On Faith, Magical Thinking, & Manifesting
"Everybody else lives in this dream world...why can't I?"
Most days I feel, getting out of bed, that anything is possible, that there’s something worth seeing or doing just by being present in the world and available to others. However miserable or disappointed or disillusioned, however heart-broken and self-loathing, I’m grateful not to have lost this essential joy. Because, let’s face it, the world we wake up to is a mess. It’s become increasingly difficult to listen to the news, to build and maintain substantive relationships, to find some semblance of peace or purpose, to imagine a sustainable future. Maybe even now you’re thinking about something (or trying not to think about something) that feels unresolved, a splinter you can’t see, but feel. Maybe you’re flying blind.
If you can’t see where you’re going or don’t know what you’re doing, holding on to some small joy, some belief in the possibility of a new day, is itself an invaluable act of resistance (against that which threatens to undo you).
What I’m describing isn’t unique, per se. Actually, according to psychological resilience studies, most of us have this capacity to find the silver-lining. Typically, we learn how to do this in our formative years (via any number of protective factors—a loving guardian, a caring community, intrinsic hardiness, faith…). In other words, this thing I’m describing is statistically common. But just because something is common, or accessible, doesn’t make it less valuable.
In my first few years of teaching at Brown University, I was so broke I could barely afford to buy the black beans I subsisted on. I had no health insurance and was drowning in undergraduate student-loan debt. The experience of being broke and hungry and doctor-wary wasn’t exactly new to me, but it was also simultaneously a moment in my life where things felt fresh and exciting. I was teaching at my alma mater, making new friends, learning new ideas, and it was all so full of promise.
One afternoon, my old advisor and friend, Forrest Gander, reached out to let me know that his friend, the Argentinian author Pablo Katchadjian, had come to visit Providence. Since Forrest was out of town, he was hoping I might spend the afternoon with Pablo and make sure he was taken care of and properly welcomed. So I reached out to Pablo and, for whatever reason, we decided to meet up at a pizzeria in Wayland Square. Except, like I said, I was broke as a joke. Not a dollar to my name.
I went anyway.
I figured I could come up with an excuse or find some creative way to keep him entertained without money. I’d spent all of my twenties learning how to be creative on a budget (of nothing), so it wouldn’t be so bad. And I really don’t like the idea of a guest or visitor paying for their meal. It’s really on the home team to cover the cost, call me old-fashioned. Really, in the final cost-benefit analysis, I figured the most important thing was to be there for a friend of a friend. Just go and be, ya know?
But guess what?
On my way there, I found a twenty dollar bill on Angell Street (pronounced angel) and it was just enough to cover the cost of our meager check.
Pablo turned out to be a genuinely wonderful guy, brilliant writer, great conversationalist. I’ll always remember our first meeting fondly. Not just because Pablo was cool and sporting a wonderfully coiffed handlebar mustache—but, because I felt tangibly rewarded for going despite having reason not to (reason being brokeness—not yet to be confused with brokenness). Finding twenty dollars on Angell Street buzzed all the joy-nerves in my precious Judeo-Christian brain. This twenty dollars wasn’t something I was expecting, or even hoping for. Still, there it was, so perfectly situated I couldn’t help feeling a bit suspicious, like it had been dangled from a cosmic lure and as soon as I’d stoop to pick it up the cops would swoop in or the news crew with their candid cameras or the aliens and their tractor beam and all of a sudden…is this what blind faith leads us to?
Satre’s Being and Nothingness, in so many words, paints for us a picture of secular (atheistic) faith by way of negation or bad faith (mauvaise foi). If our existence (as raw stuff) precedes our essence (what we become), then we are not divinely pre-determined creatures, destined to become anything other than that which we’ve chosen to pursue for ourselves. In existential configurations, we are to become masters of our own fate(s).
