My reading lately has taken me down some peculiar byways,
and led to some interesting reflections, which I will probably outline in a
number of posts (not yet sure how many). There are two books in question, both
of which I've had hanging around for a number of years.
First was Sealed
Orders, the rather creaky autobiography of Agnes Sanford – creaky because,
although it only dates to 1972, it looks and feels considerably older due to
its author’s style and the way in which it's printed. It turned out to be
rather compelling, for all sorts of reasons.
I'd never heard of Agnes Sanford; while I was looking after
the parish of Goremead I met someone from a Charismatic Christian
background who was disposing of a set of books and asked me to take what I
wanted from a box, and for some reason I picked Sealed Orders. Agnes was the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary
in China, which was where she met her future husband, American Episcopal
minister Edgar Sanford. She went through a deep spiritual and psychological
trough when they relocated to the US, mainly generated by repressed frustration
at trying to sink her identity into being a wife and mother and nothing
besides. Then, sometime about 1931, when their small son John was dangerously ill
with an ear infection, he seemed to be miraculously healed by Hollis Colwell,
the priest of a neighbouring Episcopal parish. Fr Colwell encouraged Agnes to
experiment with praying for healing for particular people, and she found, much
to her astonishment, that more often than not it worked. This was the beginning
of a life-long healing ministry that had repercussions in many Churches
affected by what we have come to call the Charismatic movement.
It's safe to say that Mrs Sanford
is a profoundly controversial figure, and
this excellent article gives you an
idea why. Her thinking acquired all sorts of somewhat peculiar features, from a
Christian point of view: she became convinced that she had in some sense been
reincarnated to carry out a specific mission from Jesus, and key to her
analysis of prayer and healing was the notion of visualisation, a theme
inherited from the New Thought movement of the mid-19
th century
which had links with Theosophy, Christian Science, and other somewhat heretical
ways of thinking. For instance, Mrs Sanford insisted that effective healing
prayer had to involve positive compassion for the sick person, with no other
aim in mind than to relieve their suffering, as this was the attitude of Christ
and the work of a Christian healer was to channel his power. She taught that
the healer must envisage the person having been healed, and found that
visualising light from God shining on them had a particularly powerful effect.
For many orthodox Christians this is simply far too New-Agey (though perhaps
New Age
avant la lettre), as well as
placing too much emphasis on the imaginative powers of the healer, and you can
find many such critics denouncing Agnes Sanford and all her works, as well as
other figures connected with her.
However, Mrs Sanford, and others,
were reacting (and naturally over-reacting) against the dominant cessationist thinking of especially
Protestant mainstream Churches – the idea that God's miraculous intervention in
the natural order had, for various plausible reasons, come to an end with the
age of the Apostles, and healing, exorcism and other supernatural events were
the province of Popish superstition (not that Mrs Sanford saw them as
‘supernatural’ at all). Furthermore, some of her more bizarre ideas were the
result of attempting to understand things she experienced and to place them
within an explicatory framework without very much to go on, and Sealed Orders itself is fairly reticent
about some of its author's more off-the-wall speculations. She wasn't the only
one doing this: her initial mentor Hollis Colwell had absorbed some remarkably
cranky concepts about diet and its influence on healing, which Mrs Sanford
didn't follow at all; she remained surprisingly and refreshingly sceptical
about grand claims. It's hard to see that her opinions are any less Biblical
than cessationism: the New Testament does mention Jesus, and the apostles,
healing, casting out spirits, and working other dunamis rather a lot, and nothing in the Scripture hints that this is intended to stop at some point,
so I would argue she was on sounder ground than her critics.
There is one claim in Sealed Orders which catches you up
short, however. After Ted's death, Agnes was considering moving from New
England when she felt a vague sense of threat regarding the northwestern
states:
I asked, “Lord, may I pray for it
to be fended off, just not to happen?” The answer was “No.” This answer did not
come in words. In fact, I would not quite trust words unless they sounded loud
and clear within me, for it is all too easy to imagine “Yes” or “No” according
to one’s desires. The answer came in this way: when I tried to pray thus, the
prayer did not rise. I could feel only heaviness. … So I asked, “Lord, may I
pray for it to be minimised, so that it will not cause too much damage?” And
the answer was “Yes” for when I prayed after this pattern I could feel a
lifting of my spirits and knew that the prayer was going forth … [The threat]
was, of course, the earthquake … but it just missed being a really destructive
one and caused little or no damage. Of course, no one can prove that prayer had
anything to do with this, but I felt sure that it did. For four days the prayer
project lay heavy on my heart, and after the earthquake came, it was lifted
from me.
Mrs Sanford became convinced that
God wanted her to move to California specifically
to pray against earthquakes. She felt that it would be more effective to do
so on the spot than from a distance:
I had found from experience that
my friends and I could pray away a hurricane
[my emphasis] in an almost laughable manner if it were coming toward the East
Coast, but that hurricanes far away in the Gulf did not seem to respond to our
prayers.
To some people reading, this kind
of thing will seem sheer madness. The only response one can make is that Agnes
Sanford was clearly not ‘mad’ in any obvious sense; and that, sensible and
compassionate woman working firmly within the tradition of the Episcopal Church
(which in those days was a bit more ‘traditional’ than it is now) as she was,
the effects of her ministry seem to have been entirely benign, if you lay aside
any theological objections to some of her more heretical speculations; and
further that Christian tradition, at least in the Catholic and Orthodox
spheres, has always insisted that a human will aligned with
that of God and open to his influence will be able to discern his voice and
work his works. Mad though it might seem to be, and whatever questions the
business of praying against earthquakes might raise about how God and nature
work, if we take the Gospel of Jesus Christ seriously, this is the kind of thing we should expect to happen.
We will bear this in mind when
considering the other figure I found myself reading about – another influential and controversial woman, the occultist Dion Fortune.
