And yet I know people who connect with this “Other” and visit another reality without the drama of disease or the aid of drugs. These are the horse whisperers: they have trained their brains through years of meditation, and their restraining hand turns the wild stallion into an Olympic jumper or a Secretariat. These people are spiritual virtuosos, and none is more winning than Scott McDermott.
CHAPTER 8
Spiritual Virtuosos
NOT OFTEN DO MAGAZINE ARTICLES rob me of sleep. But the
Newsweek
cover story of May 7, 2001, gave me insomnia for a week. The article discussed “neurotheology,” the neuroscience of spirituality—in this case, the brain activity of Buddhist and Catholic meditators when they dived deep into meditation. These experiments turned a corner in the study of spirituality. No longer would neurologists be reduced to merely extrapolating about spiritual experience from what they knew of abnormal conditions like epilepsy and psychedelic drug trips. They had moved into the realm of clinical, replicable research on spiritual events. And their subjects would not be mere mortals but spiritual Olympians, the Michael Jordans of meditation. I was hankering to get my hands into this research. It would take me another six years, but in June 2007, I would watch as a scanner took snapshots of my friend’s brain while he communed with God.
I met Scott McDermott on January 20, 2004. We were sitting in a quiet room at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship Church. We could hear the quiet
brrrr
of hundreds of people speaking in tongues in the sanctuary below us. I was there on assignment for NPR to understand this boisterous brand of mysticism. Scott was ready to explain it to me.
Ten years earlier, the story went, the Holy Spirit had “fallen” on the worshippers during a Sunday-evening service. People began swooning and falling to the floor, where they remained pinned like upturned beetles for hours at a time. They began speaking in tongues, barking like dogs, and, most of all, laughing—laughing hysterically, hour after hour, sometimes for days. It would later be dubbed “Holy Laughter,” and the phenomenon named the “Toronto Blessing.”
I arrived for the tenth anniversary, hoping to witness the “blessing” in action. I was not disappointed. During the evening service, people in the audience began to chuckle, one or two at first; then the laughter rippled across the crowd like a squall across a lake. People fell at random, weeping piteously or laughing maniacally. I recorded people barking like dogs and clucking like chickens. I even heard a rooster or two. At the end of the service, people lined up to be blessed by a team of pastors. One pastor would touch a person’s head, while another pastor stood behind to catch the worshipper as he toppled backward. They worked methodically, these anointed of the Lord, like woodsmen felling trees, one by one, row by row. I left well past midnight, with hundreds of people still sprawled on the floor, quietly clucking or barking.
At eleven the next morning, I sat down with Scott McDermott. A self-effacing man of slight build, his blond hair parted in the middle, Scott was the senior pastor of Washington Crossing United Methodist Church in Pennsylvania (about an hour north of Philadelphia). I expected him to provide an oasis of sanity and theological sophistication in this roiling sea of Pentecostal emotion. The United Methodists are known more for social liberalism than charismatic style, and Scott himself seemed hardly a “slain in the Spirit” sort of guy. He was a Ph.D. who in his spare time taught New Testament theology at Southern Methodist University.
But as he talked, his words flowed in a torrent of power and passion. I began to wonder if he was one of
them
, one of those people who fell on the floor. I asked him how he came to be at the Toronto Blessing. That is when he told me about his vision.
Scott first heard about the Toronto church in 1996, two years after the Holy Laughter had started there. He was skeptical.
“I’d seen enough of this kind of thing in American religion,” he told me. “I did not want one more emotional experience. I was really put off. But enough people were asking me about it that I thought,Well, I should at least check it out.”
Scott caught up with the Toronto pastor, John Arnott, at a church conference in New Orleans. At the end of the day, Arnott prayed for him.
“And when he did, I fell to the ground. And I felt waves of the Spirit flow through my body, from my hands to my feet, and back to my hands. Then the most unusual thing happened.”
Scott paused, embarrassed, but the spigot had been opened and the story would not be stopped. He had a vision, he explained, that he was in Israel, overlooking the Judean desert.