I’d argue that, in order to understand religious faith, one must grapple with the nausea of a cosmically rudderless condition—the challenge put forward by existentialists from Kierkegaard to Camus. To truly believe [in the divine] is to believe even in “…the nothing that is.” And maybe God is only real to those who accept, in part, the impossible weight of the creator’s responsibility to forge life from nothingness.
God or no God, broke or ballin’, so much of the joy (and pain) of life is in going anyway.
“Faith,” she said, “is holding onto the truths of who God IS…even when that truth has not manifested fully.”
Lately I’ve been going on daily bike rides. This is all part of that joy-in-the-quotidian thing I was just rambling about. For me, it’s not just about the physical exertion of exercise, building endurance and/or muscle, so much as it is just getting out there, seeing what there is to see. You’d be surprised who you run into while biking or walking, how many times you quietly fall in love or come to some quick and unsound revelation.
About a week ago, after one of my jaunts, I happened to meet the Reverend Dr. Roslyn Thomas. She’d moved up north from Virginia after getting her PhD from seminary and confessed things had been difficult for her. To keep from revealing too much personal detail, I’ll say that Roslyn and I have felt blessed by the others serendipitous presence. However different we were/are in our lived experience, we seemed to mirror each other in grief and (religious) faith.
Later I’d ask Reverend Thomas for a definition of faith in her own words. “Faith,” she said, “is holding onto the truths of who God IS…even when that truth has not manifested fully.”
And I love that. For so many reasons. I love Reverend Thomas’s erudition, her wisdom, her resilience, her grace. I love her faithfulness. I love that we met without expecting to (but maybe hoping to, in some nameless way). And I love, finally, that her definition of faith, in some way, squares with Sartre’s definition of faith—by way of what has not yet manifested.
Like a good seminarian, Reverend Thomas was also quick to point me in the direction of Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (KJV) Not her words, but a tried and true definition—a foundational verse in any good Christian’s handbook. To this she added that the Koine Greek word for faith is pistis: to be fully persuaded.
Fully persuaded? The Old Testament (Tanakh) is the document of a people (a collective) becoming, not by the actualization of their desire, but through their obedience to His sovereign will (and occasions of exceptional human intervention, intercessory prayer, repentance, etc). Faith then, in the Biblical sense, is to abandon oneself, to trust God to guide one through the valley of the shadow of death. And this, in the New Testament sense, is to be fully persuaded that the sovereign will of God is for the benefit of the individual and the collective. But is this also a promise of happiness, peace, or personal satisfaction?
Reverend Thomas had me thinking about “the truth of who God IS…” and hearing repeated ehyeh-asher-ehyeh, “I will be what I will be”.
Translated in the King James Bible as “I AM THAT I AM”, this is God’s reply to Moses when asked for His name. Cryptic. Enigmatic. On brand for the being that gave us both the platypus and herpes.
The history of Judaic monotheism is a curious and complex one. To attempt to describe its evolution in a few paragraphs is a terrible disservice to the rich history of Judaism. But between the vaguely monotheistic customs of the Abrahamic era to the institution of Mosaic/Levitical law at Sinai, the tribes of ancient Israel made every effort to distinguish themselves from the various polytheistic and henotheistic nation-states of the region. In so doing, they carved out a unique ethno-religious identity that, despite adapting and changing over thousands of years, has preserved its fundamental precepts. Chief among these is that God is one.
