Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1 - Crossing the Stream
CHAPTER 2 - The God Who Breaks and Enters
CHAPTER 3 - The Biology of Belief
CHAPTER 4 - The Triggers for God
CHAPTER 5 - Hunting for the God Gene
CHAPTER 6 - Isn’t God a Trip?
CHAPTER 7 - Searching for the God Spot
CHAPTER 8 - Spiritual Virtuosos
CHAPTER 9 - Out of My Body or out of My Mind?
CHAPTER 10 - Are We Dead Yet?
CHAPTER 11 - A New Name for God
CHAPTER 12 - Paradigm Shifts
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2009 by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
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Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from William R. Miller and Janet C’de Baca,
Quantum Change:When Epiphanies and Insights Transform Ordinary Lives (Guilford Press, 2001).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hagerty, Barbara Bradley.
Fingerprints of God: the search for the science of spirituality/ Barbara Bradley Hagerty.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-05260-0
1.Religion and science. I.Title.
BL240.3.H
215—dc22
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To Mom,
the finest person I know
What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
CHAPTER 1
Crossing the Stream
I REMEMBER THE MOMENT I decided to leave Christian Science. It was a Sunday afternoon in February 1994. By my bleak accounting, New Haven, Connecticut, was enjoying its seventeenth snowstorm of the winter. I was completing a one-year fellowship at Yale Law School. I had abandoned my sunny apartment in Washington, D.C., for a dark cave in the Taft Hotel with rented furniture that, I’d realized upon delivery, was identical to that favored by Holiday Inns.
I was sick—sick with stomach flu, a fever and chills that induced me to pile every blanket, sweater, and coat in the apartment on top of me. Still I shook so violently that my teeth chattered. I slipped in and out of consciousness all afternoon, but in a moment of lucidity I envisioned the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink. In normal circumstances, my medicine cabinet contained nothing more therapeutic than Band-Aids. I had been raised a Christian Scientist, and at the age of thirty-four—with the exception of receiving a vaccine before my family traveled to Europe—I had never visited the doctor, never taken a vitamin, never popped an aspirin, much less flu medicine. At that moment, what flashed in my mind’s eye like a blinking neon sign was Tylenol,Tylenol,Tylenol. A friend of mine, I recalled, had left some Tylenol during a visit.
The bottle of Tylenol called seductively, and I followed its siren call. I slipped out of bed and, steadying myself on the furniture lest I faint, crept to the medicine cabinet. Before I could stop myself, I downed one tablet, closed the cabinet, averted my eyes from the mirror, and stumbled quickly back to bed. Five minutes passed. My teeth stopped chattering. Another minute or so, I began to feel quite warm, no, hot, hot, what was I doing under all these covers? I threw off the coats and sweaters and blankets and felt the fever physically recede like a wave at low tide. Wow, I thought, I feel terrific!
It was not thirty minutes later when I was up for the first time in two days and cheerfully making myself some tomato soup; it was not then, precisely, that I incorporated medicine into my life. It would take me another sixteen months before I would leave the religion of my childhood for good. Soon thereafter, I announced this to my friend Laura one day at lunch.
“Oh, Barb,” she exclaimed, squeezing my hand in excitement.“Now the whole world of pharmacology is open to you!”
And so it was. But three decades of religious training does not evaporate quickly. As a Christian Scientist, I had come to believe in the power of prayer to alter my experience, whether that be my wracking cough or my employment status, my mood or my love life. In that time, I had witnessed several healings. I had come to suspect that there exists another type of spiritual reality just beyond the grasp of our human senses that occasionally, and often unexpectedly, pierces the veil of our physical world. In Christian Science we called these “spiritual laws,” and (I was told over and over) I needed merely to bring myself in line with those higher laws to banish the cough or the heartache.
I say “merely,” but it’s actually tough sledding, trying to fix all your problems through prayer. In my mid-thirties, I chose the ease and reliability of Tylenol over the hard-won healings of Christian Science. More than that, I was tired of my ascetic diet of divine law and spiritual principles. I suppose I could have walked away from religion altogether, dismissing God and swatting away questions about eternity. But for whatever reason—my genetic wiring or the serotonin receptors in my brain or the stress hormones in my body—I held fast to the idea of God, of a Creator above and within this messy creation called my life and yours. I remained open to something unexplainable, even supernatural. But I did not have a clue as to how radically my life would be upended when I encountered that mystery one summer evening in Los Angeles.
