences like that. One
day…when I used to be a teacher's assistant, we used to get snow-days off.
And we don't get snows in Knoxville like we used to, but there would be a
down time. And I would take my telephone book, and just open it up.
BW: Mm-hmm
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JD: And whatever name would leap up off that page, that's who I would
call. (laughs)
BW: OK. (small laugh)
JD: I know you're saying, "This lady is really crazy one." This actually
happened: this one particular day I was going through my telephone book
and this lady's name is Paulette [a pseudonym]. And, and we all call her
"Paula." But her daughter's name is also Paulette… So, I dial her up and I
say, "Well, Paula, how are you doing?" and we talked. And uh, the first
time it happened, her mother was very ill. And I didn't know it. And she
said, "Jean, will you pray for my Mama? And my family? We're right now
getting ready to leave town, because my mother's really ill." And I said,
"Sure I will." So I prayed with her right at that moment, and I began to
pray, you know, later, much later, and their mama got better. Well, that
happened, oh, I guess several years maybe had passed, and I did it again
(small laugh) the same way. Only this time, when I called her, the Lord
kept saying "Paulette."
BW: Alright.
JD: And I said, "Paula, how're you doing?" and she said, "Oh, Jean," she
said, "I'm having a bad time." And I said, "You are?" And she said, "Yes."
And I said, "Well, I just thought I'd call you and see how you're were
doing." And she said, "Jean Delaney, every time you call me, something is
going on." And this is what she asked me, she said, "Do you have ESP?"
And I said, "No, I have HSP."
BW: (laughs)
JD: And she said, "HSP?" And I said, "Holy Spirit Power!"
BW: Uh-huh.
JD: And what had happened — you wouldn't believe this (small laugh) –
when I called her that particular day, the night before, her daughter and
her boyfriend had just told her that she was pregnant. …You see I didn't
know that at the time. I just knew it had to do with the daughter. Because
the Lord kept saying "Paulette." And I said, "Paula, whatever problems
you're having, I want to pray with you right now." She said, "Jean
Delaney, what are you up to? Because every time you call, something is
going on." And I said, "Well I don't know, " I said. But the Lord just kept
saying "Paulette." And so when I told her, I prayed for her. She didn't tell
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me then. She didn't tell me for a month what had happened the day, the
night before I called.
BW: That's amazing. So you, at the time you called, you didn't know that
the daughter was pregnant, not 'til much later.
JD: I did not know the daughter was pregnant. I knew it had something to
DO with the daughter, the reason God wanted me to call her was to pray.
But He didn't tell me and I didn't know what the problem was, either. I
knew it had to do with the daughter.
4.3 A Personal Relationship
The quality of Rev. Delaney's relationship with God is what struck me most strongly.
She is speaking about how she communicates with the Creator of the universe, but she
relates directly and personally.
First of all, she experiences God as a person. I asked her:
BW: Do you experience God as a person?
JD: Yes. He's my heavenly Father. He's Abba-Father, to me.
BW: Experienced as a person. And, uh, you have a relationship with
him?
JD: Yes.
Just to be sure, and to distinguish her experience of God from that of some other
religions, I asked again:
BW: Some people have experienced uh God as being, umm, like a law.
Umm, a law of goodness, but a law. And some people talk more about
God as a person. Which way would you say you experience God more?
JD: As a person.
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There are three things about this relationship that are important to her: It is God-enabled,
it is direct, and it is close.
4.3.1 God-enabled
The relationship is God-enabled because it would not have been possible without the
action of God in Jesus Christ.
…but it's through grace. And through the person of Jesus Christ that
I…have that relationship with God. God made it possible through Jesus
Christ that I could have a relationship with Him.
Every formal prayer she makes, and many of her brief prayers, end with the phrase "in
the name of Jesus"
"Lord, in the name of Jesus, I need to know where to go next…"
You know, saying "Father, in the name of Jesus, I bring this situation,
whatever it is, to You."
A lady brought her baby in one day, where we were. The baby was sick –
a little baby – dehydrated. And the lady that was with her said, "Let Rev.
Jean hold the baby." I said, "Just let me see this pretty baby." So I just
grabbed him up, and I began to just um stroke his back, and I didn't pray
out loud, I just began to whisper, "Lord, in the name of Jesus…whatever
the problem is with this baby, which you know, you made this baby, you
formed him within his mother's womb, you know what the problem is, I
don't. Lord, whatever it is, bring this out of him." I was just beginning
to stroke him, and I was whispering it in his ear. His mom didn't hear me
pray. And, he got better.
She does this because it is how she is told to do it, in the Bible:
JD: I pray to the Father. …to our heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus,
because the Lord tells us that.
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BW: OK
JD: God's word tells us that when we pray in the name of Jesus ……it
talks about praying in the name of Jesus, and believe that when you pray,
you will receive.103
She tries not to "hit people over the head with it," but one of her commonest prayers is
that other people should have this same enabling, by accepting Jesus as their Lord and
Savior. She prayed for someone in a passing ambulance, finishing with
Lord, if that person doesn't know you, let he or she have a personal
relationship and, in the name of Jesus, do not allow Satan to come to steal
their life before they have an opportunity to know you.
When I asked her to pray for my dissertation, she did, and included in the prayer:
And Lord, if Birrell doesn't know You, as his Lord and Savior, I right now
say in the name of Jesus, pull on his heart, Lord Jesus. TUG on it…
Not to accept Jesus as one's Savior would be the great tragedy in a life, as she said to a
friend whose father was sick:
JD: And I said, "Well that's your father, you want to share this, you want
to make sure, before anything happens to him…
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: That he has made a decision for Christ. At least you will have
brought it to him."
4.3.2 Direct
Her relationship with God, through Jesus, is direct. There is no other mediator necessary:
103
When Rev. Delaney read this, she asked that I include a reference to John 14:13-14: "And whatsoever
ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing
in my name, I will do it."
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JD: …God made it possible through Jesus Christ that I could have a
relationship with Him.
BW: OK.
JD: I don't have to go through the Pope, I don't have to go through
anybody else…
BW: All right.
JD: …and I don't have to wait on anybody. I can say "Lord, I need you
right now." Say, "Lord, this is an SOS prayer, and I know that I'm going to
get an answer."
4.3.3 Close
This God-enabled and unmediated relationship is also close and warm. That is the
strongest feeling you get when speaking to Jean Delaney, that you could say of her as
was said of Moses, "And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh
unto his friend.104
"
I have always thought it would be presumptuous to tell God what to do. Perhaps it would
— unless you were a very dear and beloved child of that God. And if you were also,
insofar as a created being could be so, a friend. Jean Delaney's turns of phrase reveals
someone who feels very, very close to God. She talks about what is going on right now
in her life
…when I was sitting at the railroad track, I was saying, "Well, thank you
Lord, for this train. I don't understand this, because I was needed to be at
my house, at two o'clock
She fairly demands explanations:
I just say, "OK, what are you trying to tell me."
104
Ex 33:11
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Lord, what are you talking about? (laughs)
in the complete confidence that He will tell her:
And I wait on the Lord to give me explanations. I will ask him, "Well
what, what do I need to learn from this situation?" and "What do you want
me to see?" or "What's happening?" or different questions like that.
She is clearly in the presence of an intimate Friend. Her relationship is neither distant nor
formal.
4.4 The Pattern of Prayer
Rev. Delaney emphasizes that there is not a fixed pattern that she must follow when she
prays.
BW: Is there, is there an order to prayer? I mean, you sounded as if you,
there is sort of an order to things. First you praise, and then you ask for
things. I mean, is that, am I getting that accurately?
JD: And I really don't follow a set order. I know there is… if we look at
Matthew it's to praise, adore Him, you know; and if you use that there,
then there's the petition and, you know, you ask for forgiveness. And I
really don't know the order, because HOW we do it – He doesn't want us
to do it in a rote type situation…
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: …so if I'm running out of gas and saying, "Lord, I just need to be able
to get to a gas station, help me get there." Then I'm not going , you know,
I'm not going to try to go through a ritual. I'm going to say, "Lord, this is
what I need, and You know what I need better than I know…"
Many of her prayers are quick and directed to the needs of the moment, anything but rote.
But there are certain things that repeatedly appear in her longer prayers.
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4.4.1 Repentance
If she is in any kind of conflict with anyone, she needs to repent before she can go on.
JD: …I get upset like everybody else. And when I do, and if I say
something wrong, or act in a way that I don't think is right, then I
immediately want to repent.
The flavor of the repentance is not self-absorbed. She does not seems to dwell on what
she has done wrong. Instead it is "the negative part I want to get out of the way first." I
asked her if there were things that would get in the way of prayer, and she replied:
JD: Yes. Umm, sometimes if, the state of mind that you might be in…
Say for instance if me and my husband have been arguing (laughs) …then
I'd know that I can't enter in a prayer without saying, "Lord, forgive me for
my attitude" first.
BW: Yeah.
JD: So, if I, if I entered into a prayer right after us fussing and arguing,
without saying that, then that's a hindrance.
The specifics of repentance and reconciliation may involve admitting how she feels first,
and then asking for help:
JD: There was a teacher I was working with. And this teacher was going
through some problem. She was having female problems, whatever (small
laugh) was going on with her I don't really know. But, she was just
carrying on, and we had had a good relationship before then. That day I
just had had it with her. I was upset with her; we were going to lunch and
I said, "Lord, I just don't LIKE her behavior, I don't like the way things are
happening, I don't even like her! But Lord…" And that's reconciliation…
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: I could say, "But Lord, Lord, now I've got that part out, about how I
feel about it, now let me see her through Your eyes."
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The object of repentance is not herself and her condition. The object is to remove
obstacles from what is most important:
JD: …I don't want to center on me. I want to center on God.
BW: OK.
JD: Umm, so whatever the negative parts of me, I want to ask for
forgiveness, so I can get that out of the way.
4.4.2 Glorifying & Thanking
Glorifying God and thanking God underlie Rev. Delaney's entire prayer life. They seem
to be what she turns to first when she is in doubt just what to pray for. For instance, she
was delayed in getting home for our telephone interview by a train that had stopped,
blocking her road. Her response was to pray
JD: And I pray thanking the Lord for situations, like when I was sitting at
the railroad track, I was saying, "Well, thank you Lord, for this train. I
don't understand this, because I was needed to be at my house, at two
o'clock," but I began to thank him for the train. And then I began to thank
God for the train. After that, another one came, and just kept past; but the
train was still sitting there.
BW: Uh-huh.
JD: I thought, "OK Lord, now I need to be at home for this telephone call
" and I began to just say, "Well, Lord, just let me answer the questions,
where they will be a blessing to others, but to glorify You." And then the
train started moving!(laughs)
At the end of our interview, when she was praying for my dissertation, she gave thanks at
the beginning of her prayer and again at the end. She also asked that
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Lord, as Birrell interviews these other people, Lord I ask as I prayed while
I was sitting at the railroad track waiting on the train to go by, Lord, let
what he writes, glorify You.
Part of the reason for the thanksgiving in the midst of prayer flows from believing that
you have already received (Mark 11:24 "Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye
desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.") But it also
seems to be a genuine feeling, and to reflect her trust in God in each situation.
Giving God the glory is done partly in imitation of Jesus, who closed his prayer with "For
thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever" (Matt. 6:13). It also is
clearly to dispel any claim that Jean herself is the doer. Fundamentally, however, it
seems, like the thanksgiving, to be an act of love and gratitude.
4.4.3 Asking
When Jean Delaney asks, she asks in detail. It may be that other persons who pray more
kinesthetically or visually ask in such complete lists, and that we only know it in this case
because Rev. Delaney is putting words to it. But in several prayers she makes very
explicit all the details of what she is asking for, as in this passage already quoted:
JD: A lady came in one day …and she was having problems with her leg.
And while I was working with her, the Lord said, "Pray for her leg."
BW: OK
JD: And I said, "Debbie, do you mind if I pray for you?" and she said,
"No, Rev. Jean, go ahead and pray." So I just prayed and asked the Lord to
help her, because she'd been having a lot of pain in it, umm, you know,
how to remove the pain, let the swelling begin to go down, uh, begin to
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knit back the cartilage or bones or whatever is the problems, He knew and
I didn't, but if he would begin a work in her leg, and mainly take the pain
away.
I have thought about what is involved with her prayer, looking for the patterns, and I
finally realized that it was just what she said. She asks God. Why? Because He has told
her to, through the Bible.
BW: …Let me ask, why, why is it necessary for people to pray, if God's
intent is good to begin with?
JD: Because He said, "Ask." We are being obedient to His directions.
You know, when you look at the children of Israel, and why they ended up
forty years in the wilderness on an eleven-days' journey…
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: …because they didn't do it God's way. And He tells us, to ask!
Because God told her to ask, she does. She does it in every situation. Because God
wants us to communicate with Him:
So, He said, "Ask. Tell me. Talk to me."
It was the pattern of prayer she learned from her childhood pastor, Rev. Babington
Johnson:
JD: …our pastor taught us that praying was communicating with God
through Jesus Christ. And that we could ask God anything, we could tell
him anything.
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And she does. She asks for very definite things, confidently and definitely. When she
prayed for this dissertation, she said:
JD: Let everything that people have said, from the Buddhist to the, to the
whoever else he asks, let it direct people to a comfort in knowing and
loving, praying, communing with You. And knowing that you're going to
answer, Lord I ask that you supply Birrell with everything he needs, from
the ink cartridge that he may use for his computer, on down to the right
paper. Lord, go with his heart and mind, and let him be able to just type
this up. And then Lord, as it's read, let the team, whether it's a team of
twelve, or a team of six, or a team or four, or a team of two – whoever
reads it, let them know that he has done the best job that he can do. And
Lord, let it come rolling through, loud and clear, what he wants to say, in
this dissertation. Lord, bless his efforts, bless his wife. Lord, supply their
every need, Lord, whether it's financial, whether it's physical, whether it's
spiritual.
She repeated a number of times that "God is specific," and so are her requests. She seems
deliberately to have maintained the attitude of a trusting child with her Father, in prayer.
In the rest of her life she is an effective administrator, quite capable of bearding a
foundation official and securing a $60,000 grant with a telephone call. But in her prayer
life, she asks just as one would ask a beloved parent - for exactly what she wants.
4.4.4 Leaving It with God
For all the specificity of her prayer, she is very clear that she wants God's will to be done.
She asks for things, and then leaves the matter with God. Her prayer for my dissertation
went on
And Lord, I don't know where it's going, and that's all right; but I thank
You that You're going to be blessed in and through this dissertation.
She can ask what she wants, but overarching her will is what she call's God's perfect will.
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JD: …there was a friend, umm, her daughter is a Downs child, and was
suffering from something, I didn't know what it was at the time, and she
was kind of a young girl. And the mother came to me one day and said,
"Jean, I want you to pray that God don't take my baby."
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: And I looked at her, and I thought, "I'm not going to pray that." I
said, "I'm not going to let you put me into that kind of bondage, and I'm
not going to put you in that kind of bondage. I'm going to pray God's
perfect will in this situation, and give you the strength to go through
whatever it is you need to go through. But that, asking God not to take that
child, is going contrary to His will. I don't know, because see I couldn't
say that, because I couldn't say what His will was or is, you see what I'm
saying?
It was not clear to me, then, what constituted proper prayer.
BW: Yet, you mentioned that your uh, that if you know that you've prayed
aright that you can go on your way knowing that God will take care of it,
and do whatever's best. And it sounded as if you know what it is that
means that you've prayed… aright. So I was curious, what is it that lets
you know that?
JD: First of all, giving it to God.
BW: OK
JD: You know, saying "Father, in the name of Jesus, I bring this situation,
whatever it is, to You." And I pray, "Your perfect [will] in this situation,
Father." And, entering that person's name, and their situation, saying,
"Lord, I don't KNOW what they need — but You do."
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: "I don't know what they don't need, but You do." And when I do it
this way, when I, when I, when I give it totally to Him…
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: …then I can leave knowing that I haven't taken anything to myself,
and I haven't left anything for them.
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She can leave it with God because she trusts Him — either to give her what she asks for
or to do His will.
JD: I've brought it all to Him, and laid it with Him and not taken anything
back. And then leave, expecting Him to answer.
BW: OK.
JD: I think the expectation of prayer is the ultimate. It's that thing that
most people say you need the most, is F-A-I-T-H. And that's leaving,
knowing, that He's going to take care of it.
BW: OK.
JD: Trusting Him in it, even thought when you can't see what the outcome
is going to be, or you won't even know what's the outcome.
4.5 Guidance
Many of the people interviewed for this dissertation have had occasional moments of
inspiration. For Jean Delaney the guidance is daily and reliable, part of the conversation
between her and God.
4.5.1 Daily Guidance
She frequently asks for understanding.
And I wait on the Lord to give me explanations. I will ask him, "Well
what, what do I need to learn from this situation?" and "What do you want
me to see?" or "What's happening?" or different questions like that.
Sometimes she asks if she has gone astray.
JD: Like, with the ministry, I'll say, when things seem to be not really
happening the way I think they may need to be happening I ask the Lord,
"Are we still where You want us to be? Are we still doing the ministry the
way You want us to do?" And so I'll begin to ask questions: "Do we need
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to change? Do I need to change where I am?" Umm, you know, "Is there
something I need to repent from?"
She will also ask what to do in concrete situations, as when she found herself
unexpectedly by the medical center:
JD: … I ended up over by the hospital, and I thought, "Lord, what am I
doing here? What am I doing here, Lord; I passed the turn. I've just gone
right by it? How can I go right by the turn" (laughs) …
BW: (laughs)
JD: So I thought, "OK, Lord. Now I've passed the turn; I'm over here by
the hospital. There must be somebody here you want me to see."
And there was. Her dialogues with God are far from formal; instead they are like a
conversation with a trusted advisor who is not always easy to understand.
I just say, "OK, what are you trying to tell me."
Often God initiates the conversation, frequently by bringing something to her thoughts.
Very commonly Bible verses come to mind. What marks them as communications is
their utter relevance.