What remains so beautiful and terrifying about this mode of radical monotheism is that it places God at the center of it all, the God of all things. This is to say that God is the God of good and evil, of love and hate. This is a God who, in the parabolic book of Job, literally makes a deal with the devil and wins. Why? Because this radically monotheistic vision of God is one sovereign over all things, has dominion over all things, including His accuser. The governing logic here is that God cannot be separated from evil or famine or catastrophe or any of the thousands of horrors we reluctantly witness, because God is one, and God is sovereign. This can be a bit mind-boggling for evangelical Christians who’ve grown accustomed to well-worn churchisms like “God is good…all the time…and all the time…God is good”. There is this evangelical Christian tendency to qualify that which is good as belonging to God (Christ) and that which is bad or evil as belonging to Satan (the devil). Such interpretations are not Biblically false, per se, but do little to represent the truth of the matter—that a sovereign, singular God is more often ambiguous and silent than They are perceptibly beneficent. This is due, in part, to the acceptance of God as embodied by a sympathetic human named Jesus Christ (an idea that flies in the face of both Judaic and Islamic monotheism). The whole enterprise (of a distant and sovereign God) becomes way more personal when you can have lunch with the guy. Maybe this is why Evangelical Christian expressions of God’s goodness, like “God is good…all the time,” are meant to make believers feel good, to reassure one of the fruits of faith, rather than provoke anxiety. And this, I think, is a kind of magical thinking. But we’ll circle back to this idea.
In the meantime, we return to Moses, confronted by God at the burning bush. God expresses Their identity as a kind of unsolvable riddle (I am), an unnameable name (HaShem/the tetragrammaton), making clear that Theirs is a being never to be apprehended or comprehended entirely by human means. As Israel makes efforts to free themselves from bondage and establish their own nation-state, God makes every effort to remain present, but ever so slightly out of reach. And after Israel has escaped Egypt, crossing the reed sea into the Sinai Peninsula, and received Levitical law—one of many prohibitions (the 31st negative mitzvot as enumerated by Maimonides) is against divination.
Why of the 365 negative commandments have I homed in on divination, you ask? Because I must confess a weakness for divination. I love tarot. I love horoscopes and astrology. I love how the aleatory exists as an affirmation of divine will in Ifá. I love wishing on fallen eyelashes and taking screenshots of angel numbers when they flash across my screen. 11:11. 5:55. 3:33. I love all of those things. But, while these kinds of divinatory practice have been deemed sacrilege for thousands of year, what fascinates me is how every Biblical prohibition of divination, soothsaying, and sorcery affirms the enduring popularity of these customs and their quasi-efficaciousness.
There are so many verses and so much commentary on the dangers of the occult. Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides), ever the rationalist, reasons in his Sefer HaMitzvot that soothsayers are just charlatans adept at making informed guesses. And when the Lord says in Acts 1:7 “…It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.” (KJV) it stands as both prohibition and affirmation that perhaps it is possible to know or seek out the times and seasons (that future that is to be)—it’s just really not advisable (given human error and all). Let’s not forget, the wise men from the east divine through astrology the birth of the Christian messiah. It’s by the star of Bethlehem that they arrive at the manger bearing gifts.
Forgive me if you find I’m playing hard and fast with sacred texts and the hermeneutics that undergird their interpretation. I’m just saying.
After the exodus, into the time of Israel’s first king (tall and comely Saul) we witness an uneasy reliance on soothsayers to help in decision making. Panicked in 1st Samuel that God is no longer responding to him, Saul seeks out a medium (referred to in the King James as a “woman that hath a familiar spirit”—1 Samuel 28:7). It should come as no surprise that this medium is also femme, a witch in essence, perennial other to the patriarchy. That a woman who’s taken the future into her own hands, actively displacing God’s sovereignty, is being consulted by the king, signals the beginning of the end for old Saul (and the ascent of David haMelech, man of God).
Aside from the uneasy transition of power between kings in conflict, what this particular moment speaks to is how divination, soothsaying, and sorcery (magic) appeal to people in the throes of deep uncertainty, those of us groveling at the mercy of God for some semblance of direction or approval. It’s usually in these moments in my life when I find myself casually (and then not-so-casually) consulting horoscopes and looking for signs. Why? Because these, at best, offer some imaginative (or fantastical) direction. My favorite tarot readers are the ones seemingly confident enough to imagine for me (in love and life) what I fail to imagine for myself. There’s even something prescient in their specificity. Yes, absolutely, I would love to fall in love with my twin flame if I see a balloon today while riding my bike!
