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Medicine Men and Telekinetic Power

Chestertonian gold:

I count no man large-minded or imaginative who has not sometimes felt like a medicine-man.

– G.K. Chesterton, On Man: Heir of All Ages, from In Defense of Sanity, p. 244.

I make my living in a pharmacy. We cycle through a crop of teenage part-time workers every couple of years. I like to ask them whether they consider the pharmacy to be in the business of magic. Think about it: you give people pills as they either get better or they get high; their lives are saved or their lives are ruined. Either the pill does its job or they have an allergic reaction and break out in red dots. If you put that into a fairy tale you’ve got magic. We have been so desensitized to the wonders of daily life that we don’t even see the wonder. When everything is filled with wonder then nothing is wonderful.

I have watched my children go from stationary, to scooting, to crawling, to walking, to running, to roller-skating; I’ve seen them go from gagagoogoo to busting out logical sentences. I remember when they didn’t know what an ‘A’ was, and now my oldest is reading novels. I didn’t say abracadabra, but apparently every word I said was a magic word.

Sometimes, without even thinking, my body just starts doing things – things like typing.

My daughter asks me, How do you type so fast? I just do it.

I learned to do it and now I do it.

But how do you know where are the letters are? They’re out of order.

I don’t know, I don’t think, I just do it.

So simple really. I use a mind that I can’t even locate to invisibly communicate to the ‘memory’ of my fingers (is there actually such a thing as muscle memory? Where can you find it? Do your fingers really even have muscles?) and I just start typing away, 80wpm.Is it telekinetic? If not, then what is it?

If there is anyone with telekinetic power in the audience, please raise my hand; or raise your own.

Perhaps I feel like a medicine man because I am one. But I think I would feel like one even if I wasn’t. You name it, and I’ll tell you there’s something magical about it. Now grow up and be a kid again. Go to a science museum, go to Chuck E. Cheese, to to Toys R Us, go on a nature hike; I don’t care, just do it. Do not come back until you have walked into a pharmacy and sensed the sheer ludicrousness of it all.

Looking Up and Seeing Again

  • Isaiah 40:26 Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name, by the greatness of his might, and because he is strong in power not one is missing.

One of the most profound experiences of my life happened at about 4:30am in the year 2000 or 2001. They say nothing good happens that time of day, and I think that’s true for those who tend to hit the clubs and parties until the wee hours of the morning, but it’s not true entirely. It was December or January, and I was in a john boat heading down a ditch en route to a duck blind with two friends, excited about the upcoming hunt. I was in the middle of the boat, lying down on my back, as I often did, in order to keep the cold wind from smacking me in the face. But something was happening in the sky – something that I had never seen before.

I saw a shooting star – and then another, and another. Stars were shooting all over the place. It looked like the heavens were coming down, one star at a time. I didn’t know what was going on. But I was profoundly moved. I had never seen such beauty. I had never been in awe of the night sky before then. I found out later that I had witnessed a meteor shower. At 19 years old, sadly, I didn’t even know what a meteor shower was.

The visual impact of the meteor shower was intensified because my friends and I were in the middle of nowhere. We were in the woods, deep in the Mississippi river bottoms of northeast Arkansas, far away from any city lights.

The image of the night sky on that occasion still lingers with me. I’ve tried to watch showers since, but it’s near impossible where I currently live, being in a metropolitan area. I have, however, made a tradition with my oldest daughter over the past several years. Each time I go home for Christmas I take her out into a cotton field, away from all the lights, and we sit on the hood of the car to stare at the stars. They’re so much brighter in the Arkansas delta than they are here. It never ceases to move me.

As I was driving home tonight I noticed the full moon peeking out behind some hazy clouds. I made a mental note to myself of how often I just ignore the moon. So often I treat it as if it’s just background light, nothing really to take note of. I’d rather stare at a computer screen.

I bring all this up because lately I’ve been thinking about the planets and the stars. It all started with an interview I heard from Mars Hill Audio. Ken Myers conducted a fascinating interview with Michael Ward, the author of Planet Narnia, a book which sets forth the position that C.S. Lewis’ governing principle in the structure of the seven Narnia books is based upon the seven celestial bodies of ancient astrology. I don’t have time presently to write at length about this, but the discussion was stimulating to say the least.

That discussion led me to check out an audio book about the planets from the local library, which again, was fascinating.

And finally, I happened across D. James Kennedy’s book, The Real Meaning of the Zodiac, at a local Goodwill, and purchased it for a quarter. I’m presently reading it with delight. I know the book has gotten some flack, and possibly deservedly so, since Kennedy does seem to conflate natural and special revelation to a significant degree. But it is fascinating nonetheless, and well worth reading.

The main takeaway from all this at present is that I do not want to become someone who is mesmerized by a television screen while completely oblivious to the wonders that are all around me in nature. The header image on this blog is of a swimming pool positioned near the ocean. I once heard John Piper comment on staying in an beachfront hotel that had a swimming pool near the ocean. It struck him as preposterous. Why do you need a pool when you’ve got the Pacific? It’s man’s pool vs. God’s pool. And God’s is greater.

But we can control our little pools, get them to just the right temperature, build diving boards, have televisions on the patio and bar stools in the water right in front of the screen. Aren’t we awesome? Not really.

Modern science has had the unfortunate impact of disenchanting creation. Yet creation remains enchanting, if only we take the time to look. Stars are just balls of gas burning at extremely high temperatures to the modern mind. C.S. Lewis brushed back against this mentality in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (who, by the way, treads the dawn?) when the retired star Ramandu notes that even in our world a star is not simply a ball of gas – that’s only what it’s made of (not what it is).

I’m taking a physical geography class presently. It’s all about clouds and precipitation, floods, solar angles, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like. It’s all very technical. Yet it’s all very awe-inspiring, if we have eyes to see. But television and computer screens have dulled our vision. Sometimes you just need to get out in the dark and look up and say, ‘Who created these?’ (Isaiah 40:26).

In the vision of John set forth in the book of Revelation, he sees risen Christ thus:

  • Revelation 1:16 In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.

Stars in his hand and face like the sun. Indeed, the heavens declare the glory of God.

A while back I was driving to church with my family. It was early in the morning and we were admiring the sunrise. My daughter said, ‘You know daddy, the stars never go away. The sun is just so bright that we can’t see them in its light. I learned that at school.’ From the mouth of babes…

In those words a 6 year-old preached to me a powerful sermon that she didn’t know she was preaching. Immediately a passage came to my mind:

  • Revelation 21:23 And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.

It’s not that the sun and moon are necessarily going to be done away with in the new heavens and the new earth. Rather, it’s that the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ will shine so brightly that their light will be swallowed up in it. I look forward to Christmas vacation so that I can see the lights of the delta, but more so I look forward to that last day when the glory behind their glory, which surpasses their glory, will be revealed in all His brightness. Come, Lord Jesus.