God is too new-agey

Heaven, like love, can be simple.

Brothers and sisters,

I’ve tried writing this newsletter at least five times. Here, I connect dots between half-finished poems and dodged phrases written in a ten-page document. The truth sputters between lines, like tea leaking through the lid of a cheap travel mug. Everything becomes simple once our truth is pinned down.

For the sake of this newsletter and Spirit Serum in general, I mean Providence to be understood “in the wider sense of a superhuman being who governs the universe and directs the course of human affairs with definite purpose and beneficent design.” (Catholic Encyclopedia.) Providence as a concept exists outside of space and time, within all religions and spiritual practices.

In the past month, I’ve met Providence alive on the skin of this physical realm.

A few weeks ago, I swore to have seen a person walk into a closed elevator on the Oncology floor of my hospital. I’ve had at least five dreams of unverified Divine origin. Dying patients have delivered prophetic one-liners and croaked the whispers of God. I ministered the sacrament of Holy Communion to a very sick Catholic Priest. 

In early October, my sweetly zealous, always critical catholic-match-ed boyfriend dumped me because I was “too new-agey”. He appraised my “underlying spiritual orientation” as “not compatible with Catholic Church teaching”. This “orientation” being: I believe intuitive readers do have some credibility, also think women should be priests, amongst other extreme takes. 

“Too new-agey”. All character judgements aside, his words were a spiritual death, but I got it. 

We live in a squarely secular society, divorced from the spiritual dimensions in which we are suspended. Humans bear a stupid semblance to Sandy from Spongebob: we are born into space suits and helmets that disallow full union with the Spiritual realm that created us. We are quick to dismiss vivacious, miraculous and personal works of Spirit. 

I thought my breakup would send me into an existential spiral of self-doubt, vying to simulate a spirituality more “compatible with Church teaching”. It hasn’t.

More than ever, I am seeing my dearest, new-agey Jesus unfiltered and everywhere: in hymns, turkeys, poems, my twitter feed, and in the face of every single one of my brothers and sisters. 

Two-ish weeks ago I walked past a man selling wagon-fulls of books on a street corner. Ten seconds into grazing and I saw on the top of a pile, Dr. Eben Alexander’s, Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon’s Near-Death Experience & Journey into the Afterlife”. I told the person next to me that the book was “totally Abby-core”.  

I devoured the book in one day. Dr. Alexander tells the affirming and unsettling story of succumbing to a mystery-diagnosis brain infection, which left him in a coma for one week. His most generous prognosis stated that if he ever woke, it would be with irreversible brain damage necessitating a home-bound life. Against all odds, as only my fantastically new-agey, supernatural Spirit would have it, he awoke with enough of his faculties to steadily make his way towards total rehabilitation. 

As if an impossible medical recovery isn’t stimulating enough, he also travelled into a dimension unfathomable by our brainstems and frontal lobes. Dr. Alexander, while lying comatose without a functioning neural cortex, experienced the Divine afterlife. He “saw God”, and returned to write about his journey through the timeless heavens, guided by light-beings and telepathic communication. 

His story was spiritually grandiose, but unpretentiously written without embellishment. You all should read it. I gravitated to this narrative so acutely because his background as a barely-spiritual, high-profile neurosurgeon at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital is both radical and typical. I imagined him sharing his insights with ultra-academic colleagues with hopeful caution. I felt the sting of dismissal as his friends explained away his story without second thought, attributing his metaphysical near-death experience to some neuronal misfiring. 

If you are reading this, and reflexively conjuring up some man-made excuse for NDEs which feature supernatural encounters with the Divine, stop. You cannot call yourself a skeptic if you are first unwilling to consider, critically and sincerely, the matter in which you are opposing. 

I’m frustrated with my brothers and sisters around me that profess to have an open mind, and yet swiftly, thoughtlessly, foolishly refute Divine happenings seen by their own eyes. My suspicious ex-boyfriend questioned, on multiple occasions, why I believed seeing a wild turkey squawking on a busy Boston road to be a “sign from God”. Individuals with intuitive capabilities (clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience) are often labelled as evil or “not from God”. We say, “all things are possible with God”, and refuse the impossible. By our fallibility, we make God a puny fool.

I made this meme last week … See what I mean?

Unfortunately we inhabit shabby bodies with filtered and impermanent senses. Our creaturely brains are selective filters. When that brain is turned off, by way of trance, coma, or death, a new universe is revealed; one that expands outside the confines of space and time.  

If you believe yourself to be a created work of an eternally living God, the Truth of your life must be recognized. “Omniscient” and “Omnipresent” are not just tasteful embellishments of a Divine image. It must mean something real, uncomfortable and undoable. 

This past Sunday, Christians celebrated the first Sunday of Advent. We now prepare for Christmas, when God becomes known as a wailing infant birthed in a manger. The glory and mystery of Advent preaches that the birth of Jesus is the Word MADE FLESH which now DWELLS AMONG US. We know Him through Providence and radical Love. 

As humans on earth, we await and hope for the actualization of man’s eternal happiness, love and truth. We hope for Heaven, although Heaven has been made flesh and now dwells amongst us. Advent calls us to hope in unseen Truth, as this is the hope that endures. (Romans 08:24-25)

Heaven, like love, can be simple.

I believe seeing a turkey on the street is a sign from God only because the glory of the Creator shining in that bird is so obvious. Bearing witness to evolutionary majesty squawking on the cement, I’m once again mystified by Omniscient Hands. 

God is coming, and still, God is quite literally everywhere; in the face of children and within dimensions unknowable to our earthly consciousness. 

This Advent season is an invitation to enter into the mystery of Providence; to surrender to the grip of the Spirit, and challenge our growth personally and collectively. Let us pray that our eyes remain open to recognize God’s impossible, joyous, perfect intervention in this realm. 

In abiding warmth,

Abby