UFOs, levitating nuns, and seeing a miracle on video (more on the Vibe Shift)
An increased interest in supernatural and paranormal events will mean a different approach to Christian ministry.
Teresa of Avila is having a moment right now. The sixteenth century Catholic nun is referenced in a number of books, sermons, blog posts, and podcasts by various popular Christians. You’ll find the Comerites referencing her often. People especially love to talk about her masterpiece, The Interior Castle, written in 1577. She is a fascinating figure who has remarkable theological insights now being culled insided the space of spiritual formation. I celebrate this. Teresa is great. But there is one problem.
No one is talking about her levitation.
Want to know how I know you’ve never read The Interior Castle in full? You never mention a flying nun. For anyone telling me they really enjoyed the book, I’ll know you actually read it when, after saying how much you enjoyed it (it is a masterpiece, after all), you say, “there was one weird thing about it…” Then we have the conversation I want to have about Teresa of Avila: did she really…fly?
Yes, in between her special insights into the contemplative life and intimacy with Jesus through worship, prayer, and fasting, St. Teresa talks about soaring through the air in the rapturous power of the Holy Spirit. And she didn’t like it.
“There is another kind of rapture,” she says discussing moments of intense spiritual experience, “which I call flight of the spirit.”1 In another work, she writes about flying that “there is no possibility of resisting…you see and feel this cloud, or this mighty eagle, rising and bearing you up with it on its wings…you then realize and see that you are being carried away, not knowing where.”2
The saint herself and close eyewitnesses to her levitations confirm Teresa had “concerns about others witnessing her trances and levitations and about the possible negative repercussions of all the adulation that these phenomena could generate.”3 I get it. But, to quote Teresa, “[R]esisting has been impossible…sometimes my whole body…has been lifted off the ground.”4
Stories abound from many eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen her float in the air during a Catholic mass or after hours of contemplative prayer.
Before you cast her or the eyewitnesses off as crazy, consider the framing of historian Carlos Eire, whose remarkable new book, They Flew: A History of the Impossible, asks us to take on: how a large mass of eyewitness testimony surrounds Teresa’s levitation should be taken seriously. Teresa’s flying was witnessed by tons of people, including Isabel Santo Domingo, who is included in a biography of Teresa some 60 years after her death. “Relying on accounts left by Isabel, who often did kitchen duty alongside Teresa, the author…reveals that Teresa was frying some eggs with the convent’s last smidgen of olive oil” when she began flying with several people trying to pull her down as she ascended towards the ceiling.5 It would be one thing to ignore Teresa’s claims of levitation, but what do you do with the hundreds who said they saw her fly?
“[A] history of the impossible is a history of testimonies about impossible events,” writes Eire, “Our dominant culture dismisses these testimonies as unbelievable and merely ‘anecdotal’—[but] the sheer number of such testimonies is so relatively large, so widespread across time and geographical boundaries, and so closely linked to civil and ecclesial institutions that they most certainly do have a broader context into which they fit…that is a very rare and credible kind of evidence…”6
And this is what brings me to the Vibe Shift, of which I began writing about last week.
One of the “shifts” occurring is belief in supernatural events.7 More and more, people are open to the paranormal, the bizarre, and the unexplained spiritual phenomena in our world. In some ways, we are returning to an age of enchantment—that the world is charged with supernatural power where things we cannot explain happen all the time.
Take, for instance, Tyler Cowan’s recent admission that the certifiable evidence of UFOs (or UAB’s, now) has increased his probability of believing in God. The vast eyewitness testimonies of unexplained aircrafts have “updated my priors about God,” he said in a recent podcast with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He’s been a famously curious agnostic—always theologically interested but a pretty committed skeptic. He now sees UFOs as potentially spiritual beings—not even extraterrestrial, but spiritual.8 With everyone making considerations about these UABs, one option has to be that something spiritual is happening. I don’t see it that way, but I welcome a conversation of someone who does. The world, after all, is strange.