JD: One time, I, another lady and I were beginning to pray, for someone
and the Lord gave the passage of scripture in Matthew, where it says "Cut
it off."105
BW: OK.
JD: …and so we stopped the prayer...because he said, "Cut it off." And
he said, "This does not go out without prayer and fasting."106
And we did
not really realize that where we were getting ready to go into in praying
105
Again Rev.Delaney asked me to cite the New Testament verses. This one is Matt 5:30, which begins
"And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off" 106
Matt 17:21 "Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting."
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for this particular family, we were getting ready to get in some big trouble.
And so when God gave us that passage of Scripture, while we were sitting,
praying, he gave Matthew 5:30, and it said, "Cut if off." And so we
stopped, immediately.
Other times, the message will be difficult to interpret. She will then try to find the
meaning.
JD: Well, he's given me some other words, too. (laughs) Like "twin."
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: OK, we've just opened a child-care center in Knoxville here.
Montgomery Village is a housing development. And because of Families
First, there's a lot of women needing to go to work to go to school, and to
make a transition. So, the ministry had set out to open up a childcare
center. Well, this past year, June the 15th of 1998, we opened a child-care
center; and after the childcare center got up, opened and up and running,
the Lord began to say "Twin." I thought, "What? 'Twin?' Lord, what are
you talking about? (laughs) "
BW: (small laugh)
JD: And He would just say "Twin." And I'd say, "OK, Lord. " and, I'd
hear it again. Then I began to talk about it. "OK, there is a twin
somewhere," I said. "Now where is the twin?" Well, since then, right
next door are two more apartments that we now have possession of, that a
youth center is going to be developed in where the kids will be mentored,
there's going to be a library there, there's going to an art project, there's
going to be a place for suspended and expelled students to be able to
come. And it's right next door. Well I thought that was the twin, and I
guess it is. But, there're some other activities that've been going on, and
one is the youth center. We call it "YMO".107
And for the other activities
that have a place where the residents come together, there's a large open
field in front of the ministry; and it's going to be called Community Unity
Park. Well, what God has shown me since that, that these two projects are
being born… seeded first, at the same time.
BW: You mean like, planted?
JD: Yes.
107
Rev. Delaney explained that YMO stand for "Yours, Mine, and Ours"
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BW: OK.
JD: The ideas of both were birthed, the seeds were, were committed at the
same time. And then, they are simultaneously coming up. We put in two
grants; they went in together, both YMO and CUP… and they are the
twins.
4.5.2 "Holy Spirit, Pray!"
Guidance comes from the Holy Spirit.
JD: The Holy spirit is the third part of the Godhead and His job is to teach
us. He will direct us. I could be driving down the street, and not really
know where I'm going, and say, "Lord, in the name of Jesus, I need to
know where to go next…"
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: …and how to get there. And, and Holy Spirit, show me." And that
has actually happened. And so it's the Holy Spirit, which is the third part
of the Godhead, is to teach us and guide us and lead us. And He does.
In particular, she will ask the Holy Spirit for help when she does not know what to ask
for, or how to ask for it.
JD: Have I experienced uncertainty or doubt, in prayer? (long pause)
Not really. Because if I really don't know how to pray I will say, "Holy
Spirit, pray. I don't know how. I don't know what the prayer is, right
here."
The conversation goes both ways. Sometimes she initiates it, and sometimes God does.
The continuous, affectionate communion makes up her life of "prayer without ceasing."
4.6 Prayer for Others: The Vocation of Intercessor
"Everybody is supposed to pray, " says Jean Delaney, but some people have a special
vocation.
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BW: …Do you, um, do you think there's a certain kind of person who
should be a pray-er?
JD: I think there are certain people who are intercessory prayer people.
BW: What, what are they like?
JD: Intercessors are people who uh pray regardless of what the situation
or circumstances are, when God brings it to them. They will intercede for
cities, they will intercede for states, for nations, uh, for people, for things
to change. You were talking about the reconciliation…
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: …they will pray for, like in my situation, for communities to change,
for uh, for Blacks and Whites and other communities to come into a
reconciliation. These are prayers of people who will pray for a long
period of time, and will not let it go until, until God says, "OK, you can let
it go." Even though, Darryl Dawkins, every time He would bring it I
would say a prayer, not ever talking to that man, not ever knowing the
results… Some people aren't, aren't intercessors. Umm, some intercessors
will stay on their face before the Lord, for hours praying, crying out, to the
Lord.
The calling of intercessor is at least as old as the Church.
BW: OK. Is it mentioned in the Bible, in, by that name?
JD: Mmmmmm… I'm not sure if it's mentioned that way, but there's one,
when they were in the upper room.
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: Jesus said to them to stay there til the Comforter came? They were
intercessors. …because they stayed and they prayed and they WAITED
until it came. An intercessor will do that.
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4.6.1 Waiting on the Lord
Persistence in intercessory prayer is important. She has, herself, prayed for a very long
time sometimes without seeing the result.
[Y]es, an intercessor will pray, they may not stay in one place and pray but
they will continue that prayer until God says stop or it, whatever it is,
comes about.
Part of the role of an intercessor is to keep praying until God says to stop. God might
say it by giving the result, or by speaking to the pray-er in some other way; but until that
time it is the pray-er's job to stay with the intercession.
I asked her if she ever felt that prayer had failed:
JD: Well, and you know, what somebody else might consider as a
failure's like, if the answer doesn't come right away. Maybe that… I could
only see that somebody might consider that as a failure – but I know that
when I pray, that I may not see the answer, and I have to say, "Well, OK,
Lord…" Like I'm praying about a situation now, and have been praying
for several years. I'll say, "Lord, I don't know what's happening, and I
don't know when the answer's coming, BUT I trust You in the situation."
BW: OK.
JD: And so I have to trust him, even though I haven't seen the result. But
I can't think of any time of failure."
BW: So that there, It's specifically if you've prayed for, that a certain
thing happen, and it not…"
JD: …Doesn't, mmm…
BW: You know, the opposite happens?
JD: Mm-hmm. But see, uh, just because it hasn't happened right then
doesn't mean it's not going to happen.
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The wait is not part of some test inflicted by God. Instead it is part of God's care for us.
JD: And sometimes we have to wait, for answers. Because He knows
that, if He gave us the answer right then, we are not really ready to deal
with the answer…
4.6.2 Prayer and Fasting
Part of Jean Delaney's spiritual practice is fasting. It seems rare in the modern world, and
I asked her why she does it.
BW: What does fasting do?
JD: For me, personally, I feel like it brings me where I'm saying, "Lord, I
want to get serious, I want to get serious with the prayer, I want to get
serious about whatever the situation is. Because I am moving away from
the table, I'm moving away from uh, other things…"
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: So, to me, I'm saying, "God, I'm getting serious."
As with other elements of her life, she enters and leaves fasts at the direction of God. In
fact God often initiates the fast.
JD: It's not when I say, "OK, I'm going to do this fast." It's when, He
wants me to fast, if I, and I know people think this sounds crazy, but it's
like He'll slide me right into a fast, with no stress, no strain, and I'm in a
fast, and not even realize it.
She has been fasting in association with prayer from time to time ever since she was a
child. Her fasts vary in depth and duration.
JD: Well, I have done two forty-day fasts, and what they were at different
places He would show me to start dropping off meat, then you drop off
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meat, vegetables, etcetera, until you get to bread and water. The first three
days, I got down to bread and water. Then two days of just water; and the
last two days, nothing for that period of time as the fast was coming to a
close. I fast different fasts. It depends; it may be an Esther fast, which is a
three-day fast. It may be an Elijah fast… it just depends on what the
prayer is, and what the need is.
BW: How do you, how do you know which fast to do?
JD: I pray, and ask God to show me which fast it is. Many times I find
myself in a fast while I'm working, and have not eaten anything. I have
sometimes been like so busy, that I've haven't had anything to eat, and just
maybe water or juice, and when it comes down to the end of the day, I've
been on a liquid fast.
The practice of fasting seemed to me like going into the wilderness, a sort of deprival.
Rev. Delaney corrected that impression.
JD: Mmm? I don't consider it the wilderness. But, if that's what you
think… you know, maybe some people consider that as the wilderness.
BW: No, it's really I'm trying to find what your experience is and not put
mine in. It's just, you said you're moving away, from the table, and I had
this …
JD: OK, for me, it's just, that's what I'm doing: I'm saying I don't need
this food, because I don't get hungry. It's like the spiritual food feeds me.
The communication with God is filling – I really don't think about eating.
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: So the experience that I have is that, I'm full! You know, and I can
go for hours, and days, where I don't even think about eating.
4.6.3 God as the Intermediary
While many of those praying seem to have a separate contact with those they pray for
through a spiritual or psychic channel, Jean Delaney does not appear to. Instead, she
knows things about those people because God has brought her information.
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JD: And I said, "Pat, how're you doing?" and she said, "Oh, Jean," she
said, "I'm having a bad time." And I said, "You are?" And she said, "Yes."
And I said, "Well, I just thought I'd call you and see how you're were
doing." And she said, "Jean Delaney, every time you call me, something is
going on."
BW: (small laugh)
JD: And this is what she asked me, she said, "Do you have ESP?" And I
said, "No, I have HSP."
BW: (laughs)
JD: And she said, "HSP?" And I said, "Holy Spirit Power!"
4.6.4 For Whom Do You Pray
Some of the people for whom Jean Delaney prays come to her and ask for her prayers. In
other cases someone may ask prayers for another person whom she has never met.
You see, other people will call me, like I had a lady to call oh, one day a
couple of weeks ago, and she said, "There are some people I want you to
pray for, and I said, "OK." And she began to tell me what the situation
was. …And she said, "I need for you to pray, for these people." And so
she began to tell me the people's names. So I don't have to be there, when
I pray.
In other cases she will initiate the prayer herself, asking the other person if she can pray
for them. Sometimes God will bring a situation to her mind, and indicate without
explanation that she should pray for people in it, as happened with the basketball player
Darryl Dawkins. Sometimes she will be taken to a situation, as she was when she was
brought to the convenience store just after the robbery.
Occasionally she is directed not to pray for someone. The time that the injunction "Cut it
off" came to mind is an example of such a negative direction.
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4.7 God is the Orchestrator
What is the role of prayer, and of pray-ers, in a universe ruled by an all-powerful God?
The question was posed in an article in Christian Century.
If Jesus' confidence in petitionary prayer is well founded, we are led to
an astonishing ontological recognition: that God rules the world in
constant consultation with those who pray, that God's determinations are
wrought in dialogue with those who call for help. To be sure, the Lord
God is Lord indeed. Humanity proposes, God disposes. Nonetheless, we
are assured, despite the fact that God is not bound to our pleas, that God's
determinations are not unaffected by our pleas. The Lord God is Lord
indeed, and therefore, God is free to rule unbounded by the humanly
inferred laws of finite nature and free to rule in spontaneous dialogue with
us.108
I asked Rev. Delaney about this:
BW: Let me ask… I saw a quotation that really struck me, and I'm not
sure if it's a good one or a bad one: it's a strong one. And I want to find out
if you think it's true: That God rules the universe, in consultation with
those who pray. Is that …
JD: Consultation, what?
BW: I don't know. It's just I read it, and it stuck in my head, and I said,
"Why is this (laughs) sticking in my head?" So here it is.
JD: Wouldn't it be nice if it said, "in…" what, what's uh "orchestration"?
Like God is the orchestrator.
BW: OK.
JD: It would be better if it was that way for me, it's like "Yes, He is.." but
He doesn't need us, but, as He uses us then He's orchestrating things to
happen with us praying and of the prayers of other people.
108
Goetz, On petitionary prayer: pleading with the Unjust Judge?
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BW: So, so that we're part of, almost a composition?
JD: Yes!
BW: OK. And we're, we're a work of art.
JD: And we're going to, and we're working in tune with Him.
This sense of artistic collaboration may explain the excited, pleased tone of much of Rev.
Delaney's work.
BW: OK. Do you enjoy the, um, the contact with God?
JD: Oh, yes! (small laugh)
BW: (small laugh)
JD: I do. Because it's exciting. And what makes it exciting is, when you
have a situation, and you pray, you really don't know how God is going to
answer. But the way he answers is far better than you can ever imagine.
Or even think about. Our little finite minds, you know, umm It's just, it's
incredible how he answers.
4.8 "God is not a fear"
The Christianity I learned as a child had a background of both hope and fear. Hell was
always a possibility, and much of the Christian life was an attempt to avoid Hell rather
than to approach God. So I must admit I looked for that same attitude in what Rev.
Delaney said. I found only one small trace of it, in a prayer she said for the person in a
passing ambulance:
Lord, if that person doesn't know you, let he or she have a personal
relationship and, in the name of Jesus, do not allow Satan to come to steal
their life before they have an opportunity to know you.
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She is certainly aware of human suffering. Much of her work in her ministry deals with
people who have serious problems. But her overwhelming attitude seemed to be
affirmative rather than avoiding.
I asked her about unholy spirits, because in many charismatic denominations they are
blamed for much that goes wrong.109
She replied:
JD: …Umm, the unholy spirit part, I would be able to detect because
there is a , umm, and I don't want to use the word "feeling", but there is a,
would be a negative…the unholy spirit part would bring a fear…
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: …and see, God is not a fear.
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: Um, the unholy spirit part would bring a lot of fear, oh let's see, for
lack of a better word, frustration, in a negative way, like you could be
going somewhere and know, "this is not a good…thing."
She did not, however, bring up the matter of unholy spirits until I asked her. And once
she had answered the question, she did not mention them again. Much more typical of
her attitude toward God and life was her quotation of scripture:
JD: …I do let sometimes, will let fear run in…
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: …and when I do that God will bring me 2 Timothy 1:7. He said, "I
have not given you the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of
sound mind."
109
See for example McGuire and Kantor, Ritual healing in suburban America See also Csordas, The
sacred self: a cultural phenomenology of Charismatic healing
Jean Delaney
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4.9 "Because…He wants us to commune with Him."
When I was asking Rev. Delaney why prayer should be necessary in a universe run by an
all-knowing God, she replied:
JD: He tells us, to ask!
BW: So…we're doing it not because it's sort of necessary in the universe,
but because God says to.
JD: Because…He wants us to commune with Him. He already knows,
but He wants us to commune with Him.
Communing with God seems to be the heart of Jean Delaney's spiritual life. The results
are, as she says, "the proof of the pudding," but communing with God is what it is all for.
She was taught this as a child, when she was first learning to pray. Again, as she said:
…our pastor taught us that praying was communicating with God through
Jesus Christ. And that we could ask God anything, we could tell him
anything.
The communication is what God gets out of prayer, if such an idea makes sense.
JD: So, He said, "Ask. Tell me. Talk to me."
Rev. Delaney added at this point, "Ask. Seek and you will find."
BW: So, it's as much a matter that God wants us to communicate with
Him?
JD: Right.
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BW: OK.
JD: MUCH more of a matter of us communicating.
BW: …with Him. Rather than it being necessary.
JD: Right
God wants this connection with us.
JD: …He wants to be in communication with us. He loves when we are
taking time for Him, not to just talk to Him…
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: …but to really commune with Him, where He is, He is speaking back
to us…
In her prayer for my dissertation, she said:
Let everything that people have said, from the Buddhist to the, to whoever
else he asks, Lord, direct people to a comfort in knowing and, and loving,
praying, communing with You.
Paper is not adequate to convey tones of voice. Rev. Delaney's voice changed when she
spoke of communing with God. It softened and took on longing. It is clear that although
she works willingly in the world, and though she is successful at intercession for others, it
is her communion with God that she loves. And prayer makes it possible. I asked her:
BW: [W]hat would you like to share with others, if you were speaking to
other people, not only in this time, but in times to come?
JD: What would I like to share?
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BW: Yeah.
JD: Always the main thing I would would share with people, is coming
to know the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord and Savior, that's the first thing.
And then, the bond through prayer, that they can commune. And they
don't have to close their eyes, they don't have to get down on their knees,
but to communicate with God through Jesus Christ, the Father and the
Son…
BW: Mm-hmm
JD: to the Father, and then commune – have a relationship with Him,
through prayer. That, that's our vehicle…
Jean Delaney indicated in a telephone call that she was pleased with what I had written.
All of her written corrections were to amend the original transcription, and to add
scriptural citations. She sent a newspaper with a picture of her and her granddaughter
(and word that the Knoxville News-Sentinel has given her an award for her work.) And
she added this story:
July 27, Friday afternoon about 1:00 two ladies wanted to go to the Mall.
I started out of the drive at Halsy Farm and into the City of Clinton. We
passed right by Hammer's in Clinton. While driving I was praying, "Lord,
I thought there was a mall this way." And just like that the Lord said, "Go
to your house." Because near my house is East Town Mall. I would have
been still driving if the Lord had not stopped me."
5 DEBORAH KLINGBEIL: "PERCEIVING IDENTITY"
The Christian Science church has been one of the few Christian organizations to advocate
that its members rely solely on prayer and treatment for medical situations. Practitioners
assist Christian Science members in situations that need healing. Anyone may attempt to
become a practitioner. If they acquire local reputation, they may apply for listing in The
Christian Science Journal. But Journal-listing does not mean that the one listed has been
tested. It simply indicates that the one listed has been recommended by members of their
own congregation and has not been found politically objectionable by the Mother
Church.
Deborah Klingbeil is a member of a family of faithful and troublesome Christian
Scientists. They have been involved for many years in prayer research. They were
convinced that only if the Church did test its practitioners, and the effectiveness of
Christian Science treatment could be empirically shown, would the Christian Science
Church survive in a society increasingly hostile to it. The Klingbeil family created
Spindrift, a prayer research organization that involved Christian Scientists and persons
from outside the Church in ingenious experiments to show the effectiveness of different
types of prayer.110
The research garnered notice outside the Church; Larry Dossey wrote
about it in his books on prayer.111
The Church disapproved, and for a long time the family
110
Spindrift is now a separate organization, and no longer endorsed by Deborah Klingbeil. 111
Dossey, Be careful what you pray for... you just might get it, Dossey, Healing words: the power of
prayer and the practice of medicine
Deborah Klingbeil
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were pariahs. More recently there has been a thaw in this attitude. The Mother Church
even invited Dr. Dossey to speak to the employees at its Boston Headquarters. And the
Church itself is looking at prayer research. The Klingbeil family has always thought of
itself as part of the Church. Following the Christian Science tradition of impersonality,
Deborah Klingbeil looks with disapproval on attempts to attribute prayer research
personally to her family.