ON JUNE 10, 1995, Kathy Younge and I were sitting on a bench outside Saddleback Valley Community Church. The Saturday-night service had ended an hour earlier. Even the stragglers had gone home. I was interviewing her for a Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine article about fast-growing churches—specifically, why baby boomers in their thirties and forties were flocking to evangelical churches. This took me into new spiritual territory. As a Christian Scientist, I had absorbed Mary Baker Eddy’s version of Deity. The flinty foun
der of Christian Science defined “God” as a list of qualities—Life,Truth, Love, Spirit, Soul, Mind, and Principle. The Christian Science God is not a person. But to the evangelical Christians I met during my research for the Times, God is first and foremost a Person, one who came to earth two millennia ago and still yearns for a relationship with every human being.
Kathy Younge was my tour guide through this evangelical world. I was drawn to her because we occupied the same lonely demographic: both in our mid-thirties and single, we were wrestling with existential questions. But my questions paled next to hers. This woman had been fighting cancer for years. Her melanoma had recently returned, driving her to her knees in despair, and eventually to the comfort of Saddleback Church. Saddleback and its pastor, Rick Warren, are now almost household names, but in 1995, Rick Warren was unknown outside evangelical Christian circles, and his church drew only a few thousand people a week. (Now it’s closer to 20,000.) Many of those people were like Kathy—broken in some way, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and famished for a living, breathing God who listens and intervenes. Saddleback is founded on this kind of God, and gives Him a structure to work with—twelve-step programs, ministries for every sort of physical, emotional, or financial challenge, and a massive prayer chain in which hundreds of Saddleback members pray for those in distress, like Kathy.
“Do you think the prayer group in the church will heal the cancer?” I asked Kathy that night, scribbling notes in the fading light.
“No. Healing comes from God,” she said.“The church is here to be your family. They’re really your support team down here because we don’t have Jesus around to touch and talk to us. The church is God with skin on.”
That was the quote that appeared in my Times article. What happened next did not.
“Kathy, how can you possibly be so cheerful when you’ve got this awful disease?” I asked.
“It’s Jesus,” she said. “Jesus gives me peace.”
“A guy who lived two thousand years ago?” I asked, incredulous. “How can that be?”
“Jesus is as real to me as you are,” she explained. “He’s right here, right now.”
Right, I thought. Yet there was something wondrous about Kathy’s confidence as she struggled through this disease that could kill her. She told me then how she had been diagnosed with melanoma in her twenties, how her fear and loneliness had led her to Saddleback on a random Sunday, how she had come to believe that God had placed cancer in her life not to snuff it out but to give it a transcendent purpose.
As we talked, the night darkened. The streetlamp next to our bench cast a circle around us, creating the eerie sense that we were actors in a spotlight on a stage. The temperature had dropped into the fifties. I was shivering but pinned to the spot, riveted by Kathy and her serene faith.
My body responded before my mind, alerting me to some unseen change, a danger perhaps. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, and my heart start beating a little faster—as it is now, recalling the moment. Imperceptibly at first, the air around us thickened, and I wondered whether a clear, dense mist had rolled in from the ocean. The air grew warmer and heavier, as if someone had moved into the circle and was breathing on us. I glanced at Kathy. She had fallen silent in mid-sentence. Neither of us spoke. Gradually, and ever so gently, I was engulfed by a presence I could feel but not touch. I was paralyzed. I could manage only shallow breaths. After a minute, although it seemed longer, the presence melted away.We sat quietly, while I waited for the earth to steady itself. I was too spooked to speak, and yet I was exhilarated, as the first time I skied down an expert slope, terrified and oddly happy that I could not turn back. Those few moments, the time it takes to boil water for tea, reoriented my life. The episode left a mark on my psyche that I bear to this day.
EVER SINCE THAT NIGHT, I have wanted to write a book that answers the questions that I never voice in the two worlds I inhabit. The golden rule of journalism decrees that you take nothing on faith, that you back up every line of every story you write with hard evidence.You question everything. The unspoken ethos of organized religion is that you leave the uncomfortable questions alone, you accept them as unsolved mysteries or previously answered by religious minds greater than yours.You rely on the wisdom of sacred texts and your minister, and you swallow your doubts.
And yet I could not keep the questions at bay. Is there another reality that occasionally breaks into our world and bends the laws of nature? Is there a being or intelligence who weaves together the living universe, and if so, does He, She, or It fit the description I have been given? I was not worried about losing the old man with a beard—but what about the young man on a cross? Is there a spiritual world every bit as real as the phone ringing in the kitchen or my dog sitting on my foot, a dimension that eludes physical sight and hearing and touch? In the end, my questions boiled down to five words: Is there more than this?