“And I began to run on the floor. I’m on my back, and I began to run. I’m pumping my arms and legs, and I’m running from Jericho to Jerusalem. I did this for one and a half hours. And the other pastors in the room began to cheer me on. I saw them on the road in my vision. It was like the New York Marathon, people cheering, ‘Run the race! Run the race! Run the race!’ I ran as hard as I could past the Mount of Olives. I ran through the Garden of Gethsemane, through the Kidron Valley, and up the other side to what is the Eastern Gate of the Temple. It’s presently walled shut, but there it was open. There was a finish line across it, and Jesus stood on the other side of the line with His arms outstretched, and I fell across the line into His arms and He just grabbed me and held me, laughing, holding on to me.
“At that point,” Scott said,“I had stopped running on the floor, and I felt the Lord say something to me that surprised me. He said, ‘I want you to go with them, with my faithful servants.’ But in my heart, I thought I didn’t belong with them. For years, despite having a Ph.D. in the New Testament, despite teaching at a university, despite being a senior pastor of a pretty good-sized Methodist church, I didn’t feel I measured up. And so I cried on the floor. I said, ‘No, I do not belong with them. I do not.’
“And the Lord looked at me, with such intensity, and He said very firmly,‘You go with them.’ And when He did, there was this indescribable love, it was beyond words, and it began to fill me. All that low self-esteem, all that sense of not being valued, began to melt in this love.”
Scott paused to steady his voice.
“The change has been dramatic. I can’t say I’m a perfect man as a result of this, or that every day I walk on cloud nine, but I will tell you this: Because of that, I know how much I’m loved by God. And when life gets hard—and life does get hard—God’s love is there to see me through.”
After his mystical marathon, Scott said he was horrified that he had made himself such a spectacle. But the next day, he said,“People would ask, ‘Why would you have an experience like that and not me?’ And I didn’t have an answer to that one.”
I think I do. Scott McDermott is a spiritual virtuoso.
Scanning the Mystical Moment
I thought about Scott McDermott often over the next three years, because he possessed an uncommon combination of qualities: the polished intelligence of a scholar and the all-consuming spirituality of a mystic. What was more, Scott practiced the presence of God, and his long, daily prayers seemed to give him access to another reality.
When I read in
Newsweek
that a scientist was studying the brains of Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns, I thought of Scott.What was going on in Scott’s brain when he connected with God, I wondered, when he saw the Kidron Valley or heard the voice of Jesus? I could not wait to get his brain scanned.
On June 1, 2007, Scott and I met in the radiology department at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. We chatted for a few minutes, then followed a nurse down the hall to a cul-de-sac of examination rooms and one brain scanner. This was Andy Newberg’s kingdom.
Andy Newberg is an associate professor in the department of radiology—with secondary appointments in psychiatry and religious studies—at the University of Pennsylvania. He is in his early forties but looks twenty-four. His curly dark hair has flecks of gray, but the rest of him cries out that the gray is an optical illusion. He gives the impression of a seventh-grader who went to bed thinking about his geometry test and awoke the next morning to find himself a neuroscientist.
Newberg has authored three books and countless articles on “neurotheology”—the study of the brain in the throes of spiritual experience.
Why God Won’t Go Away
, which he wrote with his friend and mentor the late Eugene D’Aquili, explored the events in people’s brains when they enjoy mystical experiences. This is the research that made the cover of
Newsweek
, the story that rendered me sleepless for a week.
1
Another Newberg book,
Why We Believe What We Believe
,
2
looked at different types of mystical experience, including speaking in tongues and the meditation of an atheist. He proposed a theory of why we seek out religious experience and how the experience cements our beliefs about God and the nature of reality. Newberg is a rock star in the small world of neurotheology, and certainly among the media, even though fellow neurologists sometimes tut-tut about the gleeful abandon with which he explores the human brain. Newberg doesn’t seem to care. He’s traveled way too far into the brain to turn back now.