Ms. Klingbeil now operates the Grayhaven School of Christian Science Nursing in
Racine, Wisconsin. Prayer has been part of her life since she was a small child:
And I can remember as a little girl, my dad wouldn't teach me to pray until
I could sit quietly for three minutes, without talking. (laughs) And I got
up to about two and a half, and it was just murder.
But there were definite steps. And I had excellent teachers, from my Miss
Gwalter, my teacher in Christian Science, to my dad, to the nurses that I
worked with. I learned from doing it, but to me it was a very helpful thing
to have. And I think being exposed to healings from an early age was
incredibly helpful, because I just didn't have those barriers in my mind that
it couldn't be done.
The Christian Science view of prayer and treatment is very different from what we
ordinarily think of as asking God for help. Christian Scientists do not beseech God, nor
do they attempt to create events forcefully with their minds. As the oldest of the
Metaphysical churches, Christian Science teaches the Biblical idea of "knowing the truth"
- that simply to know what is really true about a situation is sufficient to cut through a
difficulty. This Truth is based on a view of reality that is very different from that of the
mainstream.
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5.1 Looking for Identity
So what does one do about difficulties, if one does not struggle with them and one does
not beg God for help? Just where does one seek this truth? One seeks it in what Ms.
Klingbeil calls "identity."
DK: … But you're looking for the particular identity, the true identity of
what you're praying for, whether it's a person, or yourself, or a plant or
whatever. You're looking for the actual identity.
BW: How do you recognize that "identity"?
DK: The same way you would recognize people. Umm, it's not through
the physical senses. It's tangible in a spiritual way, it's very obvious.
5.1.1 But Is It Looking?
Here we came to an epistemological problem. Just how was she perceiving these
identities? I had used NeuroLinguistic Programming for a number of years, and I had
come to trust its division of experience into sensory modes. One NLP trick for
discovering the preferred sense is to examine the language a person uses. If they use
metaphors that imply vision (look, see, clear, glimpse, light…) they are representing their
experience visually. If they use auditory language (sounds like, loud, hear, dissonance,
harmony…) they are using auditory representation. If they use a language of feeling in
its various connotations (feel, touch, contact, tight, relaxed, warm…) they are
representing kinesthetically. There are also people who think gustatorily or olfactorily.
Ms. Klingbeil used visual language during the interview for almost all her descriptions of
perceiving identity:
Deborah Klingbeil
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But you're looking for the particular identity, the true identity of what
you're praying for, whether it's a person, or yourself, or a plant or
whatever. You're looking for the actual identity…
When I really have a very clear sense of their identity, not just glimpsed
from a distance, but when I can truly communicate with that, then I know
that I’ve gone as far as I can go….
But then, when you see your own identity, or someone else’s spiritually,
it’s absolutely right. It’s like it just falls into place, and you realize, “ This,
this is, this is what it was meant for, this is what it was designed for, this is
actually is.” And it’s no longer uh all dressed up in funny clothes. I mean,
you just see it the way it is…
Because of the visual words used for the perception — "looking," "glimpse," "see" — I
was sure that Ms. Klingbeil was perceiving identities visually. When I suggested that to
her, however, she responded by email:112
I winced when you said I used visual prayer because it truly isn't, I just
don't know how to describe a spiritual sense that isn't physical. It would
be like trying to explain the human sense of touch to someone who had
never touched anything. There is recognition, but it isn't visual. Ah, the
challenges of limited language…
I wrote back and explained why it seemed that she was somehow representing the
experience visually. She responded
Its odd that I use so many visual words, which I didn't know until you told
me, because physically I am not at all visual, partly from having had such
poor eyesight growing up, and, though it's now correctable with glasses
and I have made slow slow progress, I still have terrible eyesight. I think
visually though, I picture things. I guess I think with my eyes but act with
my ears.
We explored how a fundamentally non-physical sense might be mapped onto a physical
brain. At a later point, while we were discussing her experience of guidance as a voice,
she said:
112
Corrections made after Ms. Klingbeil had seen the draft and responded are given in italics.
Deborah Klingbeil
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But I know that's a finite translation of God in my case and not the
experience of God I have in prayer. Kind of like math where you are
working in different bases and the symbol of a seven means a different
thing in base 8 than in base 10, but you get used to switching back and
forth and the underlying truth is exactly the same despite this switching.
So the voice stands for something that is true, it's just not in the right base.
Prayer is quite a different base and if its true that a non- physical sense is
being mapped onto the physical that would explain things…
I've always been awed by computer programmers who have to put all the
complexities of language into those patterns of zeros and ones, zeros and
ones. Then it gets translated back into the complexities of language, but it
has to be squeezed through that limited pattern first. It must be sort of the
same if a non-physical sense has to be mapped onto a physical one. We
only think in terms of five senses, but spiritually you have thousands of
senses, thousands of ways of perceiving, they just aren't limited and
physical. Imagine trying to map that onto a finite perception like a
nervous system. Its the zeros and ones thing. Mortal mind cannot
understand infinity and so it invents feet to walk and fins to swim and
wings to fly. How crude and funny. [Mary Baker] Eddy talks about a
finite sense occasionally peering from its cloister with amazement and
then attempting to pattern the divine. I can picture this finite sense in its
cloister, i.e. matter, like some quaint and rather deformed little elf looking
out from under a mushroom and glimpsing the Milky Way.
Finally she suggested this solution:
Describe it exactly the way you are doing. I did not mean to become a fuss
budget - only to make the point. But since we must use language the visual
is the closest we can come to what I was saying so we put it down and
trust God to interpret it to whoever reads it with a need. Right?
Right.
So with the caveat that the sensory words are only a physical reduction of a much larger
and primarily spiritual perception, it appears that Ms. Klingbeil looks for identities. She
looks not in the world, but spiritually.
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Those beings that have identities go far beyond just the human. I knew that she and her
family had prayed for seeds and even yeast in their prayer research. I asked her just what
had identity, and therefore what one might pray for:
To see the identity of anything, whether it’s a seed, or a cockatiel or a
human being, or my dog (laughs) is a tremendously (small laugh) exciting
thing. I guess that for someone that loved marine biology it would be the
same as, you know, seeing a whale. You know, it’s just very exciting…
BW: That's a …let me just sort of give a list of things that some people
have found unusual to pray for. Is it appropriate to pray for…animals?
DK: Oh, absolutely!
BW: Umm, institutions?
DK: Sure. They have an identity, you know, you can perceive an
institution…The earth itself is an idea, a composite idea. You can
perceive that.
BW: I realize, relationships are probably appropriate…
DK: Oh, yeah (laughs)
BW: Uh, transitional relationships. You know, people who meet each
other for ten minutes.
BW: Well, why not? [It doesn't (?)] take longer. I mean, you see a little
baby in the store and you love it. You don't need to know it to feel love
for that baby; why not adults? Sure.
BW: I agree. Umm. Places.
DK: Yaah, definitely.
BW: Oh, what else can I think of here? (laughs) I'm just trying …I was
talking to somebody the other day who felt very strange about praying for
an animal.
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DK: People do. And they still believe that animals don't have souls. But
then at one time they believed that Black people and Indians didn't have
souls, too. So…
BW: Yaah. Well, it sounds…
DK: By soul, I mean spiritual identity, you know.
Even beings that some people might not enjoy, she said, can turn out to have a beautiful
identity when it is seen spiritually:
DK: And often it’s not at all what you thought it was. When I was
praying for spiders, it was a very amazing thing.
BW: What was it like?
DK: Well, it was like uh having a nightmare, and then waking up and
finding that, that there was this wonderful being sitting on the bed next to
you and it was not at all what you were dreaming about or thought that it
was.
5.1.2 Beyond Looking to Loving
When she finds the identity of a being she does more than just "look" at it. She also
communicates with it, and loves it. The communication is part of the ongoing treatment:
DK: I would continue to take time every day, to get into that mental state
where I can see and communicate with their identity, that's right…
BW: What is the nature of that communication?
DK: It’s certainly not verbal. Uh, it’s mental. I mean, you know, and they
know; and, and thoughts are exchanged.
And mixed with the knowing-about is love:
I can look for and love and learn as much about the spiritual identity of
what I'm praying for, uh and that's really all that I can do is see that and
love it: And you can't love until you see what you're loving.
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5.2 The Dream, or Nightmare, of Mortal Mind
5.2.1 "Human life is a dream."
Christian Scientists believe that matter and physicality are simply an illusion that God
never created.
DK: No. That’s one of the places where I think uh mainline Christianity
has a problem with us, because they believe that emotions are good and
that the human personality, like the human body, is God-created. We
don’t believe that the body is God-created; we don’t believe that the
human ego or will is (laughs) God-created either.
The life we seem to see around us is in fact an apparition:
Well, to a Christian Scientist, human life is a dream, the good stuff and the
bad stuff, what's called good or bad… You don't judge how things are
going by how the dream is going (laughs) you know.
This view that the apparent world is a dream was one of Ms. Klingbeil's recurring
themes. Again and again she spoke about life as a dream or even a nightmare. On one
hand it could be horrifying, but even when it is good its primary quality was its unreality.
One of the consequences is that you should decline to agree to the appearances or to join
in them. If your child was having a nightmare, she said,
…and your kid was screaming and you went into the room, and you’re not
indifferent to that, but you’re not going to get into the dream and get a gun
and shoot the monster that he’s dreaming about.
5.2.2 A Mental Atmosphere
As I understand the Christian Science position, they are not maintaining a dualism
between mind and body. Instead they are maintaining a dualism between Mind that is
accurate and clear, that sees things as they are, and "another mind" that is deluded. The
deluded mind has what Klingbeil called a "finite sense," a belief that it is small and
constrained and identified with a physical body. The reality is that it is not so: the
Deborah Klingbeil
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smaller mind's dream of happiness and suffering in a mortal, physical experience is just
an error.
Because the error is mental, it pervades as a mental atmosphere. The erroneous belief
that there is a body and physical suffering is contagious, ironically, just because it is a
mental phenomenon. And ironically again, because the thought is of physicality, it is
experienced as solidity and turbulence:
DK: …For me the things that make it really hard um (long pause) It's so
hard to describe — There's a sense of stolidity, a real resistant state of
mind that's just almost, umm, it seems so solid. I know it isn't, but you
know it, a very stubborn stolidity almost.
BW: Mm-hmm
DK: There's also that most thought is so muddy. It's not…To me God is a
real clarity, and sometimes when there's just a real confusion of thought.
You will have the family and their fears, and you'll have a lot of differing
agendas and so forth. And generally I can rise above that; but
occasionally, if it's on a more global scale, where you have large numbers
of people like with prayer research where you have whole churches
(laughs) that are angry,
BW: (mutter of agreement)
DK: you have just a lot of people, and you have really hundreds of
thousands of agendas coming in — I do find that difficult. That's why I
sort of have avoided publicity, because I wasn't sure that I could deal with
that, you know, that I was ready…
Ms. Klingbeil objected to my implication that there is dualism in Christian Science:
Dualism implies that there are two things. The implication is that both
things have reality. Let's back up. I will quote canon - i.e. Science and
Health. We (C.Stists) do not believe in a dualism of mind/body such as the
physical sciences and apparently religion currently believe in; as far as I
can figure this became mainstream around the time of Descartes but you
know more about history than I. S&H states "The [physical] body is the
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substratum of mortal mind..." and "matter and mortal mind are but
different strata of human belief" and "In reality and in Science both strata,
mortal mind and mortal body, are false representations of man" etc. This
is one reason my family was pretty sure in prayer research, or perhaps I
should say in consciousness research, that consciousness could be mapped
as accurately as matter. It's the same stuff. Notice S&H says that this
single structure, the mortal mind and mortal body structure, is a false
representation. It's the word "representation" I am looking at. Just a way
of looking at something upside down. Not a false thing in and of itself, just
a false way of seeing. There is no mortal mind. Again S&H states, "Mortal
mind is a solecism in language, and involves an improper use of the word
mind...Indeed, if a better word could be suggested, it would be used; but in
expressing the new tongue we must sometimes recur to the old and
imperfect, and the new wine of the Spirit has to be poured into the old
bottles of the letter." If I look at you through binoculars and they aren't
focused I see a blur. The blur is not separate from you, has no reality
apart from you, but it isn't really you. It is a misperception. Eddy states,
"Matter is a misstatement of Mind." So I don't like the word dualism
because it sounds like I am seeing double, instead of improving my
perception of one, which is all there is.
5.2.3 From Vision to Turbulence
In terms of sensory words that Ms. Klingbeil uses to describe her experience, there is a
striking contrast between the perception-of-identity state and this more difficult mental
atmosphere.
In the perception-of-identity state, her experience is described as visual first. She sees the
identity, and then loves it. The visual precedes the kinesthetic. Furthermore, the visual
enables the kinesthetic:
…all that I can do is see that and love it: And you can't love until you see
what you're loving.
In the turbulent state of non-identity-perceiving mental atmospheres, the visual sense
dims:
DK: Yah, again, there's not that clarity. Umm, you can't get into it.
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BW: What does "not getting into it" mean?
DK: Uh, I mean you can't get into that mental state.
DK: No. There'll be times when I know that I just can't see that identity. I
don't have the purity to do that. I can't get out into the deep ocean…
What is experienced first is kinesthetic; and it blocks, stops or impedes one.
DK: There's something blocking you getting in, maybe yourself, maybe
something from the outside, but you're having trouble getting into it…
Klingbeil carefully distinguishes personal emotion from impersonal Divine qualities such
as Love.
DK: …And I find that emotion is muddy. It clouds the water. It doesn’t
really take me there. Which doesn’t mean, um, that there’s no such thing
as love. But true love isn’t emotional. It’s – we call it “impersonal,” and
people just hate that, ‘cause they want everything to be personal, you
know (laughs)
Language, which is central to prayer in many communities, is not part of the process that
Klingbeil uses in prayer itself.
DK: I don't use words in prayer. At all, period.
Instead, speech arises only when she returns from the more "visual" experience of prayer
and tries to communicate it:
DK: Well language is, you know it is really like… you can go out and
stand in the full sun and experience that. And when you come in the
house and you have Venetian blinds you're going to see interesting
patterns on the rug but those patterns, it, is the interaction of the sun
with…with the dark, with the human, you know …When you're actually
praying you're in the sun. Then later you come in and you see the
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manifestation, you see the patterns. But the patterns are just temporary.
They're useful to communicate, but they're just temporary. They're
interesting, but they're just temporary (laughs seriously)
BW: Right
DK: And prayer is eternal; it's the real; it's what really is. It's standing in
the full sun, so it’s different.
We have then a strong distinction between the sensory — I think Klingbeil would prefer
to put quotes around it and call it "sensory" — words used to describe the two states.
Clear visual experience followed by positive kinesthetic experience is the metaphor for
the Seeing-Identity state. Turbulent, blocking, negative kinesthetic experience, and
dimmed or absent vision, characterizes the opposite "human" mental atmosphere.
Ms. Klingbeil questioned my use of the word "human" as one pole of a duality:
I notice that you use the word human for something entirely negative - the
turbulent, negative absent dim state. Maybe I might have used that
terminology in my interview without thinking, which is why you picked
that up, but it is not technically correct. Sometimes I substitute the word
human for mortal, but it is a lazy way to communicate, the words are not
synonymous. Human is not a dirty word. Jesus was still human when he
pulled off the resurrection and that hardly meant a turbulent negative dim
state. Eddy says that the divinity of Jesus was made manifest in his
humanity. Human is the tares and the wheat, it isn't just tares. We need to
uplift our humanhood before we can attain Spirit (ascend like Jesus, i.e.
no longer perceive ourselves as physical). In other words we need to be
good human beings, before we can expect to go farther, and Jesus told us
to be good human beings. I am always surprised at how high humanhood
can be lifted in the Biblical record. So, would it be appropriate to use a
different word? I would use mortal, but others might not know what that
means. Or else, put a few good qualities in with the bad so that the word
human represents both.
Both are mental, however. And language arises on the interface, where these two types
of experience meet.
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5.3 Purification and Bringing The Divine and Human Together
A third mental experience exists, the contemplation of God. Klingbeil's understanding of
God differs from that which is more common in Western culture. First of all, in the
background culture we share, God is understood to be a person like ourselves. I asked
Ms. Klingbeil
BW: Do you experience um the God as a person?
DK: Never.
BW: Never?
DK: Never. I use those metaphors reluctantly, because that’s what means
something to people; but I actually think they’re harmful, because they do
lead people to thinking of God as a person, and God, to me, God is not a
person at all.
The obvious question then was
BW: What is God?
DK: Haah, Wow! (laughs)
BW: (laughs)
DK: It’s the thing you can’t put in language. You know, God is God.
God is a completely unique individual being unlike any other force or
being. God, God is! God is that which inspires complete allegiance and
love; uh, just, God is.
BW: Well, let me ask this, then: um, would you say it’s appropriate to say
that God is a, um, like a law?
DK: Well, God is the source of all the laws from which the Universe is
crafted. God’s nature is law-giving. Unity [The Unity School of
Christianity] will use the word "Divine Order," and I never liked that. I
think “Principle,” our word, is better; because Principle is the source of
order. It’s like saying, "God is loving." God is Love! It’s more! It’s
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infinitely more. God, God’s nature is perfect, and therefore It is expressed
in law, but um God is not a law, or even a set or laws, or a system, God
simply expresses Itself through law because God’s nature is perfect. God
is perfect, and cannot be changed or …you know, It is – perfect.