These forecasts feel real because we want to believe in them. They inspire a kind of confidence, perhaps false, but nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. And in an age of anxiety, confidence is king, confidence is commodity. The ugly irony, of course, is that in a world rife with uncertainty, what presents itself to us as absolute truth or the promise of individual satisfaction is also cause for suspicion. Whether you trust those who purport to know for fact what escapes you in the brumous impasse of the present is another story.
Magic is to religious institutions what hacking is to the internet.
Magic is an extra-legal means of agency for the unauthorized civilian seeking to borrow/steal from/threaten the established order, generally for personal or private use. When there are no forthcoming answers to your burning questions, when the doctor has no cure for what ails you, when you’ve been locked out of your account because you typed the wrong password three times—you consult the outsider who’s willing to break the rules on your behalf. Or perhaps you yourself have insider knowledge enough to maintain your own practice beyond the proprietary walls of the institution that purports to hold all knowledge. Are you, in this sense, a hacker or magic user? Even if you don’t think so, try to imagine in what ways you’ve subverted “the natural order” to affect the kind of change you wanted or needed. Perhaps you’ve practiced forms of magic without even realizing. No big deal. Surely a marker of intelligence is the ability to identify unmapped desire paths. These may even become lucrative revenue streams, in market parlance (or your next boyfriend).
In the past two years, there’s been a significant rise in astrology and tarot based content. These topics have not only spiked in popularity, but are widely accepted as reasonable outlets for spirituality and guidance. With this glut of content has also come a rise in secular or agnostic or even explicitly religious self-help shamans who counsel their followers in the fine art of “manifestation”.
If you’ve never heard of manifestation, wikipedia defines it as “…various pseudoscientific self-help strategies intended to bring about a personal goal, primarily by focusing one's thoughts upon the desired outcome. The techniques are based on the law of attraction of New Thought spirituality. While the process involves positive thinking, or even directing requests to ‘the universe’, it also involves action-steps on the part of the individual.” Indeed the idea became popular (again) in the early 2000s after the publication and film adaptation of The Secret. But it has its origins in the Second Great Awakening, a period of Protestant Christian revivalism in early 19th century America. Phineas Quimby is sometimes attributed as the father of this “New Thought”, one that would give rise to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science and later forms of mind-over-matter that are, arguably, rooted in American Christian practice and theology.
More often than not, new age gurus who deal in manifestation stylize their counsel as some variation on the adage “if you can visualize it, you can have it”. I don’t mean that to be a reductive assessment of what manifesting is and how it too has evolved over the years. But, whether we’re dealing with hardcore Kabbalists or the influencer you follow for motivation, we’re now squarely in the realm of the subversively fantastical and superstitious, of the human spirit’s perceived triumph over “the natural order” or what is. Because there is no standard for practice in this space, it becomes difficult to distinguish the sage from the charlatan. And one’s ability to manifest, it seems, is limited to the satisfaction of one’s personal desire (money, things, lovers, fame, etc). Those who preach manifestation never really counsel manifestations for world peace, reducing poverty and hunger, etc. The practice seems to begin and end with the person doing the manifestation.
I have a funny manifestation story.
Once, on a whim, I tried a manifestation meditation for a soulmate. I was counseled to enter a meditative state and imagine the person I most wanted to bond with. So I gave it a try one rainy morning and shortly thereafter forgot about it. I went out to take care of some errands and get some groceries, all the while nursing a kind of quiet crankiness about my station in the world. I certainly wasn’t thinking about that hocus pocus non-sense I entertained in sad curiosity. So it came as a terrifying surprise when, on my way home, in my curmudgeonly state, I saw the person I had imagined in my soulmate manifestation. She was on the other side of the street, standing outside of a library as if waiting for something or someone. It was too strange to believe and I thought it generally inappropriate, maybe creepy, to introduce myself to a complete stranger (especially while we were both wearing masks). So I went home, oddly thrilled and perplexed.