We can also consider the rapidly changing world of quantum physics and quantum mechanics, that has someone like Philip Ball admitting that what we are discovering is “beyond weird” and mostly unable to be comprehended. Or those working on “the problem of consciousness” like Iain McGilchrist who freely admit the Christian theological tradition has a lot to offer what we know about our minds.
The “vibe” used to be that the more we discover about science, the more we will be certain that God is not real and the world can be explained through measurable, repeatable, and observable phenomenon. This was the gift of the age of empiricism. Most anything outside of empirical science should be roundly dismissed, we have been told. Christians joined in on this, often considering the phenomenological “demonic” at best or silly and fabricated at worst. Protestants routinely dismiss bizarre events—especially the miraculous claims of Marian apparitions from Roman Catholics—just to make their theology a bit easier. Let’s keep everything—including our theology—as explainable and observable, the way we see the rest of the world. But this is changing.
For a long time, we thought the more we discover about science, the more explainable the world would be. But this is not the case now. It seems now that the more we discover about science, the less explainable the world actually is.9
In addition to scientific empiricism and UABs, digital technology and surveillance capitalism have heightened our skepticism. Strange supernatural events have often been rebuked as we demand “video evidence.” Show us the video! Let’s see a photo. But even that is shifting with the dawn of Deep Fakes and AI.
Now, video evidence itself is being questioned as everything we see online must be “verified” (which means that another set of digital tech tests what the previous digital tech recorded). The run of “video evidence” is now coming to an end. We don’t trust the videos we see. And any video or photo before the early 2000s is “too low of quality” for us to really ascertain what’s happening. It’s all a wash. If everything before about 2009 was too low of quality and provided “sketchy images,” and everything after 2022 is under suspicion for being doctored by advanced digital technologies, then we really only lived a little over a decade when the “video evidence” demand was actually valid. I believe historians will look back and see it clearly. Video evidence is overrated…and brief.
What we are seeing is a resurgence in what the ancients practiced: eyewitness testimony. The bizarre, the strange, the unexplainable demands a world view that explains it. When secular people run in to the boundaries of their godless frame of thinking, suddenly they’re surprised with the possibility of an enchanted world, full of angels, demons, gods, and goddesses, which just so happens to be the world most of human history believed. All of a sudden ancient and medieval Christian theology looks pretty good. Most of our forefathers and mothers knew the world was full of all sorts of strange supernatural powers. Heck, if you or your neighbor saw a nun flying at a local mass and told you about it, you’d rethink your epistemology too.
The shift also joins us with most of the globe, many of whom see the world as richly enchanted with spiritual power. Hopefully this is the final death blow to modern secular material scientism. This defeat would mean that Americans can join two-thirds of the world that already sees the world as charged with spiritual “powers and principalities.” Your Bible takes for granted that the world is filled with angels, demons, and other unexplained immaterial forces. So do many in the non-Western world.
How might the church adjust in light of this aspect of the Vibe Shift? Here are a few thoughts of ministry in a supernaturally interested world:
1. Own the fact that Christianity is weird
We’re coming out of an era where preaching on angels, demons, the Second Coming of Christ on a White Horse was either theatricalized or completely disregarded. Along with this, many evangelical Christians have little-to-no theology of the Eucharist. We apologize for “weird” parts of the faith, but it’s time to own them outright. The world is filled with angels and demons. Heaven is real. The New Jerusalem is a future promise we take as actual. We eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus every Sunday. I think more people are ready for a full ownership of the strangeness of our faith. We have inherited a tradition that American Evangelicalism is trying to ignore. The interest in a corporatized gospel that looks like the rest of human experience is fading. We’ve spent decades trying to convince the world that the church is just like their entertainment experiences and workplaces. Maybe it’s time to tell them church is nothing like their daily lived experience. Maybe it’s time to tell someone a nun once flew in the air after taking communion.