Klingbeil uses the capitalized neuter pronoun "It" in her email when referring to God.
She also has a specialized usage of the words "treatment" and "prayer." Treatment is
looking for and contemplating identities with love. It is therapeutic. Prayer, in her usage,
is the contemplation of God.
DK: Oh, prayer is just looking at God. Treatment is looking
at…something particular in God. (small laugh)
The most common metaphor she uses when talking about God is the ocean. Again and
again she speaks of God as the great sea, and the practice of prayer as being by the shore.
That Sea, however, is aware and helpful:
DK: Well, in prayer it would be like…See, the problem is that God is
outside of language, so it's so hard to explain it, but I guess you could say
like um looking at the ocean all day. But in treatment you might be
looking for a particular grain of sand at the ocean's depth, which the ocean
will bring to you, and show you…
God is good and will bring to you – um if you’re looking for one little
grain of sand that’s out at the very bottom of the middle of the ocean
(laughs) God itself will bring that up and show it to you.
The ocean figures also in Klingbeil's sense of playfulness in contemplation:
DK: Oh, it's like running on the beach. There's times when it's non-
treatment, and I don't have to look for a particular identity, and I just pick
up anything that looks interesting to me. Or I might choose to wade in a
little bit, you know, and get bitten by a crab on my foot (laughs). It's so
interesting, you know what I mean? Uh, nothing is more interesting than,
that reality, and sanity, and clarity; and it makes the dream just look so
tawdry. It, it's so invigorating, it's so …where else would you ever want to
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be? You know, it doesn't always have to be uh on purpose; you can just,
you know, you can go to the beach to look at the storms coming in, you
can go to the beach to learn about marine biology; but you can also just go
to the beach….
Your relationship to God can't be all awe. There's certainly that, but umm,
I mean I'm awed even by human beings; but you still have fun with them,
you know. I'm awed even by my dad or myself, sometimes; but you're
still you. You know what I mean? You can't take it too seriously.
She also compared her experience of God to the time she spent in a Chicago art museum
as a child:
DK: When I was a kid, before people worried about child-abduction and
everything, my mom had an appointment downtown, she'd just leave my
sister and I at the Art Institute (laughs) like a baby-sitter. We'd run around,
and the guards just hated us. I mean, we'd tear up and down those stairs
and hide behind those statues and everything…
BW: (laughs)
DK: …And you know, once a year they'd take us on a field trip, and it
was just ghastly. They'd have these little folding chairs, and you'd have to
sit on them, and they'd talk about some painting. It was so boring, and we
just wanted to get to the gift shop and the lunchroom and everything. But
many years later, and I know nothing about art, but I would see pictures
and statues and I would knew them, because I'd played behind them. I
knew what the marble looked like up close. And I loved them. I'd hear
about a theft or something and I'd be shaken to my soul, (laughs)
BW: ahh!
DK: …but the pictures we had to learn about … (laughs) They're just
totally…I remember this one Madonna, and to this day I think it's just the
ugliest thing (laughs) … a chubby baby. And yet the pictures that we
played in front of, we weren't studying them, but we were there. And I
think that's true in prayer. You know, if you grow up and you unfold the
little chairs, and pray like that, you're going to hate it. But if you're really
allowed, from a young age, or even older, if you're allowed to run around
in the art museum (small laugh) or in the magnificence of God, you're
going to love those things. Because you're absorbing them, at some level.
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5.4 But Seriously, Folks…
One of the strongest impressions in interviewing Klingbeil was her sense of humor. In a
two-hour interview she laughed over 140 times. Sometimes she laughs the sad laughter
of someone who can do only that in the face of some kinds of pain. But again and again
she seemed to understand how unusual and even absurd a life of contemplative prayer
would seem to others. She could move into that other viewpoint, and from it chuckle at
her own life's work. She told me with genuine appreciation of Gary Larson's Far Side
cartoon about the "Small-Appliance Healer."
It is fortunate that she has the sanity of humor, because the life of prayer she portrays
seems to be deeply serious and demanding. Although her universe includes the
contemplation of God's bright oceanlike love, she is not allowed to dwell there
undisturbed. Not only does daily life impinge on her as it does on everyone, it also is part
of her vocation to confront the negative. She is a Christian Science nurse, caring for the
physical needs of patients while she and other practitioners work for their healing. She
is currently caring for an Alzheimer's patient in her home, re-founding her school of
Christian Science nursing, continuing prayer research (she is at this writing working on
making sterile birds fertile), publishing a widely distributed newsletter called The Home
Catacomb, and corresponding with people as far away as Mongolia. She also has both
birds and dogs as pets. This is not a life withdrawn from the world.
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5.4.1 Invading the Shadow
It seems that the life of a healer is a deliberate, repeated invasion of the shadow to bring
light to situations.
… it is very painful when you're longing for spirit with all your heart, to
willingly walk into the shadow, which of course is what healing is about,
you know, being willing to do that. Jesus obviously did that, even though
he didn't like it.
She repeated that Jesus' 'Way of the Cross' is the model she follows:
BW: And, have you seen these negativities transformed?
DK: Oh, yaah.
BW: I mean so that they become not only better, but they become their
opposite?
DK: Well, that's what's so — that to me is what healing is. I mean, Jesus
turned the crucifixion, capital punishment, just about the ugliest thing, into
you know the greatest outpouring of love the world ever knew. He turned
his betrayal from Jesus, I mean from Judas into true forgiveness and love.
I mean, that is what we do.
Many of the situations are objectively awful:
We had a fellow that came to a [Christian Science] mental institution.
He'd been on a waiting list because we only have one institution, and he's
been on a waiting list a couple of years. He'd been very badly messed up
in Vietnam. He'd been a chaplain over there, a Christian Science chaplain,
he'd had the, the seminary training and everything. And he'd gotten
shrapnel in his brain and seen a lot of bad things, and he was very… when
he came to us he'd been on tranquilizers, because he'd had to be to be in
the institution where he was [unintelligible]. And when he came off it was
so scary. He literally… We had a new wing, and we'd put him in there
with some other people; and I heard a noise, and he was breaking the toilet
(laughs) with his hands, you know how the adrenaline runs and they get
real strong…
BW: Wow, yeah.
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DK: And I didn't get to work with him too much (laughs) - after that, they
used male nurses — but he would not wear clothes, he'd lie on the floor,
you know, he was so violent and so angry and so agitated. And the
practitioner was pretty good, but in the two years I was there I didn't see
real progress at all… And so I, I sort of wondered about tranquilizers,
whether they might not be good. But almost twenty years later I ran into
that man — happily, he didn't recognize me — and he not only was totally
healed, but he was a practitioner and I heard later what wonderful work he
was doing.
The practice of healing requires that healers expose themselves not only to objectively
difficult situations, but also to toxic mental atmospheres:
BW: You mentioned the mental atmosphere. Umm, could you say a little
bit about what it is that makes it hard, or easy, to work in a mental
atmosphere?
DK: It's mostly getting in and out. I mean the, the state of prayer is
totally outside of, you might say outside of that airspace; it's out of the
orbit. You know, it's outside of time, or the case, or the physical senses.
But (laughs) launching is the place where that would run into trouble. It
was just like bad weather can, you know, keep you from launching there.
At this point in my progress I can't just do it at will, I need to…um, I can
do it increasingly at will, but there are things that would hold me back.
And there are certain mental atmospheres that make it very hard.
5.4.2 Dealing with the Side Effects of Healing
Just as a physician or a nurse in ordinary medicine must understand the ecology and side
effects of disease in order to deal with illness, so must a Christian Science healer
understand possible collateral results of prayer. Klingbeil's family frequently found that
when they did healings or prayer research, some people were not pleased. They could
not just ignore these ecological side-effects. They felt they had to seek them out and deal
with them.
DK: …That's part of being a responsible pray-er. Because you are leaving
a wake.
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BW: How do you… How do you find those patterns and, and how do you
deal with them?
DK: You specifically look for them. And that is not so much in prayer,
that's more like after prayer is over; and you come in, and you, you find
the pattern, and you try to decipher it. That's part of what I'm doing in
prayer research. I'm looking for where the vulnerable people are, I'm
looking for where the resistance is going to be greatest, I'm looking for
where, uh, I need to mentally go, to …cover my tracks, so to speak.
BW: Where do you find… what do you do, when you discover that?
Those tracks?
DK: Then I have to, then I have to pray, then I have to treat that. And I'm
not allowed to go forward in prayer until I've done that.
BW: Could you give me…
DK: It could be dangerous.
BW: …like an example, that would make this concrete? Is there a story
that can be, that's appropriate to tell?
DK: Well, I think when we started out with some of the tests, it
threatened people, at some level. And we had opportunities, at that time,
to get some funding and go forward. But we had not done that particular
work. We, we didn't really know who. We could feel the mental
friction....
BW: Mm-hmm
DK: ...We could certainly feel the resistance; it was just like a wave, or
you know, just like walking through molasses half the time. But we didn't
know where it was coming from. We certainly had not loved, or seen in
prayer, the identities of people who were feeling threatened. We'd
threatened somebody, and they were hateful; but we didn't know who or
where. And so we turned down that funding, that opportunity to go
forward, until we did mentally search. It, it, it's kind… my dad once said
it was like putting your hand down a lot of snake-holes, and something
bites, you know you're (laughs)
BW: (laughs)
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DK: at the right one, you know, you just loose (?) it around and "Oh,
good, this is where, this is what we have to handle." And so, I like
problems because when there's a problem you begin to see the fault lines.
There's pressure, and you can see, even in your own mind where you're,
where you're weak, you know what I mean? You see where you're going
to crack. Then you can shore that up before you go forward (laughs). We
did eventually discover who it was, and uh, were able to all come to where
we felt we genuinely loved them and were able to protect them, so that
their own hatred didn't hurt them. Because hatred is just fear, too, and
being threatened, your identity being threatened. And so when that was
done, then we were able to go forward. But that would be an example of
what you would have to do to be doing this in an ethical way…. And, I'm
not searching for evil; I'm searching to bless. When somebody just lashes
out at you it's because they're hurting, and you want to bless them before
you go further.
The danger is not academic. Both her father and her brother committed suicide, apparent
victims of an unremittingly hostile response to their prayer research.113
Klingbeil's own
marriage ended in divorce. But despite this personal grief, Klingbeil continues with the
practice of praying beyond healing, to a wider 'ecological' context
DK: …If we come to the end and they call me up and say, “Oh, I’m
healed, I’m healed!” I will then, very frequently, ask if I can pray another
week or so. And they will usually say yes.
BW: And what, what you’re after is that clarity of their identity which is
an issue that is beyond the healing?
DK: Yes, and beyond the disappearance of physical symptoms. And then
I think what it does is it enriches that healing, and it makes it so much
more universal. It makes it good for the family and the community and
the world, and it makes it good for their spiritual growth…
113
The darkness and pain of dealing with this hostility is portrayed in the lightly fictionalized account of
the life of her father, Bruce Klingbeil, written by her brother John Klingbeil: Owen, The healer.
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There is a second source of personal stress. When one does treatment, it is not possible
to predict what changes it will bring about. Klingbeil is sure that they are for the best, but
they can be very difficult:
DK: I have a woman in her fifties that came to me, she has a son his
thirties who is developmentally disabled and she’s a single mother and
he’s been living with her his whole life. Maybe the last ten years he’s had
his own couple of rooms upstairs, but he basically can’t function. Umm,
and she asked me to pray, and within a week he was in the hospital, very
ill; and now he’s institutionalized for the (laughs) first time in his life in a
group home. But for the first time, too, he has a friend and he’s going on
outings and she is having to deal with some things, because he’s not there
and she’s having to deal with some things. And to me it’s a very positive
thing; to her it’s very painful and hurtful.
BW: Yeah.
DK: (laughs) But I have no control over that. I have no control over the
process. I can only bring the love to bear. Umm, I guess another analogy
would be, you know, if you were having a nightmare, uh, and your kid
was screaming and you went into the room, and you’re not indifferent to
that, but you’re not going to get into the dream and get a gun and shoot the
monster that he’s dreaming about. So you’re going to love him, and you
don’t know what will happen. Maybe his dream will get better, but you’re
not changing a monster into a whatever he’s dreaming about now, a new
puppy. I mean, stuff just like you’re not changing a sick body (small
laugh) into a healthy one; they’re both illusions. But you are glad that
he’s having a better dream.
Because "the dream" is so dark and turbulent, and because even the positive results of
treatment can be stressful, the life of a healer is not an easy one. One of the apparently
essential skills is the ability to move quickly from "human awareness" to the
contemplation of identities and of God's perfection. Sometimes the impediment to
making this move, which Klingbeil calls "launching," is as simple as her small and noisy
dog:
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…(dog barking) whenever I get to the place where I’ve just about
launched into Spirit, it always seems to be Caleb (laughs).
Sometimes the difficulty is more general, like bad atmospheric conditions.
The state of prayer is totally outside of, you might say outside of that
airspace; it's out of the orbit. You know, it's outside of time, or the case, or
the physical senses. But getting (laughs), launching is the place where that
would run into trouble. It was just like bad weather can, you know, keep
you from launching there.
And sometimes the problem is within one's own character, a particularly agonizing
situation:
DK: But again, that launching process can be very painful, if you have to
burn away something that has to be burned away to get in there, and you're
not quite ready (laughs)...and you're going to do it anyway. I mean, it
really is like cutting off your right arm ...and you do it. Umm, yaah, it's
painful.
BW: Ow, yaah.
DK: It's painful. And you know that you're creating your own pain, but
it's still there. Getting into prayer can be very, very painful. But, prayer
itself is never.
Part of the solution is to learn to take the shadow and its dramas less seriously:
DK: Well, to a Christian Scientist, human life is a dream, the good stuff
and the bad stuff, what's called good or bad. It's obviously, I mean we're
in that to an extent — It's not a huge part of my life, luckily, and happily.
You know, it isn't the major part by any means. Um, but like a shadow,
it's there that I'm aware of.
Another part of her discipline is to use the pain and difficulty itself as an aid to entering
the prayer or treatment state, as a bird rises on a blustery thermal:
DK: So sometimes problems can push a little bit in a good way. Physical
pain is something that can actually be very helpful [inaudible] (laughs). I
actually never mind being sick for that reason.
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BW: That's interesting. What is it about physical pain that seems to be
helpful?
DK: And by the way, the Church would absolutely kill me for saying that.
(laughs) But it's true - I don't mind, I'll say it again….
BW: That's interesting. I sort of get this metaphor that's emerging for me,
and let me check it, that it really is like atmospherics,
DK: Yah: again, it's just a matter of getting in and out of the prayer state;
and the older I get, or I shouldn't say — the more experienced I get you
know the more I can walk that at will. … I would say with physical pain,
you know, you're in a dream and you want to get out of the dream, so
what's going to help you - if you're comfortable in it or uncomfortable?
Which are you - if you're in a house, if you're a landlord and you're renting
a house, are they more likely to leave if they're real happy there or not too
happy? I don't believe in creating problems, you know, being sadistic, but
I never mind them, I truly don't.
BW: Yaah. That's a very…it sounds like a distant echo of the ascetic
tradition.
DK: I'm afraid so (laughs).
BW: (laughs)
DK: I would have gone wonderful with the sackcloth and the ashes and
the hair shirts and everything (laughs).
5.5 A Life of Prayer
5.5.1 Solitude
Klingbeil's life centers around private prayer. As such, it often seems an odd life to
others:
DK: And I have a real problem (small laugh) being out in the world
unless it's doing my nursing. My husband just used to say, "You'd rather
go out on a case than to a party," and — I would.
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BW: (laughs)
DK: It's hard, you know, what can I say. (laughs)
BW: It is a little odd, isn't it? "What do you do for fun?" "Well…"
(laughs)
DK: Pray! (laughs) It does sound funny. But that's because people don't
understand how fun it is, you know.
People do not understand, and that contributes to the loneliness. She responded to one
person's interest this way:
DK: You know, Birrell, that is so precious, because believe me, people
like that are few and far between. I mean, you'll go for years without
really meeting anybody who even (small laugh) cares.
But part of her development is that she has grown to love even this aloneness:
DK: But now I'm starting to like being out in the desert, too. (laughs)
Those stellar winds are ok. So I, you know, you change a little too.
5.5.2 Purification
To become pure sounds grueling, and it is clear from Klingbeil's previous descriptions
that it is so:
BW: That's also one of the questions, I guess, is: do you find that you
have what you would call negative experiences during prayer?
DK: Uh, I have negative experiences getting into prayer. Never in prayer,
no. But again, that launching process can be very painful, if you have to
burn away something that has to be burned away to get in there, and you're
not quite ready (laughs)...and you're going to do it anyway. I mean, it
really is like cutting off your right arm ...and you do it…
And again:
... But do I ever experience difficulty? Sure. Spiritual growth is very
hard, and you know, St. Paul says "I die daily" and I do. Uh, the part of
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me that needs to die to get out of here, dies daily; and that's not always an
easy process.
But painful as this process is, it has rewards. It is the impurity that makes it difficult to
work as a healer:
BW: Do you find um that you always eventually experience success?
DK: No. There'll be times when I know that I just can't see that identity.
I don't have the purity to do that. I can't get out into the deep ocean, you
know. And then, regretfully, I will drop the case. And that's an incentive
to work harder.
But prayer itself makes one more pure:
DK: …But the act of praying is a purifying process, and, you bet,
everything we pray for is just … to pray for a healthy body is an illusion,
too, but if it brings you closer to God and to waking up, why not?
The process also requires a certain patience with oneself;
DK: this is also… I don't mean to be too laid back, but I mean, I do accept
that it takes hundreds of years to do this. And I, you know, I'm not too
strung out about not being able to do it all.
The process of purification, she implies, will eventually allow one to go deeper into God,
and take part in even greater wonders, when one has become more pure:
Well, in prayer it would be like um…See, the problem is that God is
outside of language, so it's so hard to explain it, but I guess you could say,
[it is] like looking at the ocean all day. But in treatment you might be
looking for a particular grain of sand at the ocean's depth, which the ocean
will bring to you, and show you, if possible, some of them, you know;
God can't bring a sperm whale up to the shore. You have to go in and you
might not be pure enough to do that….