For the past few years, Newberg has studied spiritual experts of all stripes: Tibetan Buddhist monks, Franciscan nuns, Sikhs, Pentecostals— in other words, those who practice prayer and meditation long and hard. I had already witnessed him measuring the brain-wave activity and scanning the brain of a Sikh while he chanted his prayers. And on this first day of June 2007, I would watch as he scanned the brain of a Christian in prayer, my minister friend Scott McDermott.
One mystery about spiritually inclined people is this: What turns people into spiritual virtuosos? I have come to think that people like Scott McDermott are to prayer what Tiger Woods is to golf. From an early age, their natural talents channeled them toward golf, or toward God, and once they felt the rush of watching that ball fall into the hole or sipping the unearthly wine of transcendence, they pursued their passions. They trained because the reward was so sweet and so constant. Nature and nurture, genes and sweat, schemed to create these masters.
Scott was sixteen when he says he first “encountered” God directly. From that time on, prayer became the central habit of his life, around which all other events orbited. Scott has prayed one to two hours a day for more than thirty-five years. On Fridays, his day off, he is often on his knees for four. During those sessions, Scott feels peace and joy. He says he often hears a voice and receives visions.
“I begin early,” he told me.“I begin at five-thirty. I’m not a morning person. I stumble down to my basement. My study’s down in my basement. I have a recliner down there. I walk down, turn the lights on, and say, ‘God, it’s just me. I just want to spend some time with you.’ And I sit in that chair and we begin to have a conversation.”
I turned to Andy Newberg, who was standing with us in a small examination room at the hospital. Newberg was listening intently.
“I’m curious, Andy, what would that kind of practice do to the brain?” I asked.
“Well, some of the research we have been doing suggests that when people are engaged in practices over a long period of time, it does ultimately alter how the person’s brain functions,” Newberg responded. “As one does a particular practice or a particular task over and over, that becomes more and more written into the neural connections of the brain. So the more you focus on something, whether it’s math or auto racing or football or God, the more that becomes your reality.”
I glanced at Scott to see if he picked up the ambivalence in Newberg’s response: God may be “your reality” and still be imaginary. The belief in God may shape your worldview, and your brain, in the same way Harry Potter books shape the brains and imaginations of children. But no one would argue that a wizard like Harry Potter actually exists.
I put the question to Newberg more explicitly:“When people pray, do they connect to God or tap into a dimension outside of their bodies?”
Newberg was prepared with a careful answer.
“Well, it comes down to belief systems,” he said. “When a
religious person
looks at our brain scans, they say, ‘Ah, that’s where God has an interaction with me.’An
atheist
looks at the data and says,‘There it is. It’s nothing more than what’s in your brain.’ Even if I do a brain scan of somebody who tells me that they’ve seen God, that scan only tells me what their brain was doing when they had that experience, and it doesn’t tell me whether or not they actually did see God.”
In fact, Newberg is undecided as to whether brain images reveal there is a God or not. Materialists would say that brain scans prove that prayer is a physical process, nothing more; there is no need to bring an external Being into the equation. But Newberg points out that brain scans do not necessarily exclude an external being. Say you are eating a piece of apple pie, just out of the oven, topped with melting vanilla ice cream. If Newberg took a brain scan of you as you bit into the pie, various parts of your brain would light up—the areas that register smell, taste, form, and shape, as would the area that recalls the memory of the time you tasted pie this good, at the county fair when you were six years old. The parts of the brain not involved with the task would go dark.Who knows? You may even lose a sense of self in this ecstatic culinary moment. But just because your brain is activated in a certain way, does that mean the apple pie isn’t real? Of course it’s real. And just because Scott McDermott’s prayers correlate to brain activity, does that mean God is mere illusion?
Newberg then announced it was time for the study to begin. He closed the door and instructed Scott to relax on a metal bed in the sterile, cool room as a nurse inserted a catheter into his arm. They dimmed the lights. After ten minutes, Newberg tiptoed into the room and started the IV. A radioactive tracer began to flow into Scott’s arm and up to his brain. After the tracer had set, Newberg led Scott to the brain imaging machine, which would take a snapshot of Scott’s brain.