Thinking And Living Impossibly

Navigating A Re-Enchanting World -- And, The 1993 Vision That Changed My Life

Jesus of Nazareth, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah (Rev. 5:5) (Source)

I have just started reading How To Think Impossibly, by the celebrated religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal. In it, Kripal advances his familiar argument that philosophical materialism, which became a hard dogma in the Enlightenment West, is provably wrong. Kripal has long contended that modern people maintain their essentially religious belief in materialism only by dismissing anything that stands to falsify it. He has been making this argument for years, but now, in this fast-re-enchanting era, people might begin to take him seriously.

Kripal, who heads the religion department at Rice University in Houston, is very much not a Christian. Nor does he have a general theory about what various phenomena we usually call “supernatural” or “paranormal” are. His main point is that we ought to be investigating them, talking about them, trying to make sense of them, instead of mocking people who experience them, or dismissing any and every claim as nonsense. How To Think Impossibly is in the same genre as Yale historian Carlos Eire’s great recent book They Flew: A History Of The Impossible, which examines the historical evidence from the early modern period of claims that some religious people levitated, and were seen by large numbers of people to have been levitating.

I’ll have my own take on the Kripal book when I’m done. In First Things, the British historian Francis Young offers a mostly positive view. Excerpt:

If we can justly criticize Kripal for passing over the medieval synthesis—or, at least, for not explaining why it is unworthy of consideration as a model for a future knowledge economy—then there are other aspects of his critique of religion that believers ought to heed. I do not think faith is restrictive or limiting, as Kripal does, but it is undeniable that historians of religion with a personal faith (and I include myself in this) seldom do a better job of wrestling with the reality of supernatural phenomena than secular materialists. It is all too easy for believers to become apologetic for the impossible truths that, in theory, they ought to be defending—eager as they are to be received as “normal” members of society, and of the academy. If Kripal is right that reality is not as secular materialism tells us it is (and I suspect he is) then religious believers ought to be the first to offer an alternative outlook, rather than providing cover for the materialists by shepherding any dissent from secular orthodoxies into the realm of personal religious belief. If the spiritual world is truly real, that matters—with all the disturbing consequences that follow.

Jeff Kripal

Jeffrey Kripal’s How to Think Impossibly correctly diagnoses a genuine and pressing problem: the failure of Enlightenment-derived models of what reality is and the sorts of things we are taught to believe can and cannot happen. We can no longer bury our heads in the sand and pretend that fantastical phenomena such as out-of-body experiences and instances of non-linear time do not occur. We should be open to modifying our picture of reality to accommodate such evidence, and open to the possibility that science cannot explain everything.

Absolutely correct. Though I know that Kripal and I would disagree on many important things, he’s right about this. My book Living In Wonder advances the argument raised by Francis Young in this interview: that Christians ought to embrace the “weird” aspects of our faith, and not shrink from them or apologize for them. Of course not every weird thing within Christianity, broadly speaking, is true. We have to be discerning. There are people who misread natural phenomena as supernatural; there are bad actors who intend to manipulate people with fake miracles; and there are demons who can produce signs and wonders with the intent to deceive. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that in the modern era, many Christians in the West have been eager collaborators in the disenchantment and denaturing of the faith.

Below is the conclusion of Living In Wonder. In it, I talk about a strange vision, or semi-vision, I had back at the very beginning of my life as an adult Christian. Nothing like it had happened before, or has happened since. I was twenty-six years old at the time. It unnerved me. But as you will see, I took it seriously, because I was given a stunning reason to take it seriously. I don’t get into specifics — some things I am not prepared to talk about — but here is what I write:

So, a final confession, of a mystical event that has guided the entirety of my career as a writer. It makes me uncomfortable to talk about this, but then, I’m too old to care what people think.

In 1993, at the beginning of my Christian walk, I was praying for a believing friend having an intense spiritual crisis when I had a sudden quasi-apocalyptic vision. I saw a civilizational catastrophe that cast light on the test my stricken friend faced. At the conclusion of this strange fugue state, I heard God’s voice say, “You will lose your reason,” but, the voice continued, cling to Christ and “don’t be afraid, for the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David has triumphed.”

You will lose your reason. What? And what is this Lion and Root stuff? I figured they must be messianic titles, but as a man new to the faith, I couldn’t be sure. I phoned my friend, told him what had happened, and he thanked God for this sign, which he believed told him what to do. A few minutes later, shaken by what had happened to me—it was the first such episode and, as of this writing, the last—I sat on the couch of my Washington, DC, apartment reading one of the Gospels, which were all fresh to me then.

Though it was the dead of winter outside, and the windows were closed, a puff of air blew softly across my left cheek and seemed—I know this is weird—to pass through my mind. It left the words “Revelation 5:5” there. Startled by this, I turned to that verse and read these words: “Then one of the elders said to me, ‘Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.’”

A surge of electricity shot up my spine! I could not have known that verse. This confirmed that the vision I had experienced while praying had not come from the overheated imagination of a new convert but had been real.