There may be times…you know, a lot of times especially at my stage,
which is an early stage, you might not see it clearly. You might like see a
dolphin jump out of the water and that might bring healing; but it's a lot
different than swimming with the dolphins, you know. Or you might see a
Deborah Klingbeil
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different… mountain peak, or a ship or something, but, and that might
bring healing but it isn't …always a close-up view. There are things that I
cannot perceive at this point, so that I have to give up the case.
In the meantime, this life of prayer and purification, though sometimes painful, has
brought about changes in her character:
DK: Has it changed me? Oh my goodness yes! Oh my goodness yes.
You wouldn't have recognized me (laughs) thirty years ago, Birrell! I had
a terrible temper growing up; I was a very wild kid. I always had that love
of God, which luckily kept me, you know, protected. But I certainly have
done many things I regretted and umm. Yaah, I would just say that I am
so different today that umm, it's one reason why I have trouble with
relatives, 'cause they don't, you know, they remember me a certain way;
and it's just almost impossible … It's made me very patient. It's made me
very happy, it's made me have a greater grasp of the big picture — you
know, I don't just look at one side of things anymore. Everything that I
was ever intolerant about immediately came into my life. ...
BW: Mm-hmm
DK: ...So, you know, I no longer have that. You know, if I was against
this or against that… Even suicide (laughs) you know, I used to be very
arrogant about that. "Well, that…" It would be like that.; it would come
right at me, and I would have to let it go. So it's made me very, uh, very
much more loving. It's made me a lot smarter. It's changed me, just even
in my lifestyle. You know, like I say, I don't need as much sleep as I used
to. I can literally rest in this. It's changed me in so many ways I couldn't
even begin to tell you. My whole consciousness. I'm not as emotional as I
used to be. I was very emotional growing up. The things that make me
happy are totally different now than they were even one year ago, much
less five years ago. And I think that's the biggest thing, is our concept of
happiness changes. So, the things that make us happy, you know, tend to
be better for us. ...
5.5.3 Waking People from the Dream
She is able to tolerate this human loneliness and the pain of purification in part because
her healing work contributes to the awakening of others.
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Her use of the word "waken" is dual. She uses it in the ordinary sense, as when she
describes people's experiences of prayer in her experimental 'prayer stations' where they
work by praying for yeast:
DK: Mostly, when people try these tests and they realize that their
thought has an effect, it's a real shocker to them. They they're both
worried about whether (laughs) they're going to have a negative effect,
and realizing that they ought to be doing something. I mean, it does make
wake them up; we found that at the prayer stations.
She also means it in the larger religious sense, of awakening from "the dream." The
healing is important, but it can be dwarfed by the impersonal Knowing and Loving that
brings it about. In some ways the metaphysical healing seems to be what merchants call a
"loss leader," something that is offered to bring patrons in for what is really important:
DK: …Your dream also might wake, I mean your love might wake him up
temporarily, which happens: people have this experience of God, and the
healing almost becomes irrelevant. Umm, in fact I just had that on a case
where a woman had a growth on her face. She was very focused on it, and
then she had this experience of God, and she doesn’t even know when it
fell off or what happened. (laughs)
BW: (laughs)
DK: (laughs) I mean it was just like it wasn’t even important any more.
DK: … she truly was just filled with love. And people will often say that
they can't bear to hear a cross word. You know, that they just loved
everything and everybody that they saw, (small laugh) from the blade of
grass to the neighbor. It's just this wonderful experience that they will
never forget for the rest of their life, and which almost makes the healing
irrelevant.
5.5.4 Communicating with Spiritual Beings
The human loneliness that can arise from giving up social life and doing prayer research
all the time is much relieved by other sorts of contact:
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DK: What do I value? First and foremost, the contact with God that it
gives me, you know, the fact that, in today's world, there aren't many ways
that you can make a living and have time to look at God, all day (small
laugh)...That is very valuable to me… I think you get to know people at
the most important part, time in their lives. It's not a trivial relationship.
You get to not only commune with spiritual beings, but you get to see
people being, you know, waking up out of the dream. It's so much more
meaningful than the average friendship.... To me there is a sense of, of
friendship that takes away some of the sting of the dream. You know, it
redeems it a little bit.
As the prayer life begins it is acutely solitary.
It can be a very lonely thing, when you're not good enough to really
communicate with spiritual beings, and you're not longer really interested
in the dream, it's really a very sad place to be.
But when it becomes possible to actually get in touch with spiritual beings, it is exactly
that contact —and not even the human contact involved in prayer research — that
comforts:
DK: Such a surprise! (laughs) and that to me is the heart and soul of
prayer research. I mean, all the rest, the data, and again, that’s
communication. It’s what I need to do, and you know, I’m happy to do it,
but…but that’s not the heart and soul of it. So … (laughs)
BW: Well, the heart and soul is the contact with other people?
DK: The heart and soul is the contact with the spiritual beings. I mean, life
would be very lonely without that.
I asked her how she knew that this contact was not a mental artifact, and she replied
How do I know when I meet you that you are not a mental artifact?
Actually, according to Christian Science, the physical personality of
Birrell is just that, not real at all. The best I can tell you is that the
experience is much more real than meeting someone in the flesh. It's a
tangible thing, spiritually speaking, and just like when someone comes to
my door and I talk to them I don't stand there and wonder first if they are
an illusion. This is a real experience. It's where I live. The other seems
much more transitory and shadowy, and hard to believe in, the flesh I
mean.
The contact with God and the contact with other beings is not, in the end, distinct:
Deborah Klingbeil
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What I mean is that we are not separate in that way, its like we share a
central computer, a central Mind, a central heart, a central source of
feeling. When we read something someone has written or said, and its
helpful, its not because we are learning but because we are recognizing,
God is revealing Itself to us. Its God's basic nature to reveal Itself. It's not
Deborah to Birrell or Birrell to Deborah but God to Birrell and God to
Deborah, or Mind to us, or Ego to us, if you prefer, and we get to chat
about it which is fun but the learning doesn't flow between us. I never
could get into clergy or the priesthood thing - the posture was all wrong.
God on top, person on bottom, priest figure in middle. Or practitioner in
middle. The picture I like better is two people reaching out to God
together and God in the middle.
5.5.5 Miracles
As a person who prays and who nurses those who are being prayed for, Klingbeil is
present at events that seem miraculous to outsiders. To her, they are almost ordinary, and
they can even bring logistical problems:
DK: One [case] was — I was actually on it as a nurse, —but this woman
was born blind, and was blind her whole life,. She was not a Christian
Scientist, not into spiritual healing. But she got married and she was
pregnant, and she wanted to see her baby very badly. I don't know why
she didn't go to a practitioner near her — she lived in Illinois — but she
got (laughs) on a Greyhound bus with her baby… (laughs)
BW: No! (laughs)
DK: … and she was blind, and she didn't want to tell her husband because
he'd think she was crazy and weird, and came to downtown Chicago — at
that time my father had an office, because they all did — and was healed
in his office. I came on the case — it was the first time I'd ever come on a
case after the patient was physically healed —she couldn't find her way
home, she wasn't used to seeing. She didn't understand, you know,
perspective and things got bigger when you move toward them…
BW: Oh! (laughs)
DK: She couldn't understand anything, really, and then she was so elated
that my dad thought maybe she'd get off at the wrong stop (laughs) so…
BW: Sure.
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DK: I went home, and I was with that family a month; and it was the most
interesting case that I've had because there was no real need for nursing.
But she needed time to study. I mean, she had to be taught to read, for one
thing, and to drive. And I'd take care of the baby so she had time to study.
And also, the family was a little threatened by it all, you know — they
were scared. And I think being there made it a little more
comprehensible(?) to them.
But even these concrete miracles are part of the larger contemplative life:
But, this is where physical healing and prayer research come in handy
because one way to communicate , or you might say one way to bring the
two perceptions into momentary sync, is for there to be a coincidence of
the human and divine. When I see the identity of Polly (the bird)
spiritually, she is no longer physically sterile. She lays an egg. Things
move, it's like they are being sucked into the divine, the illusory
perception is being pulled into a higher perception and we interpret this
humanly as a "healing".
5.5.6 The Sea and the Shell
In the end, despite its difficulties, Klingbeil 's life is a delight to her. She said of her
prayer research;
DK: Well, for one thing it's made me pray for hours and hours…and for
another it's kept me very aware of, of the nature of God. You know it's
like being out in a beautiful place, where you're constantly looking at
mountains and rivers. It uplifts you, I mean, you're constantly looking,
even in the dream world, you're still looking at parts of God all the time…
BW: Given that, is there any particular sort of message that you would
pass on to others, either those who might be in your own path, or just — to
others?
DK: That prayer isn't work. That prayer is something so wonderful that
you…uh, you know it isn't something you have to do; it's not a duty. It's
something so wonderful that, that you will want to do it, and that you
should try it…
DK: It will always be possible to do something, and it will never be
boring. (laughs)
6 PRISCILLA STUCKEY: "GETTING OUT OF THE WAY"
Reiki is a system of healing whose name in Japanese means Spirit Energy. It arose out
the Meiji period, a time of rapid social change in Japan.114
It has spread around the world
and has many initiates to its various degrees.115
Priscilla Stuckey is a Reiki practitioner and teacher who lives in Northern California.
Her own healing practice is one of the youngest among those interviewed; she has been
using the system since 1995. Her first contact with meditation and spiritual healing came
when she herself was very sick, beginning in 1990.
PS: When I got CFIDS back in 1990, early 1990…
BW: CFIDS?
PS: Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome.
BW: You don’t look ..
114
Practitioners of Reiki tell variants of the same story. In Japan, more than a century ago, a Japanese
Christian teacher was asked by his students if he could perform the healings that Jesus predicted and
enjoined. The teacher, Mikao Usui, was chagrined that he could not. He decided to go to a Christian
country, America, to find how to perform such miracles. He attended the University of Chicago, the stories
say, and received a doctorate. But he did not find how to perform the healings Christianity claimed in its
early years. He traveled to northern India, and (knowing Sanskrit) studied the holy writings. He then
returned to Japan, where he retired to Mt. Kuriyama to fast, pray and read Buddhist sutras for 21 days. At
the end of that time a light came and struck him. When he recovered consciousness, he was able to heal by
the laying on of hands. See Baginski and Sharamon, Reiki: universal life energy, Haberly, Reiki: Hawayo
Takata's story, Horan, Empowerment Though Reiki Other sources challenge many of the particulars,
claiming that Usui was never a Christian, and never left Japan. The history of the Usui healing system All
do agree that he taught the system, and that it was brought to North America by a Japanese-American
woman, Hawayo Takata. 115
Initiation into Reiki was part of my own spiritual inquiries, and I still use it for myself and occasionally
for others.
Priscilla Stuckey
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PS: Isn’t it amazing? (laughs) I’m younger and healthier than I’ve ever
been in my life. (laughs) I started, as one of the therapies, because
Western medicine didn’t help, I tried everything else. And the first thing
that helped was acupuncture, and the next thing that helped was
homeopathy, and the third thing that helped was this: I started going to
this spiritual healer. And that’s when my world-view really started
breaking open. I had been praying, and I’d been acknowledging the non-
three-dimensional world for some years already, but I wasn’t really like
exploring it. I’d had some psychic openings, but I wasn’t really … Faith
wasn’t there. I wasn’t consistently interacting with that dimension of
reality. And I started seeing her once a week, for months. She worked
mostly in the aura, but sometimes would place her hands on your body,
and she had a tape of Tibetan bells, bowls, bells, you know, that was being
played in the background. And she… my world-view started cracking
open when I realized she could read my life, she could know what was
going on in my relationship with my mother (small laugh), she could tell
what was happening in my foot (small laugh). And my world-view started
breaking open.
When she read my draft, she added:116
Although my Reiki practice only goes back to 1995, my work in laying-on
of hands (on myself) goes back to 1990, and the main reason I decided to
get Reiki certification was because it appeared to be merely an
augmentation of what I had already done for five years.
Her own pursuit of spirituality had led her into graduate work at the Graduate
Theological Union in Berkeley, from which she was eventually to earn a Ph.D. with a
focus on spirituality and gender. At the same time she was in contact with the extremely
varied spiritual offerings of Northern California. She sought out a woman who taught a
class in animal communication when she acquired her present dog:
…she was such a special character that I wanted to know more about what
her mission, what her life in the world was about. And so I consulted
Heather117
, to communicate with her. And then Heather said, “Oh, by the
116
Corrections and comments by Dr. Stuckey are in italics throughout. 117
A pseudonym
Priscilla Stuckey
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way, I’m teaching some Reiki classes.” And it just had happened that I
had laid my hands on a Reiki book a couple of weeks earlier, and had seen
how, “Oh, this person is talking about how the energy comes out through
your, both your hands. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since I lay on
Penny’s118
table, and when I’m all in the morning, I put my hands on
myself; and it comes through both my hands. OK, I’m going to do Reiki!”
She received her initiation into the first level of Reiki in 1995. Since 1996 she has taught
occasional classes and given Reiki treatments to herself and others.
6.1 The Practice of Energetic Healing
6.1.1 Working Hands-On
Basic Reiki consist of laying hands on a client. This distinguishes it from some forms of
energy work, such as Therapeutic Touch, in which one works "in the aura" near the body,
without actually touching the client.119
The recipient is usually lying on a massage table,
fully clothed, and often with eyes closed. The Reiki practitioner places both hands first
on the head, and then works down the body of the recipient. Eyes, ears, the back of the
head, mid-chest, mid-back, upper abdomen, lower abdomen, knees and feet are common
places to rest the hands. The hands are allowed to remain for a period of time at each
location.
118
The spiritual healer who had been working on her 119
Therapeutic touch is particularly common among nurses, and one of its primary exponents is a professor
at a New York nursing school Krieger, Accepting your power to heal: the personal practice of Therapeutic
Touch.
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Priscilla Stuckey's practice is highly kinesthetic. She experiences the energy
kinesthetically, and the indicators that tell her whether the session is going well or not are
also kinesthetic.
Ms. Stuckey commented:
It’s not a matter of whether the session is going well or not; the kinesthetic
indicators are about how long to stay in each position. I assume the
session is going well, because I’m doing what I’ve been asked to do.
For instance, the amount of time at each location is not fixed; and Stuckey may change
hand positions based on her feelings:
PS: When I’m working on people, I go by how my hands feel. Well,
that’s not exactly true. I go by how my hands feel and I go by a three to
five time limit in each, or three to five suggested, time-frame in each
position.
BW: Minutes?
PS: Minutes, yah. So sometimes I won’t feel anything happening, but it’s
a good idea to just stay there anyway. Other times I definitely feel
something happening, the hands will heat up, you feel the heat rise, it stays
at … high temperature for a while, then it goes down and relaxes again,
then I move on.
The energy is conceived as a flow and experienced that way, kinesthetically.
When I’m treating somebody, I generally — and I can feel it now because
I’m tuned into it — I feel the flow going through my body, in my head,
down …to this region, and flowing out my arms…
The feeling of heat in the hands is common among practitioners, but it is not a necessary
experience. One of the things Stuckey has learned is that the energy may be working
Priscilla Stuckey
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even when she does not feel it. In the following account the name of the recipient is
replaced with a pseudonym:
…sometimes things are successful even when I don’t experience it. The
most dramatic healing that I’ve taken part in was a woman who’d just had
a lumpectomy on her breast that day. And it was cancerous, she’d just
received her cancer diagnosis – she was an RN, so she was not blitzed out
by the hospital thing, but she was blitzed out by the anesthetic, because
they’d given her the wrong kind for her body, and she was having
stomach… she was totally nauseated, and was very ill that night. And her
friends – there was a women’s healing circle — had gathered, and it
happened to be that night that we were to meet, and it just so happened
that I was supposed to be giving a presentation on Reiki that night. Well,
it didn’t happen, obviously, at least not in the way we expected, until we
went into Mary Alice’s bedroom we all decided to put our hands on her.
And they gave me the (small laugh) place of honor over her breasts. And I
did not touch them, I just held my hands about yea-high, about eight
inches off her body, and just beamed Reiki to her. And I felt very clearly
the support of the whole circle of women, just gathered sitting on her bed.
It was very reverent, and very peaceful, and very calming; and Mary Alice
opened her eyes, and thanked us all for being there, and told me later that
we all looked like angels (small laugh). And that Reiki silence, that Reiki
calm, descended on the room, where everything is in tune, and everything
is all right. And I felt nothing happening under my hands. I was going
through enormous doubt, mental doubt, like “Am I doing anything? Is this
working?” (small laugh) “What am I doing here? I don’t know what I’m
doing here.” But I just kept doing it, learned you just keep practicing and
don’t ask questions and it does the work. So I kept just talking myself
through it. And, at the very end, I even tried looking into her body to see,
“OK, which breast was it” and I think I even got the wrong clues, because
I just simply was not getting it, mentally, that night. And at the very end
then I felt the urge to do something non-Reiki. I felt the urge to wave my
hands up as if pulling something away from her body. And then I finished
with Reiki, sending Reiki again. And then, the circle dispersed; we went
home. Outside the front door, the woman who had been sitting at Mary
Alice’s feet looked at me, she said “What did you do! I saw you pulling
the stuff right out of her body!” and I said, “Well, I don’t know. I
certainly didn’t see it.” (laughs) I felt like I was doing meaningless
motions. I had no sensation in my hands that I was pulling anything.
There was nothing to tell me that I was doing something, except that was
what I supposed to do, I was moved to do it, I was urged to do it. And I
got no feedback, they were giving NO feedback that night.(laughs)
Priscilla Stuckey
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She pointed out that I had omitted the crux of the story:
Mary Alice called me a week later and reported that we had taken all the
pain out of her body that night so that she never needed to use the pain
prescription.