2. Christus Victor and the incarnation help make sense of a world filled with “the powers.”
The classic “presentation of the gospel” in the West is the forensic/judicial atonement theory: you and I are guilty in our sin, Christ stood in our place condemned so we could be free. All true. Continue to preach it. But many more (especially in Gen Z) need to hear a “mosaic of the atonement”—a full display of what the cross accomplished. Far more often, I lean heavily into the reality of the cross “defeating the powers” and casting Satan asunder—what we theologians call Christus Victory. Jesus stood in your place, but what place was that? The place that put a foot on the head of Satan, sin, and death. The common American now sense “the powers” at work and they are overwhelmed and anxious. Our message provides Good News: Christ has disarmed the rulers and authorities in heavenly places.
And it’s important that Jesus Christ is our victor—the incarnate Son of God, who is sent from heaven to have “all the fullness of the Deity live in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9). Because of of the Living God comes in Christ he experiences humanity with divine power, able to sympathize with us in our weakness, experience the real horrors of satanic temptation, and prove dominant over the very same demons that plague our world. What other religion or system of philosophy can make sense of an inexplicable and unpredictable supernatural world? When we see Christ in the gospels talking to the demons, things make way more sense.
3. Talk about the spiritual realm we do not see and its participatory relationship with the earthly one we do
I’m growing in my conviction that a sacramental vision of reality is key to our next 50 years in American Christian ministry. What I mean by this is yes, a huge emphasis on “the sacraments” (Eucharist and Baptism), but I also mean sacramental in the way of the early church: that what we do not see (“the spiritual”) participates with what we do see (“the physical”).
These are not two separate worlds that sometimes interact in strange, miraculous moments; the intermingling of these two worlds is reality itself. Our frustrations with “the government” and our anxiety about “the economy” are interplaying with the very real unseen realm of angels, demons, false gods, and the Holy Spirit. “The government” is both the problem and not the problem as the political powers participate with the spiritual powers and principalities now at work in our midst.
This is true at the personal level too: someone’s addiction or temptation or pain is interrelated to a spiritual reality we cannot see. You are not “a body with a soul,” as the painful Cartesian teaching says (one that has regrettably made its way into the Church). A full picture of “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” offers a more promising route to the future. Those are not three “separate forces,” but intermingling “powers” at work in our midst and in our daily lives. The world is a battleground of non-flesh, non-blood activity that is constantly affecting the flesh and blood.
It is tempting to apologize for all of this as a “weird” part of Christianity, but it’s not as weird as a flying nun. I think we’ll be OK.
The Latin name of The Interior Castle is Moradas, this reference from 6.5.1, O.C., pg. 540.
Vida 20.3-4, O.C., pg. 109.
Carlos Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible. New Haven: Yale, 2023, pg. 83.
Vida 20.4, O.C., pg. 109.
Carlos Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible. New Haven: Yale, 2023, pg. 91.
Eire, They Flew, pg. 5.
“In Northern and Western Europe, Gen Z was more likely than the boomer generation to say they believe in heaven, supernatural spirits, hell, and the Devil.” For more, see the report from Christianity Today.
The difference between extraterrestrial and supernatural alien beings is significant for our culture. There seems to be a rising number of people who are consigned to the existence of UFOs and now open to the reality that the beings inhabiting these vessels or illusions of spacecrafts would be either aliens or demons. Of course, a large population of the country believes these are either Chinese or Russian. No matter how you slice it, it seems like an important shift. What difference would these possibilities make for Christian theology? Not a ton. The demon theory fits easily into a biblical cosmology and the foreign nations theory doesn’t have any immediate effect on our faith and tradition. If these are extraterrestrial beings, we can safely assume that the event of the resurrection has profound effects on their existence. Maybe that’s why they’re here?
A fantastic moment to recommend what is, in my mind, one of the best novels of the past ten years, Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, which is a profound meditation on the burden and pain of increasing scientific knowledge. I’d also recommend Chuck Klosterman’s But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if it were the Past.
You had me at Christus Victor. Take my like.
Thank you. I have read of Teresa of Avila and find the early chants/singing Teresa of Avila wrote lift me beyond the here and now to sit in serenity with God.