Signs and Wonders - 1

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.