As the years unfolded, I stockpiled more questions and more stories—strange stories that demanded an explanation. I wondered about my friend John, who was a slave to painkillers and scotch. Day in and day out, the cravings drove him away from his wife and to bars and Internet pharmacies. One day he felt the touch of something supernatural, and the cravings vanished. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, and while he never really bought into the tenets of his Catholic Church, he subscribed to the mysterious power that pulled him from the pit.
I wondered about my grandmother, a Christian Science “practitioner” or healer, who prayed for people and saw them recover. I thought about one patient in particular, a teenager in San Francisco who, tripping on LSD, jumped from an eighth-story window onto the street. The doctors declared him brain-dead and left him to Granny’s prayers. Two weeks later, he walked out of the hospital.
I wondered about my own brief brushes with something numinous, and the gnawing suspicion that there might be a reality that hides itself except in rare moments, or to rare people. I have stumbled a few times into a mystical presence—once, as a blinding light in my bedroom, another time as a voice, several times as an undeniably physical presence. Few people know about those times; they are intensely private and, to be honest, a little bizarre.Which is why, I suppose, it took me more than a decade to write this book.
MARCH 6, 2004, exploded with promises of spring. I had spent the past two days moderating a forum on the history of faith and law in a hotel conference room in Walland, Tennessee. It had been heavy intellectual lifting, and when we finished the last session late in the afternoon, I burst outside like a kid at recess, sprinting to my hotel room and throwing on shorts and a sweatshirt. The hotel sat at the base of the Smoky Mountains, and my forty-four-year-old heart raced as I made a dash for the trail that led me into the nearest set of hills.
The sun was already hovering just over the horizon. But I only planned to hike a three-mile loop. Plenty of time. As I left the road and started up the trail, a longing swept over me, a memory of what it felt like to be young. Perhaps it was the smell of the spring moss, or the way the shadows dappled the path, but my mind’s eye scanned back twenty-five years to those summers I had spent backpacking in the Colorado Rockies, in that pink dawn of life when your future fans out before you and you instinctively know that now is the time to risk everything because you may never have another chance.
The exhilaration did not serve me well. It blinded me to my surroundings and the stealthily setting sun. Only after I had hiked up and down one of the foothills did I notice it was growing quite dark. In the mountains, night dims gradually for a while—and then instantly, like a towel dropped over a birdcage, it is black. I started to run along the path that I knew would lead me back to the main road, when the trail simply ended. Curving from the left roared a small churning river, swollen from melted snow. On the right, the hill swept up vertically, thick with trees and prickly bushes. There was no path forward.
Perhaps, in retrospect, I should have waded into the ice-cold river and followed it to the main road. But
doubts crowded in. Maybe I took a wrong turn. Maybe I misread the map and this stream doesn’t return to the road. I decided that the only way back to safety was to retrace my steps.
For the next three hours I raced up and down the densely forested hills, blindly stumbling down one trail after another, unable to see my hand in front of my face. At some point, I became genuinely frightened. The Smoky Mountains are home to bears. A few days earlier, I had been warned (wrongly, I later learned), a serial killer had been caught in these very woods. Finally, I sat down, closed my eyes, and prayed. I prayed to a God who engages with His creation, a personal God intensely interested in every one of us, an all-seeing God whose GPS would guide me off the mountain. I began to sing Psalm 139, sotto voce at first, then louder in case the All-Hearing didn’t pick it up. “Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, and whither shall I flee from Thy presence . . .”
This is the image I hold in my mind: singing a psalm at the top of my lungs, clapping my hands to scare away the bears between verses. Bolstered by the prayer, I ventured down one more trail, and in a few moments I saw—Thank God!—lights from houses in the far distance, with people inside, tucked in for the night with a book. I careered down the rocky trail, relieved that my small nightmare was over. It was a perfect story for telling at dinner: a little dangerous but not too.
But the scene I was already imagining, regaling my dinner partners with this small adventure, abruptly ended. Between me and the little white house that had become my passage out of these black woods rushed a torrential river. Admittedly, it was more like a stream. But in the dark, it was a loud and angry stream, and dangerous, too, swollen to about forty feet wide by melted snow. Carefully, I waded into the water, hanging on to a tree branch that extended over the stream. The current instantly swept me off my feet. I clung fast to my sturdy little branch, surprised and grateful that it did not snap. Scrambling back onto the bank, I imagined some poor fisherman finding me three days later, miles downstream, caught in the brambles, my bloated body slapping softly against the bank.
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