Priscilla has found that she may not get external confirmation immediately, if at all, of
the effectiveness of her work. She does tend to trust a subjective test that, like the
practice, is kinesthetic: a feeling of calm.
I asked her how she knew it was appropriate to give Reiki to someone.
Mmm. Just discernment. I pray about it. I check, I check my internal
state. If my heart’s beating like this, I’ve got a lot of stuff (laughs) going
on about it, and I should be careful (laughs) … If I feel calmer and more
… peaceful about it, then it’s perfectly fine to do it.
This feeling of calmness is an indicator that it is okay to go ahead and treat someone. A
sense of calm combined with a becoming-clear (which is experienced visually, as a
clearing of the vision) sometimes indicates that the treatment has been successful.
Reading the draft, she said:
I’m still uncomfortable with the judgment of when a treatment has been
“successful”; I don’t make that judgment, it’s not up to me.
And a Reiki session itself is often characterized by what she calls "that Reiki calm." And
the absence of calm is a negative signal: when she is stuck in what she calls her "stuff,"
one mark is
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I’m not calm any more, by any means (small laugh).
6.1.2 Working at a Distance
Reiki has several levels of practice. All Reiki practitioners do hands-on energy work.
Some time after she took the first degree she received her initiation into the second level
of Reiki, which also permits distance work, and then the third, which allows one to
initiate others. She has used distance work in situations in which she can see what is
going on, but is not able to actually put her hands on people. She was at a graduation
ceremony:
PS: But I’m sitting there, and in the row ahead of me is a couple with a
couple of kids; and one of the children is being real, well, in Pennsylvania
Dutch we would have said “ruchy.” (laughs)
BW: What does “ruchy” mean?
PS: Moving around, talking, walking around, bothering everybody, just
not able to sit still, just – ruchy (laughs). And the father was ignoring the
child, as fathers often do – and the mother was over-involved, and was
being harsh, which is what parents often do when they get stressed. And I
looked at this scene, and I was getting really pissed at that mother for
being harsh, and for jerking the kid around, and for everything else. Then
I remembered: I’ve got Reiki. What if I tuned into the Reiki wavelength,
frequency—what would happen? So I sat there, and I surreptitiously put
my hands up as I was beaming Reiki to the situation. And I did it in a way
so that it was all masked, and nobody watching could have told anything
was going on. And I consciously focused my attention at beaming Reiki
to this family ahead of me. And within seconds my own demeanor
shifted, I felt more compassion and understanding in myself, and what’s
more the mother’s demeanor toward the child shifted, within five minutes.
Sort of shifted. She turned, she really looked at him, she gave him like a
meaningful look, then she hugged him.
Much of her practice has been on animals. When our dog Abigail was in surgery for a
serious tumor, Priscilla Stuckey was one of those I asked to help her. She did, and Abby
Priscilla Stuckey
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returned from the very edge of death to be with me as I write this. She has worked with
wild animals as well. As a volunteer at a shelter for injured wild animals, she has used
the most distant form of Reiki on an owl.
…She was not able to stretch her wing out. And so they couldn’t release
her, and they had space and decided to keep her. And they were trying to
tame her, to adjust her to human company, and she was very wild – she
did her owl umm — I can’t think of the words, you know their behavior
when they want to chase somebody off (small laugh). The words “fright
wig” came to mind. (laughs). They put their wings out and their head goes
from side to side, and that’s how they try to scare things off. And she
would go into that anytime a human came close, and so I assumed that it
was really uncomfortable for her. I was going through a really tough time
in my life at that point, and I was waking up at four, five in the morning,
with stress and emotional distress. And so I, as part of my own
comforting, partly to comfort myself, I decided to try comforting her. And
it seemed like a good hour of the day. That’s an owl-y hour of the day
(small laugh), and it felt like I would establish this very clear connection
with her. And it got so close, and I did it morning by morning, for a
number of weeks, I think, a couple of weeks at least. I felt like I got to
know her really well, and like we became buddies, so that when I would
approach her in the spirit plane in the morning, she’d be happy to see me,
“Ho! Hi!” you know, “Cool!” (laughs) And I asked her name once, and,
and I got an instant answer. She rattled off, it might have been a hundred
syllables long. And, of course I didn’t catch them, but the first sounded
“Sa-ra-da-da…” so I called her “Sarah” after that. (small laugh) Then,
you know I would go to see her in person, and of course my human self
still disturbed her. I didn’t get much of any indication that she recognized
me, except one day when I went and stood by her cage, and I beamed her
Reiki, when no one was looking (small laugh). Her name at the center
was “Dusty,” everyone called her Dusty. But I beamed her Sarah-name to
her, said “Hello, Sarah. It’s me.” I could have sworn she jumped a bit and
looked at me. (laughs)
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6.1.3 Putting on Their Skin
It would be easy to label Stuckey as a "Reiki Practitioner" and to describe only her
practice of the Reiki method, but she is also deeply involved in modalities that are not
Reiki-based.120
One of these is the practice of sharing the experience of others.
She learned this in part from the woman who taught her Reiki:
My Reiki teacher also is an animal communicator, and I took an animal
communication one-day workshop with her. And it was just wonderful,
because I learned, “Oh, I’ve been doing this!” (small laugh) She taught us
at one point to approach… well, it was an image. We started with an
image, of an animal. “Approach that image, in whatever way you do,” she
said, “until, in whatever way it happens, you become one with it." And I
realized that the way I became one with it was, I would sit into its skin.
That’s the way I do it, is I slip into the skin of the other. Umm, rather than
take it on. And it becomes my skin, I really feel inside the skin.
She is able, when she does that, to learn what is happening with beings that cannot
communicate verbally:
Yeah. It’s the same skin. Their skin becomes my skin. And I slip into that
easily. I can easily do that. … Most of the time that’s still the method of
choice. And she actually recommended it for working with beings that
you can’t speak with. ‘Cause that’s still the method of choice to really
find out what’s going on, if there’s a health problem in an animal or
something, that you can’t figure out any other way — slip into their skin.
You can tell what’s going on.
120
Mixing modalities is common in Reiki. German practitioners reported that they and other practitioners
they knew had used Reiki with " massage, reflex zone therapy, breathing therapy, Touch for Health, Pret-
natal Therapy… the injection of procaine into scar tissue…acupuncture, acupressure, the massage of
acupressure points, shiatsu, kitsu, tai-ki, an-no, do-in, E.A.S., Jin shin jiutsu, chiropractic, color therapy,
Bach flower remedies, homeopathy, aroma therapy, Ayurveda, fasting, various forms of
psychotherapy…meditation, bio-energetics and autogenous training. " The authors added, "For all these
reasons, Reiki is especially helpful for all people in the broadest sense, for it will complement almost every
kind of treatment we know of in a wonderful and natural way." Baginski and Sharamon, Reiki: universal
life energy, p. 103-4
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She has developed very clear methods of withdrawing from the experience of being
within the skin of others.
PS: … I’ve trained myself how to get myself out of it… I make a very
clear, I’m in their skin, and I’m sort of looking out through their eyes.
And I’m feeling what they’re feeling. And then I make a big deal of
backing out at some point. When the session or the moment is over.
BW: and the back-out is spatial?
PS: Yeah. Visionary, visually.
BW: So you then move where you can see them.
PS: Yeah, uh-huh. And I move away so that I can feel myself, on the
inner plane, as separate from the other.
6.2 Stuff in the Way
6.2.1 Entanglement
But why would it be so important to be able to distinguish one's own experience from
that of another? It is so in part because one can fall into the experience of another. She
did when she was working on Abby.
I got…I also found myself — this happens when I, if I try to contact the
patient telepathically — and I wanted to help here, so I was kind of doing
that. So I was doing more than Reiki. And I was trying to talk to her.
And, she pulled me right in, and all of a sudden I found myself
overwhelmed with sadness and despair, and I was very nearly shaking in
sobs as I was sitting there with my hands on the pillow. Then I stopped
and I caught myself and I, like "OK, boundary’s not here; where am I?
What’s me, what’s her?” (laughs) Found out she was showing me how
heartbroken you guys would be if she left. And, it was such a, it was a
heavy thing for her, she was so sad that you would be that heartbroken
(small laugh).
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She often prefers to work with animals, because they are, in general, less likely to
entangle one in their "stuff."
(laughs) It feels safer to do it with animals. Actually, my partner Jim
asked me this the other day: "Do you do this more with animals than with
people?" I said "Yah." He said, "Is there something you like better about
doing it?" And I said, "Well, the animals withdraw better. They don't like,
let their stuff hang around you, as much." So, I think that's why…the
boundaries. I can keep a sense of myself better? I do it more with animals
and plants because it feels safer that way, energetically safer, than with
people.
"Stuff" is a very important term in her description of her practice and experience.
Fourteen times in a two-hour interview she used the word to describe a class of
interrelated problems. "Stuff" denotes a kind of embroilment that eliminates calm. In
trying to get me to understand her, we had the following dialogue:
PS: But I, I feel caught up….…entangled. I feel entangled, yaah.
BW: But in motion…
PS: Uh-huh
BW: …you’re not stuck.
PS: I’m not calm any more, by any means (small laugh).
BW: But it’s, the kind of entanglement is not the kind where vines grow
around you; it’s much more like the kind where you’re dragged into a
dance that you weren’t planning on being in? (small laugh)
PS: That’s ex… perfect image, yah. Uh-huh. And then I somatize that
and it starts coming out in my body and I get, uh, agitated.
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To the extent one somatizes one's awareness of another's state, one will experience their
experience with one's own body awareness. One might feel sick in one's own body when
working with a sick person. Priscilla Stuckey is athletic and active; when she
experiences others' "stuff," she experiences it as drawing her into unwanted activity.
It seems to me that this sense of entanglement is increased by the essentially kinesthetic
nature of energy practices. The basic experience is of contact, of laying hands on another
person. When one does Reiki on a distant being, it is very common to have an object —
a pillow or even a child's stuffed animal — that serves as a proxy for the other. Then one
treats the other, at a distance, by touching and channeling the energy into the proxy. The
flow into the other of course suggests the possibility of a back-flow. Instead of the Reiki
energy going to them, their energy can come to the practitioner. The Reiki books I have
read do not suggest this as a danger, but it seems to be an issue for Ms. Stuckey.
For instance, the experience of other people's stuff puts some limitation on the situations
in which she will and will not treat. She will work, she said:
When somebody has a need for it. I try to distinguish: I have pretty
careful boundaries about when I do it, because I know my own tendencies
to get sucked into other people’s stuff. And so I’ve been trying to watch
real carefully — when is this something for me to do, and when is it not?
The threat of being involved in "stuff" also limits the people with whom she will work:
If I had too much stuff going on, either about the person or had a lot of
judgments about what they were, about their life, or something like that.
And sometimes, actually, people that are closer to me, I don’t do as
frequently — my blood brother, for instance, who is having a very hard
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time in his life. I tend to pray for him in a non-Reiki fashion, because I’m
so close to him that I tend to pick up his stuff really easily. And so I pray
for him in a very detached manner, like “May he find his path,” you know,
“May God be present with him.” And let it go at that. Because if I do any
more than that, whoom, I’m right in there in the middle of his troubles.
(laughs)
"Stuff" seems to be complex because, if one can put on the skin of another or otherwise
be involved with their energy, then one's own stuff and their stuff may not be
distinguishable. But no matter whose it may be, it may involve judgments, as above,
unhappy experiences from childhood, one's own desires for the person, "mental loops"
and the voices from the past we all hear. It seems to be in many cases the material that
makes any of us unhappy. But when one lives in a universe in which one's own
experience can overlap and interact with others, one wishes to keep the stuff of others at a
distance.
6.3 Getting Out of the Way
"Stuff" from other people can make the experience of contacting them difficult or
unpleasant. While it is interesting to discover what is going on with an animal or a plant
that does not linger in contact beyond what one would wish, with people the same contact
can lead to unwanted entanglement.
One also wants to keep one's own stuff from interfering with the healing effects of the
Reiki energy.
BW: … do you have a sense that you’re still in contact with the person
after you’re done, treating?
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PS: Yeah, but I try to minimize that; I really try to… get out of contact,
because I… that feels like my ego, my own desires and my own stuff,
getting hooked up with them.
A solution to both problems is "getting out of the way." Stuckey repeatedly spoke of
moving herself to one side, of getting out of the way to let Reiki work. When I asked her
what she thought at one point, she replied
…I don’t analyze what’s going on. It’s part of my stepping out of the way
(small laugh) to let Reiki do the work, is not to get my mind too involved
in what’s happening in their body.
When she was working on our dog, at first she paid attention to what was happening with
Abby. Then she stopped trying to get that information.
And then, after I got out of the way and just did Reiki, after some time
then everything cleared, psshht!
She also passes on the discipline of getting out of the way to her students:
But it’s a wonderful gift that I can give to students – “You don’t have to
know what’s going on here. You don’t have to sense any shift. You don’t
have to do anything, mentally. Just get yourself in place, put your hands
in place, and get out of the way.”(laughs)
6.4 Mulling
Getting oneself out of the way is one method to deal with what Priscilla Stuckey calls
"stuff." It does prevent entanglement with stuff, but it leaves one out of contact.
Here Dr. Stuckey and I disagreed. From other things she had said, it seemed that getting
out of the way prevented contact. But she commented upon reading the draft:
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This doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like me. Getting oneself--one’s ego,
small self--out of the way is the perfect way to contact another, really, the
only way. As in the next quote, “get myself out of the way so I can be
present to her.” You get the small self out of the way so that the larger
Self, divine, love, whatever you want to call it, can work.
See, though, the section on mulling, where we found we agreed on the meaning of getting
oneself out of the way.
Another process actually deals with the stuff itself, and offers the possibility of dissolving
it. It is a practice that is part of her daily time for herself, something that she does,
without naming it, just about every morning:
…it’s not very clear to me. It’s, it’s more like I’m in a state of meditation,
I mull over things (small laugh). And it’s not even as directed as praying
for things. I just kind of like try to get to a place where everything feels
all right (laughs). It’s like mulling over…thinking about what my friend
Mimi and I talked about yesterday, and how Mimi’s in this little small
peck of trouble. And so I’m thinking about that and I’m realizing, “Well,
I’ve got some feelings about that. Well, how could I get myself out of the
way there? And how could I be present to her?" And then how I just kind
of lift the whole thing to, how could I just kind of relax about it, so it, so it
all comes out all right? (small laugh)
It seems that she has developed a private form of meditation that somehow loosens or
releases what she is considering. When I asked her how she knew that she was done
"mulling" a particular thing, she responded
PS: When my own…state of mind shifts.
BW: And the shift is?
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PS: Toward that sense of clarity, and that sense of “I don’t have to do
anything here.” The need, or the have-to-do-something-about-something,
goes away.
In part this form of mulling meditation resembles Buddhist teachings:
…Well, just kind of mulling things over in a state of meditation. To bring
a feeling of peace, peacefulness to it. And to identify my stuff, and to
become more aware. Yeah, it’s like mindfulness meditation. I ran into a
Buddhist treatise, that talked about starting with your toes. And moving
in, working, starting with the top of —I forget which end of the body you
started with (small laugh), but you work your way through the whole body
— just become mindful of each of the parts of the body. And work your
way through this, and work your way through that, and I thought “Yeah,
that’s what I’m doing.” (laughs).121
It is clear that she was "mulling" before she ran into the treatise. She has discovered a
method of releasing "stuff" that works reliably for her over time. It seems to involve a
daily process of bringing awareness to personal and interpersonal issues, and mulling
them lightly, until a sense of clarity and un-urgency arises. Here she commented,
"Cool! Sense of un-urgency is EXACTLY what I’m after."
Her partial sentence about lifting it —
And then how I just kind of lift the whole thing to, how could I just kind
of relax about it, so it, so it all comes out all right? (small laugh)
— makes us wonder to whom or what she lifts it. During her description so many
thoughts of my own arose that I am not sure I ever discovered the whole of her method,
but I think it is clear that there are other, not-yet-revealed parts to this process of mulling.
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Mulling may seem to be an entirely private affair, part of the "therapeutic culture" for
which our Northern California area is so famed. But it seems to me that it is more other-
aware than that. For instance, one removes one's own stuff so one can be available for
others. At this point, Ms. Stuckey commented "Yes!"
And so I’m thinking about that and I’m realizing, “Well, I’ve got some
feelings about that. Well, how could I get myself out of the way there?
And how could I be present to her?"
Priscilla Stuckey has discovered personally that the experience of one person can
interpenetrate with the experience of another, through her putting-on-the-skin of others.
And she knows that one person's "stuff" can adversely affect the experience of another.
The balancing brought about by "mulling" can positively affect others.
BW: What about the mulling?
PS: Since that concerns my own relationship to the rest of the world,
more than what I’m doing to other people, it’s like trying to bring my own
…self into balance. And… that can extend to those around me, in so far
as I get it.
Mulling is also part of a more general process, shared by creative people. I asked her if it
would be something others should learn.
I think probably lots of people are already doing it. Maybe in our non-
religious society… I mean poets are doing this, artists are doing this.
Artists are doing this every time they make a piece, they’re figuring out
their relationship to the world. Umm, writers are doing this — God I love
listening to how writers talk about their stories developing. And it’s this
121
It may also resemble Focusing, a technique for allowing meaning to arise from bodily experience with
which she was not familiar before the interview. Gendlin, Focusing
Priscilla Stuckey
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mulling process. They’re just watching… what develops. (small laugh)
Who else is doing it? Scientists are, it’s intuitive knowing, wherever it’s
found. Scientists, artists, writers, musicians.
She is beginning to make a personal synthesis of many of her life themes: the issues of
boundaries, of getting out of the way, of healing and of mulling and the connectedness
among beings.
BW: …It sounds as if your diag… — it’s not diagnostic, that’s the
wrong word, it’s the way you learn about something — is to literally to
enter that.
PS: Yah, Mm-hmm.
BW: …but do you suffer what they suffer, and enjoy what they enjoy?
PS: Umm, well, that happens… I’ll go back to the recent experience with
Abby. When I was communicating with her, it was like I was feeling what
she was feeling. And so, momentarily, I am … experiencing exactly what
they’re experiencing.
