“Please leave,” said Mircea Eliade (editor-in-chief of the 17-volume “Encyclopedia of Religion”). With a question, he had just begun a lecture to a group of liberal clergy at the University of Chicago. His question: “Do you think that the sacred tree in the center of the clearing is not holy? If so, please raise your hand.” To the hand-raisers – about a third of us – he said, “Please leave.” The room became dead quiet; nobody left. Minds not open to the supernatural seemed to him subhuman: openness to experiencing the transcendent, the beyond, is a constitutive characteristic of human consciousness.
The great phenomenologist was talking about the supernatural, not the paranormal. The current “On Faith” question asks about the two: “Polls routinely show that 75% of Americans hold some form of belief in the paranormal such as astrology, telepathy and ghosts. All religions contain beliefs in the supernatural. Is there a link? What’s the difference?”
1.....The difference appears in the delightful, uproarious film, “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” Out of the open cockpit of a small biplane, somebody throws an empty coke bottle, which lands in a small village of near-naked primitives, overwhelming them with fear of the unknown and befuddling them with cognitive dissonance. We viewers know that the event was natural, almost normal. But to the primitives, the event was para-normal, preter-natural, beyond both expectation and explanation.
What to do? The leader rose and supernaturalized the event. The gods had gone crazy and had dropped on them an evil that would destroy them if they did not destroy it by throwing it over the edge of the world. The remainder of the movie is the leader’s physical-spiritual journey through the jungle, and viewers can share his relief and joy as the coke bottle flies out of his hand and over the cliff.
The sense the movie makes to the Enlightenment viewer is literal – not paranormal, preternatural, certainly not supernatural. But scholars like Eliade would have us read it also allegorically, making sense in the context of full human experiencing. The first guy to throw the coke bottle was, in a way, crazy; and the second guy was, in a way, not crazy.
2.....”You have 48 hours to write and hand in an essay defining the supernatural.” In 1941, those were the first words of the University of Chicago doctoral-seminar professor teaching a course titled “The Natural and the Supernatural.” I’ve been revising my essay these 67 years: what can’t be done must be done. “Transcendence” is Latin for “climbing across/down/up,” and we are climbers with ladders too short. But as we reach out beyond the end of our ladders of longing, the Mystery reaches and blesses us.
3.....It’s an old joke that if you pray you’re pious, and if God speaks back you’re crazy. But we supernaturalists say you’re crazy if when God speaks you don’t listen. Of course, God’s language transcends ours, and we translate his speech into the best sense we can make of it with the best sounds we know. We can’t expect our God-stories to match. The fact that they don’t is an argument not for atheism but for awed humility face to face with the divine transcendence and for generosity toward one another: “O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord?” (Bible: Romans 11:33-34)
4.....As parapsychology uses “paranormal” as an umbrella term for the trans-scientific, the rationally unexplained, religion uses “supernatural” as an umbrella term for the rationally unexplainable, for the more real than real, for what Browning called “beyond our reach, or what’s a heaven for?” But we would not reach if we had not been reached: the natural dimension is available to, indeed pervaded with, the supernatural dimension. The sky can reach us far beyond our ability to reach the sky.
5.....As philosophies compete to win our minds, God-stories compete to win our hearts. Nobody gets a pass to the truth, everybody must choose and should respect others choices within the bounds of human dignity. I choose the most astonishing God-story, the Bible’s: God so loved us that in and as Jesus he became one of us, to do for us what we could never do for ourselves – free us (as an ancient baptismal formula puts it) “from sin, death, and the devil” - free us to be fully human and responsible in love of God, neighbor, self, and the good earth.
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