Fingerprints of God 9 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

I was eight years old when my left foot began to grow crooked. Within a year, the bunion of my big toe was pronounced enough to make me a reliable sideshow for my grandmother and my Great Aunt Nellie, who regularly stripped the offending foot of its sock and shoe, propped it up on their laps, and crowed that the bunion was as bad as the one afflicting their late father, a plainsman whose crippled foot left him farming in soft calfskin slippers.

All I knew was that the bunion had derailed my flamboyant taste for hot-pink high-button boots and spike heels. The doctor advised a bunionectomy when my growth plates came in, but my mom took matters into her own hands and sent me to Darlene.

Darlene was the lone charismatic healer at our tiny Baptist church. Her matronly face was comprised of three colors: bright yellow, bright pink, and bright blue, assigned and apportioned in a correct but slightly garish fashion. In the annals of my childhood church’s history, her greatest claim to fame is the prophecy-in-tongues that she shrieked over the sanctuary one Sunday morning, in a kind of apoplectic coda to our pastor’s mid-sermon resignation.

But this was years before that day, and at this time she was best known for the fervor and efficacy of her prayers. One Sunday morning after the service, my mom herded me to Darlene’s seat on the back row of the sanctuary, where I again stripped off one sock and one shoe, and Darlene commenced to cast the evil spirit out of my bunion.

I was ten years old. I was very devout. But with her hands wrapped around my crooked foot, and her voice shouting victory over the demonic forces that held it in bondage, I couldn’t stop laughing.

Years later, watching my post-bunionectomy toe melt slowly back into its gnarled hook, I remembered opening my eyes in the midst of Darlene’s prayers to watch her bobbing yellow head. Even as I had laughed, she had been undeterred, so deeply focused on my healing that she did not hear the giggling or the coughing that, for a brief moment in my convalescence, I feared had shown a cosmic disrespect so great that I might never be healed by any means.

My left big toe still points at a forty-five degree angle: proof of a demonic touch, willful doubt, run-of-the-mill genetics—or something. Darlene’s failed healing remains one of the more colorful markers in my spiritual history.

But the older I get, the more I become a body, strange dust and something eternal. And the more I’ve begun to shed shame and skepticism about this and other spiritual experiences. At this point, my thoughts on the matter tend toward relieved thanks or curiosity, comic or otherwise.

So I was well primed to pick up NPR religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s new book, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. As much a personal inquiry as a scientific survey, it’s a search that begins with a frank account of the author’s own religious denouement and late-coming evangelical Christian conversion.

Recounting the bout of stomach flu that coaxes her away from the Christian Science faith of her childhood and, later, a “numinous” event that leaves her longing for her own personal Jesus, Fingerprints pivots on humility. It gives the reader a rare glimpse of the raw underbelly of intellectual curiosity, where the interrogator admits a stake in the fight.

There is something very human about the way she shows her colors, sometimes admitting her hopes, and sometimes pulling back to admit how her hopes have swayed her.

“Searching for the God Spot,” a chapter on the brain’s role in spiritual experience, is a great instance of this; Bradley Hagarty submits, skeptically, to the “God helmet”: a set of electrodes that induce stimulation of the temporal lobe and, as the lead scientist promises, mystical experience. Scoffing at the helmet even as its web of wires enervates her brain, upon comparing the scientist’s recorded commentary of the event to her own laboratory experience, she finds that she cannot “easily dismiss” his “discomfiting assertion that God is all in one’s head.”

That open, personal stance allows a slow unfolding of “the chicken or the egg” question that underscores her journey through scientific examination of the spiritual: which came first—the God who created consciousness, or the consciousness that created god?

Neurotheology, peyote, epilepsy, and scientific forays into life beyond death all figure in the answer to this question. Her own understanding of God wavers and expands, and yet maintains a mature respect for her dramatic Christian Science healing at age fourteen, in which a fleeting out-of-body-experience preceded complete physical relief from scarlet fever. Bradley Hagerty finds that the Mary Baker Eddy cosmology of her childhood prefigures, in many ways, the modern science of psychoneuroimmunology, or the power of thought to affect and transform the human body.

I figured that it would be a bit more difficult for me to reconcile my own childhood spiritual training with the vagaries of modern science. But Fingerprints revealed that the physics of entanglement, the unbreakable quantum particulate connections that Albert Einstein dubbed “spooky action at a distance,” are beginning to be understood by the Institute of Noetic Sciences as a possible scientific parallel to the bonds of love and the power of intercessory prayer.

Was quantum physics, I wondered, what I was laughing at that day in the sanctuary with Darlene?

Finally, Bradley Hagarty tackles with real candor the “trump card flung in the face of every Christian believer who begins to question” the Gospel: “the statement in which Jesus Himself said that He was the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to God but by Him.”

The tightrope she walks as a journalist and a spiritual seeker constricts for a moment. “[N]othing I have learned in the past year undercuts the fundamentals of my Christian faith,” she resolves, even as she concedes that questions regarding the specific historical claims of Christianity lie outside the realm of her scientific inquiry. She has not lost “the young man on the cross” as much as she has come to understand that “the old man with a beard can no longer encompass the grandeur and genius of God.”

Fingerprints reasons that humility before the burning bush, epileptic electricity storms, sub-conscious visions, or perhaps, in my case, the undaunted bunion exorcist, is the first requisite for revelation.

That’s a lesson worth heeding.