That was more than thirty years ago. I have lived to see specific things foretold in the vision come true. In recent years, as our common culture has gone morally insane, I believe now I understand God’s warning about the loss of reason. He wasn’t talking about me personally; he was talking about humanity. It was only in completing this book that I came to grasp the purpose of that prophecy. In a time of general madness and perhaps coming persecution, our last and best hope is found only through a strong and robustly countercultural faith, one rooted deeply in the Christian tradition and a creed that roars out the good news, and in defiance of the world’s wisdom: that the Lion of the tribe of Judah has already won the victory.

Maybe, then, by writing this book, the seeds the Holy Spirit planted within a young journalist, shaken more than three decades ago by a mystical experience at the beginning of his career—one that he never dared to make public until now—has come to fruition with this book. I don’t know if we are at the end of the world, but we are undoubtedly at the end of a world—and if Christians are going to make it through this long dark winter without losing our faith, we must become practical mystics.

If we prefer to rely on the fragility of both secular rationalism and a Christianity whose once-strong God has been reduced to a mere moralist or political activist, or relegated to the status of cosmic butler or genial grandfather, we’re not going to stay Christian. Even worse, if we allow the gods of AI and related technologies to possess us, we will in time cease to be human.

This book has shown you how to open your mind and your eyes to real reality—if you have the courage. Seek the living God and the experience of him, in the ways of our faithful ancestors, while you may. The hour is late, the times are dark, the heavens full of signs and portents are wheeling about us— and the stakes could not be higher.

If I had dismissed this “vision,” if that’s what it was, at the time, I’m not sure what would have become of me as a Christian and as a journalist. When I tell you that I saw in that event clear, specific, and undeniable symbols of the coming destruction of our culture, I mean it. Consequently, I knew when I was being deceived, and what was to come for us all. And it all came true — and is coming true daily!

Understand what I mean: the thing I saw in the vision happened over the next thirty years, or at least has mostly happened; the accelerating collapse today is only a manifestation of a dynamic that began when I was first given that strange vision. Again, that vision had to do generally with the disintegration of the remnants of Christian culture and civilization. As much as all we have seen has grieved me over the years, none of it has surprised me. When people say to me these days that I have had a gift for anticipating what’s coming next (they’re speaking of the prophetic nature of The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies), the truth is that I was given a glimpse of the dark future at a time of great optimism in the West, which had just triumphed in the Cold War, and all the right-thinking people assumed that we were at the End Of History, and so forth.

Because of this vision, the specific details of which I have disclosed over the years to close friends, I was usually not fooled, even by the things “reasonable” people said about the direction of the United States and Western civilization. The one major lapse was my support for the Iraq War, but then again, I was given a sign that I couldn’t accept. I’m talking about the torn American flag (I wrote about it here) on 9/11/2002. I was on that day shown an “impossible” thing that symbolized the catastrophe that was coming to America — only I was unable to accept its plain meaning at the time. Three years later, when the truth was clear, I realized my mistake.

It is quite a thing to have passed over thirty years in my career, and to have written two New York Times best-selling books of religious-based cultural and political analysis (and, one hopes, a third!), all of it based in large part on a dark revelation that happened on a winter’s night long ago, when America was at the peak of its power. I don’t know why God sent that to me then. He has not sent me anything else like that over the years. But the vision has borne fruit in three books that I intend to prepare my fellow Christians, and anyone else who pays attention, for the time we are living in now, and the darker days to come.

The passage above entails the last paragraphs of my new book. The start of that chapter quotes the Jesuit scholar Karl Rahner, who was wrong about a lot of things, but surely correct when he said: “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced ‘something,’ or he will cease to be anything at all.”

In September, in my talk at the annual Touchstone Conference in Chicago (you should come — follow the link check out the line-up of speakers), I will be talking about why Christian enchantment is a survival skill for life in what Aaron Renn (who will be speaking) calls the Negative World. To the extent that my books The Benedict Option, Live Not By Lies, and the forthcoming Living In Wonder help believers prepare themselves, their families, and their communities for endurance in the post-Christian world, it’s all because back at the start of my Christian walk, God gave me the grace to be mystical enough to have a vision, and to take it seriously as a guide to my life and my work as a writer and a journalist.

I only added this story to the Living In Wonder manuscript in the final revision. Who wants to admit to the world to having had this kind of woo event in their lives? But I realized in the final revision that if I was calling on my readers to embrace the mystical within the Christian tradition with boldness, I had to be brave enough to tell the truth about what happened to me, no matter what others said.

By the way, we’re going to launch Living In Wonder in Birmingham, Alabama, in a series of events involving the great Paul Kingsnorth, who is profiled in the book. TMy pal Matt Burford, the organizer of the event through his Tactical Faith ministry, wants me to pass this on to you:

Tactical Faith, in partnership with Holy Trinity-Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Cathedral, are proud to present a weekend with Paul Kingsnorth, Rod Dreher and others Oct 18-21st. While more information involving the weekend events are forthcoming, our first event tickets are already for sale at https://tacticalfaith.com/events/paul-kingsnorth-2024/ .

We look forward to honoring Rod's new book by bringing world-class speakers into Birmingham, AL to discuss and equip people to think about the wonder and awe of the Christian faith.

The Kingsnorth event promoted above is not going to be the only Living In Wonder thing happening in Birmingham that weekend — more info on that to come when we lock down the details — but you really do want to get tickets to the Samford University lecture, which kicks things off.