BW: And so when you do, umm, the mulling, which allows things to
change…
PS: Mmm. Mm-hmm
BW: …what do you do? There’s something more than the way they’ve
experienced it, because the way they’ve experienced it hasn’t made a
change.
PS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it feels like it really, it changes my approach to
things. It gets, gets me, it, it really umm, it’s a healing for my own ego
approach. It’s getting my ego out of the way. So, it’s really working on
me. That part feels like it’s working on me. But of course it affects
everything around me. [small laugh].
BW: Why does that make them better?
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PS: Yeah, well, I’m not sure … There a couple of ways to answer. One
way is that… [long pause] How would I say it makes them better?
Because we’re all connected, for one thing, I believe that really strongly.
So that if I get my stuff healed, it’s going to affect the people I’m close to.
It’s going to affect the people I come in contact with. If my stuff gets
healed, it’s going to call for something different in the other. And that
leads to my view of the way the universe looks, if you had to put a picture
to it. It’s like every…It’s like a globe, it’s like we’re people standing on
the earth, but a part of us goes right to the center, and so at that center
point everyone’s partaking of the same thing. And it’s manifesting
outward in separateness.
6.5 Some Partially Explored Themes
6.5.1 Not Given to Me
So much of Ms. Stuckey's language seems be part of current vocabularies that I was
struck by the old-fashionedness of one phrase she used:
And I didn’t even know that, I had no sense that that was going on. It’s
like the knowledge of that is beyond my ken, it is not given to me. It may
be given to me at some point; it is not at this point in time given to me;
and so therefore I don’t talk about that aspect a lot.
Over-arching her whole spiritual pursuit seems to be a sense of what is "given to her,"
and even more strongly of what is "not given" at any particular time. She never said what
agency gave or did not "give her" to do or to understand something, but it was clearly
something she respected very strongly in practice. When I asked her how she felt about
apparent failure, she responded,
Well, I sort of try to detach from that as much as from success. Because
it’s not given to me to decide what’s a success and what’s a failure.
When I asked her whether she explored the energy of others, she said the same thing:
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You know, I don’t find myself exploring that dimension of things very
much. It’s like, it’s not given to me to explore. So I don’t actually do it
very much.
To this quote she added:
This is my strong conviction that it’s not my business. So if someone has
not asked for my help, it is not “given to me” to explore their energy.
Therefore it would be rude, intrusive, controlling, to try to do it. Another
sense of “given to me” is a coming to terms with my particular
proclivities. It IS given to me to help heal others, when they ask for it. That
is my inclination, my desire. I do NOT have the desire to go mucking
about in their energy fields, and I don’t really want to see (psychically)
more of my patient than is necessary for healing. Why not? Bec. it would
be a violation of their boundaries, poking my nose into their business. And
it would spend unnecessary amounts of my energy. So the business of
“what’s given to me” is the business of recognizing which work in the
world is mine and which is someone else’s.
Whatever this guidance or given-ness may be, she follows it. She finds in it the reason to
enter or not to enter different sorts of experience. Even when she does not use the same
words, it seems to be what she is saying.
It might be right for other people, but it isn't for me, and so I just…go
down a different road.
She said about this section:
Here I’m referring to what’s “given to me to know at the conscious level.”
Since so much of my life has been spent in rational, conscious awareness,
it at first came as a challenge to me that so much of this healing business
works without the content of it coming into conscious awareness. So then I
had to learn to trust the healing process without understanding or
controlling what was going on--to give it over to the larger wisdom and
love that we call God or the Universe or the One or the All-That-Is. This is
a big part of my practice of NOT CONTROLLING what is going on--to
not ask for everything to become conscious. So when I work on a patient, I
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will occasionally see (with conscious awareness) what is going on inside
them, but more often it “is not given to me,” to my conscious self. I just do
the work and let God control the process. I feel very strongly that the need
to SEE everything--to follow the process with the rational mind--is a form
of trying to CONTROL it. (Not to mention, it’s intrusive and invasive.)
And that’s a no-no if you want the deepest healing to take place.
6.5.2 That’s Not All of What God is About.
A number of healing practices assert that God is only kind and good. Stuckey
specifically denies that. To her, Reiki and its gentleness is only part of what God
contains:
I was preparing, mentally, for this interview, and thinking about Reiki and
how, a lot of times we get into — when we’re doing Reiki together, when
I do Reiki with students — we get into this certain mind-state that’s very
calm and peaceful and gentle, and compassionate. And I began to feel,
with the student I was working with last week, that that was bordering on
a dualism I didn’t like. That, yaah, Reiki really does induce that kind of
calm and peacefulness in people, but that that’s not all of what God is
about. So it’s more like, the Reiki is a particular channel on the whole
radio frequency list. And so the divine that I’m in contact with, when I’m
doing Reiki, is … It’s Reiki and it’s bigger than Reiki. It’s gentle
compassion, and it’s also bigger than that; and the divine that I want to be
close to also has fierceness and has all kinds of unpleasant emotions (small
laugh) .
6.5.3 Native Connections
One theme that came up, and which we did not adequately explore, is her affinity with
Native American traditions. She only mentioned them in passing, as part of an
explanation of something else. She said that she has some connection with a medicine
man, who has taught her things — including the ability to recognize her own doubt —
and who has occasionally done healings on her behalf:
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I have taken people to my medicine man and had him do ceremony for
them in absentia, when there was somebody that I cared about that I didn’t
want to get so personally involved.
She did not volunteer more about her relationship with this man, and I did not pursue it.
When she read the draft she added:
He regularly does ceremonies for me, and occasionally I have had him do
a ceremony for a person or animal who couldn’t contact him directly.
He’s a white, suburban guy with a swimming pool and rose bushes and a
pot belly. He just happens to have more faith--more of a constant
connection with God, with hope, with clear sight--than most anyone I’ve
ever met. Perhaps that’s why he got tapped on the shoulder by Native
Americans in Winnipeg to take up the pipe ceremony.
6.5.4 Meaningful Animals
She spoke a good deal about her connection with animals. It was her dog, after all, who
indirectly connected her with the woman who became her Reiki teacher. I mentioned
earlier that animals are more comfortable to work with than are people, and that she is a
volunteer with an animal shelter. She has worked on animals she has seen in the wild
near her home.
I actually treated a deer out here on our hillside — distance Reiki — a
couple of months after we moved in. It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and
there was a deer sitting on the hillside across the stream and — it was a
doe —and she was sitting there, for several hours without moving. And
she looked comfortable, she didn't look sick; she wasn't drooping, she was
just sitting there, on the hillside. But it is so unusual for deer to sit a few
yards away from a busy street, unmoving, for hours at a time — so, when
she was there, after about three hours I went to my sofa and I picked up
my pillow (laughs) and I mocked her up on my pillow, and I checked out
to see what was going on. The place where my hands heated up was her,
her brain, her head. And I got the sense she might have had a little bit of,
umm, fever. Like she may have been feverish from something, or else the
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hot day, wasn't…something had gone wrong in her circuits, a bit. And
then, it kind of like dissipated, the feeling just kind of dissipated. Here's
how I tell when to move my hands; it's not always that my hands change
— I get bored, mentally, too. I can be involved mentally, when
something's happening, and then, my interest in what's happening goes
away, and I'm bored, and "OH, it's time to change my hand position."
And so that feeling of boredom increased until there was like nothing to be
done any more. And I just put the pillow down, and I went out to see, and
she was gone.
But animals are also deeply involved in her sense of meaning. She worked on one doe,
but Deer taught her things through several channels:
I was also playing with Medicine Cards, Jamie Sams' Medicine Cards.
And I had a really clear experience with the Deer card one day. And then
a deer hide came to me, so I now use that as, as a medicine help when I'm
doing Reiki. I put it on the chair, and I call Deer in to help. And I have
learned about the power of gentleness. I've learned, what Deer showed me
was the inevitability of gentleness — that something that gentleness sets
out to do is not… it's gentle in the way that water is gentle. It flows, but
it's inexorable. [small laugh] And I've learned the inexorability of
gentleness, I think. And I've learned how I don't have to go that other
place, to do things in the world. I can do things through gentleness.
Another animal that she finds powerful is Raven, as a manifestation of communication.
These animals function in a way that would seem symbolic, mythological and oracular to
an outsider who insisted on labeling them. But Stuckey, who has a Ph.D. from the
Graduate Theological Union, certainly knows these words — and does not use them.
The animals seem to be not so much symbols as presences, part of her experience. Here
Priscilla commented, "Yes!
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6.5.5 Internal and External Teachers
As she has experiences of connections with other beings through the inner planes, so she
also has experiences of inner teachers. She mentioned even less about them than she did
about her connections with her medicine man.
…there are internal teachers whom I’ve never met.
Earlier she had asked herself
…did I get this from Diane Stein, or did I get this from some internal
teacher?
It is clear that at least part of her teaching comes from beings that the world would
consider invisible. When she talked about learning gentleness from Deer and other things
from other animals on the Medicine Cards, she said,
What usually happened was that a quality would come through, pertaining
to that creature. I receive it as a teaching from that creature.
She also has "ordinary" teachers. The woman who taught her Reiki is one of them. She
considers Hawayo Takata, who brought Reiki to America, to be a "grandmother teacher."
And she consults with her teachers frequently, asking their advice about fine points of
treatment.
She is herself a teacher of Reiki, and takes the task very seriously. She describes herself
as an introvert, but she will spend all day with students, giving them private lessons, or
working with a class to initiate a group.
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6.6 The Value and Future of Her Reiki Practice
I asked her what she would like to share with everyone else, if she could. She said:
I’d love it, if everybody became aware of how powerful their own hands
are. It changed my relationship to my hands, and it changed the
relationship of my hands to the world, to learn Reiki. And I would love
that everyone, EVERYONE, have that experience. They couldn’t hit
people anymore. Their eyes would be opened (small laugh).
She continues to work on improving her practice by getting herself out of the way.
I’m trying to keep track of myself in the process, and not get lost in the
other person’s stuff. And so it’s like a constant checking in: “Where am I
now? What’s going on with me now?” And try to stand out of the way
and let Reiki do the work, instead of getting my own preconceptions, or
my own desires, for this situation into it. I’m really working on getting
those out of the situation to let Reiki take over…
But even before she has done that, the method works.
…If you’re working on somebody in person, all you have to do is put your
hands on them, and it’s going to start working. And you don’t have to put
your mind anywhere. And when you’re treating somebody at a distance,
all you have to do is set your intention, and you really can think about
whatever you want, or talk about whatever you want; except one of the
grandmother teachers used to say, “You can talk about anything, just no
gossip.” (laughs)
Though her personal theology rejects the idea that God is only gentleness and
compassion, she likes to cultivate this 'channel:'
PS: The Reiki seems to really bring out the … calm. It’s just one place on
the dial that has a lot, it, when I want, when I’m feeling the need, when
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I’m starting to get really pissed at somebody and I’m noticing it, I can turn
to that dial, and find an alternative.
She enjoys it, as do her students:
BW: … Well, so you enjoy working with this power?
PS: Yaah.
BW: You enjoy the contact in general with it?
PS: Mm-hmm. Yaah, it’s fun. And like the student I was doing Reiki One
with last week, she said, “You know I’ve done a lot of energy work and I,
I kind of expected …well, I didn’t expect it to be so much fun!” (laughs)
So she does the work and teaches the classes, it seems, out of sheer pleasure.
PS: Oh, it’s great fun. It’s, it’s nerve-wracking, actually. It takes me a
long time to prepare for a class. And it feels, the class itself feels like it
takes a lot of energy. And I’m exhausted at the end of the day, but I’m
also high (small laugh), because it’s so fun to, it feels like such a privilege
to introduce people to this healing modality. And to get them in touch
with this frequency. And to get them aware of it. It’s like, I just get
[changes to little-girl voice] all happy that there’s somebody else walking
around who knows Reiki. (laughs)
BW: (laughs)
PS: (laughs)
BW: She sounds like she’s, maybe eleven. (laughs)
PS: (laughs) Yeah, it does, it brings that out in me.
She noted in addition:
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This sense of joy & fun is vital, I believe. I just ran into a problem in my
writing--finding myself regarding it as “work” instead of doing it for fun.
So I went back to a writer who influenced me, Dorothy Maclean, to whom
the Deva of Fruit Trees said, “Nothing is worth doing unless it is done
with joy; in any action, motives other than love and joy spoil the results.
Could you imagine a flower growing as a duty and then sweetening the
hearts of its beholders?” (From To Honor the Earth, HarperSanFranciso,
1991)
6.7 Privacy:
Even after speaking with her for two hours, transcribing the interview for countless more
hours, and writing many pages about her, I leave with a strong sense of Priscilla
Stuckey's privacy. It is not at all a covertness. I have no doubt that everything she said is
very much true and forthcoming. And yet there is a strong sense of veils.
That retirement impacts this study, as it leaves me wondering what great part of her story
remains untold. Is it a part she does not know herself, yet? Is it a context that I could not
perceive? I cannot tell, but I think I can say that much of her story remains to be known.
And she said:
Interesting...I sure would not expect that to come across. Me, with a face
that hides nothing! I’ve often bemoaned my utter inability to lie...You’ve
just attributed to me a mystery I always wanted but never felt I had! I
chalk it up to the parts of me that will be revealed only in years to
come....Thanks for your kind attention to my way of being in the world.
7 JULIE HENDERSON: "THEIR CLEAR, LAUGHING
VASTNESS"
I have been around Julie Henderson for many years now. She is my teacher, in as much
as I can accept one. The reader may then wonder if I can be objective in presenting what
she says, and if she can be dispassionate in correcting my understanding. There is also
the complementary danger of me being too distant, in an attempt to create objectivity.
Objectivity has not been a goal in the other presentations, however. The goal has been
fidelity, a faithful presentation of the experience of the persons interviewed. My
experience with Julie may give me an opportunity to fill in lacunae that I have missed in
the write-ups of other interviews. I simply wanted to be clear that my relationship with
this participant is very different from my relationship with the other persons interviewed.
My goal remains the same.
7.1 "I am not a Buddhist."
I was introduced to Julie Henderson by my Buddhism teacher at the California Institute
of Integral Studies, Steven Goodman. I have taken my work with her to be the lab-work
for those Buddhism courses — the place where I try out and experience what Buddhist
tantrics talk about. Julie Henderson, however, finds the term "Buddhist" too constrictive.
I pretty specifically do not consider myself a Buddhist. I find that much
too…binding. How much of it has to do with the particular vocabulary
that Buddhism has been squeezed into in English, I don't know. Lots of
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things that could be said about that. But I don't think of my teachers as
Buddhists. I don't think about Buddha, except as a state.
Immediately after saying this she tells a story about her Tibetan teacher, the 12th
Gyalwang Drukpa whom she calls Drukchen, leaning over in the middle of a ceremony
and saying the same thing to a Canadian seeker, "I am not a Buddhist." My conclusion is
that she is indeed a Buddhist, a "Western Somatic Topological Tantric Mahayana Mantric
Buddhist" if a name is needed. It seems to me that she is no more different from other
Buddhists than are the various Asian Schools among themselves. Her Buddhism, or
lack thereof, will have to be judged by the reader.
Julie Henderson's first career was as an actress, like both her parents. Her acting training
and temperament show in her speech — she frequently dramatizes several characters at
once, and she always chooses her words with the care of a performer. Her difficult-to-
transcribe discourse is filled with rhythmic spacers and nonce words — "mmmm"'s to
which she gives meaning by gesture or expression.
She received a Ph.D. in Somatics and body oriented psychology. Her clinical training
was most influenced by George Thomson. She worked briefly but deeply with hypnotist
Milton Erickson; and Erickson's storytelling and multileveled realities found a home as
well in her sense of drama.
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Julie says that Erickson is the only Western teacher to teach by transmission. She says
his influence changed her perception and style more than any of her other Western
teachers.
She is a Somaticist, having worked with a number of teachers:
I have been more and more inclined to study and teach somatics itself
rather than a kind of psychotherapy influenced by awareness of the body.
I describe somatics as a newly emerging natural science that crosses the
usual boundaries set between mind and body. I call it an exploration of
the practical implications of being a body and being also aware. Western
science hasn't yet addressed that simultaneity of body and awareness to
my satisfaction!
Her language is constantly based in bodily experience. It is not only personal bodily
experience as felt from inside, nor just a distant and objective "study" of the body. It is
both of those and a third — the awareness of others' experience, through what she calls
"finding." These three perceptions of the body braid through all her descriptions, even
when she is describing experiences others would call non-physical. Her spirituality is
actually, not just theoretically, body-based.
She began her contact with Buddhism while being trained as a somaticist. She
encountered Tarthang Tulku in 1975, and received from him a transmission that
hybridized with her training in somatics and emerged ten years later as The Lover
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Within122
, a book about living as an energetic being. (It was this book about the
experience of energy that convinced me that I had to meet her, which I did in late 1993.)
By the time I met her, the central focus of her work had moved. She had begun to
experience all of what she had done before - somatic, energetic and traditionally Western
psychological - in a context of "openness" and "loving presence." This context came to
her not as theory, but in persons - as a series of Tibetan teachers who came into her life.
She did not find them attractive because she had a predisposition to Buddhism — she was
attracted instead to what they were.123
7.2 Finding
What might all this have to do with the practice of praying for others? Well, Dr.
Henderson does it, but in a way that is a byproduct of both her somatic and her Buddhist
experiences.
Julie herself does not think of it as praying, she says, but as a kind of rarified touching.
Drukchen, however, does call it “praying” when speaking of it in English.