Sometime later I found her again. This time on a dating app. And would you believe, we matched. I thought, oh gosh, how incredible is this.
After we matched I sent a text: “this is going to sound so odd…but you’re literally the girl of my dreams…” A risky confession to make, but this was a bit of a test. To my surprise, rather than block me immediately, she seemed intrigued. So we talked for quite a while, all very pleasant and warm. That is until our discussion turned to her experience as a pianist. I hate it, she confessed, after I’d mentioned a handful of pianists I admired. She hated that she’d been forced to play as long as she had, regardless of how capable she’d become. But maybe I’d grown too comfortable, too soon. I tried to empathize, saying how I understood it must’ve been a burden. And not wanting to sound so bleak, I added that I hoped someday I could hear her play. Then I set the phone down, wondering what to say next, and when I picked up the phone to see if she’d responded, she had disappeared. Unmatched, I guess.
I suppose the point of this story is that, in my experience, even when we’ve “manifested” something, that something is almost always treated as an object, and that object may or may not resist its sudden presence in your life. Manifestation, in this sense, seems to me a selfish thing. It’s all about me me me and gratifying what I want with as little effort as possible. At worst, it’s nothing more than magical thinking.
What I do love about forms of magical thinking, regardless of their supposed efficacy or grounding in sound doctrine, is that, at their root, they mean to empower the individual as an agent in the making of their own lives. The danger, of course, is in misrepresenting and misinterpreting such practice as a substitute for substantive change, failing to acknowledge and accept things as they really are. In the sung words of blind seer Stevie Wonder, “when you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer…” What happens, for example, when it feels like God is not good all the time? What happens, for example, when the dream love you’ve manifested rejects you unexpectedly? Magical thinking can be (and often just is) nothing more than unalloyed desire and the expectation of wish fulfillment. But even actual magic takes more than magical thinking, wishing, and visualizing. It takes work, practice, arcane knowledge and a willingness to risk becoming an outsider by breaking “the law”.
If magical thinking, bereft of any effort to make real what one has imagined, has any redeeming quality, it’s that such fantasy is an essential reflex in our psychic lives. On occasion we need fantasy like we need salt on our food. It can make the hard truth a little more palatable and inarresting.
“Sometimes life overwhelms us,” said Reverend Thomas. “We feel very low. The Bible says, for the spirit of heaviness, to put on the garment of Praise. Literally start to Thank God for being alive.”
If there’s one final difference between faith, magical thinking, and manifestation, it’s that your faith will gratify something other than your personal (see: selfish) desire. In faith, you can let go of the desired outcome and trust in what may or has already transpired. And if there is a common thread between faith, magical thinking, and manifestation, perhaps it’s my belief that it’s ok to get in where you fit in—especially if it means you’ve accepted responsibility for your life—if it means that what you subscribe to…
gives you cause to get up in the morning and live in the hope of what can be. Faith, magical thinking, and manifestation, however you choose to define these, are just a handful of supplements to the absurd and beautiful mystery of life itself.
Invariably, there will be disappointments and what feels, in the moment, like failure. No matter how badly you feel you’ve failed or by what measure you’ve missed the mark, some joys in this life will find you regardless—if you can just find the courage to get up and go, be who you are, and meet the miracle of the mundane half-way. Trust in yourself. Trust that within you is something even greater, stronger, more beautiful than you might realize. Trust that you are worthy and capable of dealing with whatever may come your way. Trust that you are part of a vast narrative and a grand movement, grander than your own needs and desires, that will touch the lives of all the people you meet. And consider perhaps that, at the end of the day, the truth of our lives is always somewhere in an impossible-to-perceive middle, in the center of it all, in the ungraspable place where God resides—never as bad as we imagine, and never as exciting as we fantasize it will be. Carried in a still small voice is affirmation that your life has not been without witness, that you belong here, that you have purpose, power, and reason for being (which is absolutely worth setting off in search of).