In the first workshop I attended with her, she taught an exercise called "finding":
When I'm teaching this, I have people sit back to back, and be aware of
each other from their back – what the set of sensations is – so they're not
122
Henderson, The lover within: opening to energy in sexual practice A new edition from the same
publisher is being released in 1999. 123
Julie discussed how she experienced these teachers in a chapter called "Tulku" in Friedman and Moon,
Being bodies : Buddhist women on the paradox of embodiment
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relying on what this person looks like to them. What is the set of
sensations, of being in contact with that person? And then gradually I
have them just ooch apart a little bit, so there's a little bit of, like an inch
and a half gap, and notice that the sensations are still there. So how does
the organism remember those sensations? I don't know. How does it
remember anything? But then, those sensations are available for that
person. That's how you know them to be them. That's what you're
"finding," that's what I'm finding anyway. So, if it's a person that I have
met, then I have those, that set of sensations on file. And I look for it, I,
you know, I go through the sensation rolodex until I find it. It’s a little bit
like asking for the data. In the space, I form the intention or the wish, of
finding that … set. Then I have it (makes flipping-through-cards noise).
The exercise begins as an apparently somatic practice, each person in physical contact
with another. Then they are moved apart, and the exercise might be called "energetic," or
feeling the energy of the other from a small distance. But the third step involves having
one person from each pair go off to another room, and discovering that one can still find
the "set of sensations" through some sort of space of awareness. In this first exercise she
combined body, energy and awareness. On a base of bodily sensation she invited
attention to energetic experience; and in an almost mathematical demonstration ("How is
this possible?") showed the existence of a larger space-of-awareness.
7.2.1 Turning Attention
"Finding" someone at a distance to work on them involves the same sort of turning of
attention as finding someone right behind you or in the next room. We spent part of the
interview working with a woman I will call "Jeanine," who lives half a continent away
from the San Francisco office where we conducted the interview. Friends on an email
list had asked for prayers for Jeanine as she underwent chemotherapy for her melanoma.
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To find Jeanine, Julie first found me by what she calls "alignment." Alignment is a
somatic exercise she teaches, in which one moves the parts of one's body in very small
motions, feeling for the optimum comfort-position.
[We] have some idea of, of the physical, physiological anatomical
concomitants of being in personal alignment, that is to say: that
relationship of the various parts of the body that allow the freeest flow of
fluid, from one segment to another, at the hopefully most positive rates of
pulsation for each of the systems, combined with and supporting a mmmm
an alert relaxed trusting neurochemistry – which tends to arise anyway if
you're… But that involves then a freer energy flow, and that means more
clarity and blah blah blah. OK, but the thing is then, something happens
BETWEEN people that is also alignment. I know what it feels like. It
feels like this docking operation. There you are over there, and here I am
over here, and I'm in alignment with myself, and you pose a question, I
will be able to respond to that question if I come into alignment with you.
So I experience, along my midline, a kind of a very slight – these days; it
used to be bigger – very slight degree of lateral travel, until there's a click.
You now, it feels just like a click. Then, on that, in that particular
dimension we are connected in a way that gives me information from you,
and vice versa.
Once she has made this connection with me, she is able to use it to reach to Jeanine. But
I do not know Jeanine directly either, so the connection goes on out through those who do
know her.
BW: And that, that's how you find me, and then you follow me as I find
her?
JH: Mm-hmm. Your attention moves to her automatically in order to talk
about her. That, that's one of the things — I think it's Erickson's – you
can't remember something without accessing it. I mean that, that sounds
weird, but you have to access the whole set of data that is Jeanine,
including the [email] list and all the things that blah-blah-blah, but there in
the, in the – it feels like a net, yeah? Indra's net – is Jeanine. And you
can't talk about her without finding her. It's like "Go into that corner and
don't think about green monkeys." You know, tell me about Jeanine
without thinking about her.
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The connection with Jeanine is not conceptual but experiential. For Julie Henderson the
"sensations available for that person" are primarily experienced as kinesthetic and
proprioceptive. Originally she experienced them in her own body, but many years ago
she learned how to move them at need to a space outside (though near) her body.
Her visual experiences are abstract patterns of moving lights. She speaks also of smells
and tastes. But the primary experience, and the one most close to conventional reality, is
a kinesthetic awareness of the person. With all of these experiences of the other person
she attempts to avoid reification or any insistence that the story is "true." Instead, it is a
byproduct of her presence with the person in their experience.
And I get an image of her umm, and I should say an image, it's not…it is
vaguely a visual, but it's more a sense of movement and grab, like a ghost
of her lifting up off this bed that she might be resting in, and taking me by
the throat. Umm, even though she had laid down to rest, it might have
been. But I don't know why she, I don't know what that is. So I don't
decide what that is. And at the level that I might be doing Chöd124
, it
doesn't matter if she does that. But at the level that my body might take it
seriously, then I might intervene. So at the moment I don't know which
way it's going. [Long pause] Uh, my sense is, it's just her desperation.
Her response is based on the feeling-quality, not the story:
So what I do then is to, fold in under and hold her. This [is] not like me
physically doing that, but to provide a kind of hammock-like container for
her to more intimately have that company… And I feel protective and I
guess you might say, motherly sorts of sensations. Like rocking the
cradle. But it's still sort of a hammock shape…. A lot of that sounds like I
think there's actually something happening. That's not true. That's only a
"retailing" of images and sensations that ordinarily I wouldn't even bother
124
Chöd in Tibetan Buddhism is a visualized ceremony in which all form - including one's own body - is
offered for the satisfaction of all beings. For the origins of the ceremony see Edou, Machig Labdrön and
the foundations of Chöd. For an alternative and very beautiful version of the ceremony, see the chapter
"The kusali's accumulation" in Patrul, The words of my perfect teacher.
Julie Henderson
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to speak. When I speak them, they tend to solidify them a little bit. And
that influences things in a way that I ordinary wouldn't do. Makes them
too – solid, too real in that sense. [long pause] Uhh, in my mind's eye her
form contracts and shrinks and becomes sort of non-human, which is again
a reflection of her fear and desperation, not commentary on her; and it's
difficult to get or maintain her attention. But it's also a statement – you
know, God, this all sounds so, you know, so reified, but anyway, fuck that.
It's a statement of trust on her part to allow that to happen, because she
can't protect herself while she's doing that. She's too out of touch, it's a bit
autistic. Yah, a bit autistic. So, then, I do a little bit of, undertake the
protection while she's doing whatever that is; and so far I have not been
invited to intervene in the situation at all, except to give her company —
that's all.
Her primary interventions are not a specific attempt to make things better. Instead, they
are to "keep company" and to offer space. The company is just that, a good presence:
I'm open to spending time in her company. And finding out what
information arises about what she wants, as much as I can perceive. But I
also, my experience is that….by spending time with her, just ummm,
becoming part of the system, it increases possibility. And I don't
"make"…except for a general wish that she be well and happy and
supporting the best possible outcome, which I have no idea what that
might be, I don't go in trying to fix.
"Making space" is more complex, but basically it means to offer more room to the system
of which Jeanine is a part:
JH: If I intend more space for Jeanine's situation, if I'm in that state of the
inseparability of form and, and openness; if I'm in that state of the
inseparability of awareness and openness, then I flip the light-switch.
That's it.
BW: You intend the openness?
JH: I intend the openness.
BW: So…, and I know, from talking before, that you intend not infinite
openness, but an appropriate amount of openness.
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JH: Just enough to create more possibility.
Just what it means to offer "space" and "presence" will occupy the rest of the chapter.
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7.3 Space
One of the words Julie Henderson employs the most is "space." She used it thirty-four
times in our two-hour interview, with many shadings and subtleties. The word is used in
such a variety of senses that it is worth looking at some of them.
7.3.1 Directly Experienced
For Dr. Henderson "space" seems to be a general word for the context in which
experience happens. Julie says that a better term than "context" would be "the underlying
texture of the reality" in which experience happens.
She seems to experience much of being, as well as her work, spatially. It is not that she
just thinks about spaces: she reports direct experiences of space, spaciousness and various
spatial topologies.
The metaphors are often kinesthetic. She uses words like "tight" and "folded" to indicate
constricted spaces. She talks about the "grain" of spaces. It is as if she were touching the
spaces, so she could directly feel their texture and tightness or openness. At other times it
seems as if she herself were the space, and felt its permutations by a kind of
proprioception. When she was talking about finding someone she said:
JH: …It's my experience that if you persist in being open to knowing, that
gradually the, the common senses extend their range. They go right on
feeling much the same, or maybe a little bit finer, kind of, their level of
sensation or something, but the…you go right on seeing, you go right on
hearing, you go right on (rubbing sound) tactilely perceiving, that sort of
thing. And … not just finer, but in different directions. For me sensation
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has always been the strongest one. I get…I don't know what – pale
visuals. I know what I would see if I could see it. I could describe what I
could see if could see it, but I don't SEE it the way I see in, in apparently
outside reality… My memory is almost entirely kinesthetic, in that sense.
BW: And that's what you meant by "sensation," also, is kinesthetic?
JH: Proprioception more than kinesthesis. But, taking them together,
yeah.
7.3.2 Multidimensional
Some years ago when her focus was more "energetic" she talked a lot about fluid
dynamics, and the sense in which energy moved in patterns in space. She offered her
students a book of pictures of the patterns that flows could take.125
As she has turned her
attention more to the space of awareness, her awareness of space has become more
topological, more involved with connectedness and twists and recurves.
There are all kinds of spaces. Some of them have topology and some of
them don't. Or, some of them have more obvious whirls and curves and
stuff, than others.
Julie's focus has moved from the flows of energy within spaces to the spaces themselves.
And the spaces have differences not only in the connectedness and room that they have
within themselves, but also in the number of dimensions that they have.
I more and more think in terms of, or conceptualize in terms of topologies,
or describe – that's the word I want – describe in terms of topologies,
because it has such a, such an opening and closing, folding and unfolding
kind of… the trouble with that as a metaphor is that we fold and unfold
things in the three dimensions of which we're aware, physical dimensions
that we're aware of, and this is an unfolding of dimension.
On reading the draft of this chapter, Julie added:
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Space itself moves in patterns of flow.
I have tried to understand Julie's emphasis on added dimensions, and what follows is my
understanding. To add a new dimension to something has two practical consequences.
Each new dimension adds a new possible direction in which one can exist. In the jargon
of topology, a two-dimensional space is called a "two-manifold," a three dimensional
space is a "three-manifold," and so on. For each new dimension you get a larger
manifold - and more directions or headings along which you can move and be.
JH: …you know those things that swivel open and then swivel closed?
You know, they're little cup things or whatever. Sometimes there are
basket-weave forms that, that rotate on themselves, and then rotate open.
BW: So when you rotate them one way they're flat, and when you rotate
them another way they're three-dimensional?
JH: Yah. Only we're talking, I'm not talking about that…It's a "hmmm-
hmmm" manifold, it's a "hmmmmm;" there's more…directions.
When we see a picture like the one here, of a three-dimensional figure that is vaguely like
a cube, we understand that it is just the shadow of a cube. A real
cube cannot exist in a two-dimensional manifold like this page. But
if a third dimension were "rotated in" somehow, the cube would have
room to be itself. So one consequence of having more dimensions is
that some beings can be more fully themselves.
125
Abraham and Shaw, Dynamics--the geometry of behavior
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The other practical consequence is that things can change, in a larger
number of dimensions, in a way they cannot in a smaller number of
dimensions. A right-hand shape embedded in a plane can only be a
right-hand shape, no matter how it
rotates or slides. And as long as it is
embedded in an ordinary plane, it
cannot change from being a right-hand
shape. But if there is suddenly a third dimension available, even for a moment, the right-
hand can be lifted up through the third dimension, flipped over, and set back into the
plane as a left-hand. So if more dimensions were available, we would have two
advantages. There would be more room (or less crowding) so that beings could plump
out to their natural multidimensional fullness; and "impossible" transformations would
become possible.
This all sounds very abstractly mathematical. But it is part of the work that Julie does. In
her perception it is not cubes and outline gloves that are confined in an under-
dimensioned experience — it is living persons and sentient beings. When she finds
someone, she also finds the topology that they are inhabiting. Very frequently the
problem is that they are "contracted." A person feels that their world and the possibilities
in it are both too small. Jeanine was having that experience.
Then, as I stay open to information about, or associated with Jeanine, and
you give me information about chemo, then I feel this kind of burn, uh,
toxic burn, and a sense of…like a shrinking and like a shrink-wrap
tension, in the rest of her body, at least her torso.
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What can one do about such a shrinking of world and possibility? First of all, one does
not accept their "story," the complex of meanings and implications that people give to
their experiences. This does not mean that one denies the story either — one just does
not fall into it.
I know for sure that I am less convinced by stories that I tell myself.
Sometimes I am annoyed by that, because it's so much easier when you
think the story is what's happening.
Instead one stays with the sensations, and that can be difficult. (It is even harder when
someone is being interviewed as one works.) At one point Julie said, " I have to …make
a story out of it, rather than stay with the sensations, to answer your question."
If one does not fall into the story, though, it is possible to offer an experience of a larger
and more multidimensional space, with its two advantages of more room and more
possibility. What one is allowing to open is not "Jeanine," exactly, but the experience
Jeanine has wrapped her attention onto.
Or when, when the spa…, the space is, because it's not personal to
Jeanine, when, then, if it's too tight, now I shift it open.
But how can a person open a space and bring more multidimensionality to it? Julie does
it by connecting a larger and more generous space to the contracted one. One can simply
add one's own space to the other person's space. If one is able to find another, then
already the two consciousnesses are linked. Julie adds that “In fact these two
consciousnesses are two topological nodes in [undivided?] awareness.”
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When you feel unhappy or stuck, it's associated with, if not because of,
attention has gotten shrink-wrapped onto, into a set of structures that don't
allow for something different? There isn't enough room, there isn't
enough space for something else to happen. So if I make connection with
that system, to the extent that it responds to me, then there's more room.
Then something else is possible.
The more-room, more-possibility experience is not only for what we ordinarily call "the
person." It also extends up and down in scale, and Julie's experience as a somaticist
makes her focus on both smaller and bigger bodies rather than the lifeless systems others
might concentrate upon. This is an awareness that Henderson brings from her long
history of somatic work undertaken at the same time she was meeting Tibetan teachers.
The experience of opening reaches to the very cells of the organism
It's like there's more space between the cells, more movement in the
ground substance, more space for that movement to take place.
And it also reaches out to larger "organisms" of which we are part, though we do not
need to take them any more (or less) seriously than the small and local body.
I was, to a certain small extent, engaged in larger experiential processes –
a bigger body, and a bigger-bigger body and working with the government
and stuff like that – noticing now, that's a story. That's a structure created
to explain sensation, so that it's more tolerable. Absolutely all it is.
The other advantage of moving to a larger space is that new possibilities emerge. It is
also at this level that the most terrifying reality emerges. To be different — to move into
another possibility — is to lose one's own self. To have someone else change is to lose
the person that was there before. The desire to avoid that loss can make us constrain
someone so they cannot change. The same constraint can happen even at the seemingly
rarified level of consciousness involved in "finding." For Jeanine to change, we have to
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let go of her and of the specific space in which she is en-contexted. That means entering
a larger space in which certain constraints in our ordinary reality do not apply —
including the idea of distance and the idea of boundaries that separate interiors and
exteriors.
We have to, in some way we have to engage this other arena in which
there's no distance, in which there's no inside/outside; or we can't…. play,
we can't…flow, we can't let things be different, we can't … loosen up our
attachment to Jeanine enough for things to be different for her.
Julie also uses more traditional Buddhist language for this move, echoing the Heart Sutra:
If I intend more space for Jeanine's situation, if I'm in that state of uh the
inseparability of form and, and openness;126
if I'm in that state of the
inseparability of awareness and openness, then I flip the light-switch.
7.3.3 Nested Basins
There are many different experiences of space. Julie likes the metaphor of "attractor
basins," borrowed from chaos theory, to describe these spaces. "Attractor basins" are
regions that hold something — it can move within the basin, but will not escape without
special circumstances. A watershed is an attractor basin for liquid water. Ordinary mind
is an attractor basin for attention.
Attractor basins can be nested. A horse's hoof-print holds rain-water. If a child splashes
that water out, it may be held then in the next largest attractor basin, the stream-bed in
126
Compare the Heart Sutra's "From form, not distant emptiness; from emptiness, not distant form" in a
literal translation from the Sanskrit of Conze, Buddhist wisdom books: the Diamond and Heart Sutras..
For Indian, Tibetan, Chinese and Korean readings of the Heart Sutra, see dKon-mchog-bstan-p'ai-gron-me,
An explanation of the Heart Sutra Mantra, Illuminating the Hidden Meaning, Gyatso, Heart of wisdom: a
commentary to the Heart Sutra, Hua, The Heart Sutra and Commentary by Tripitaka Master Hua, Lopez,
The Heart Sutra explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries, Sunim, Heart Sutra: ancient Buddhist
wisdom in the light of quantum reality
Julie Henderson
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which the horse left the hoof-print. If it runs off from that streambed, the water may
enter the next larger attractor basin, running into Lake Tahoe. If it evaporates from Lake
Tahoe, it enters the very large attractor basin of the atmosphere.
Julie uses this metaphor for those things that (as she says) "entrain" attention. Attention
just shrink-wraps itself around experiences, she says, and does not move except along the
"lines of experience" permitted by the attractor. Attention becomes wrapped around a
trauma, or even just a habitual story; and then to the person experiencing it seems that
they "are" that trauma and story. It is not that the trauma did not happen or that the story
is not true. But by saying "I am my sad upbringing" or "that terrible night destroyed my
life," the mind enfolds and restricts the space of awareness and reduces its experienced
dimensionality. The remedy — easy to say and hard to do — is a kind of letting go.
[T]hese days my experience of what attention is, is much more
…malleable, much more flexible, much more topological than it used to
be. I used to think of attention as a kind of a point-process. Now I
recognize you can shape attention in any way you like, sort of very topiary
attention forms, and put it wherever you want; and you can do it in layers.
Kath127
and I used to talk about the placement of attention within attention
so, you know, there's layering of that sort. But specifically in this case if
the focus of your attention is too tight, you can't perceive enough to do
whatever it is that is being asked about. So, I guess I would say I relax
attention OUT of the entrainment that is common to functioning in this