{"id":101952,"date":"2018-01-29T00:23:22","date_gmt":"2018-01-29T07:23:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=101952"},"modified":"2018-01-28T23:27:36","modified_gmt":"2018-01-29T06:27:36","slug":"magical-thinking-blinds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2018\/01\/magical-thinking-blinds.html","title":{"rendered":"The Magical Thinking that Blinds…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u2026is under discussion by Yr. Obdt. Svt. over at Catholic Weekly<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

I love magic.\u00a0 When I was a boy, my brother did magic tricks that filled me with wonder.\u00a0 Once, he made me invisible.\u00a0 I remember running through the house, waving my hands in my parents\u2019 faces and shouting, \u201cHere I am!\u201d while they looked straight at me and couldn\u2019t see me.<\/p>\n

My brother taught me wonder at an early age with his disappearing coins and flabbergasting card tricks.\u00a0 I will be grateful to him till the day I die for suffusing my mind and heart with the idea that there were things in this world that were past our abilities to understand.<\/p>\n

Of course, what my brother did was not really magic.\u00a0 It was just sleight of hand. Clever trickery that I knew at some level to be naturally explicable.\u00a0 Such \u201cmagic\u201d is just prestidigitation.\u00a0 It\u2019s about getting you to look at the wrong place while the \u201cmagician\u201d is doing something clever with his hand elsewhere.\u00a0 It\u2019s not \u201cmagic\u201d in the sense that one is drawing on unearthly powers or familiar spirits or the demonic.\u00a0 It\u2019s just agility (albeit often agility that dresses itself in the costume of some adept of the mystic arts).\u00a0 But the hocus pocus is just for show in all such \u201cmagic\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now the mention of hocus pocus brings us to a curious point.\u00a0 Hocus pocus is a corruption, oddly enough, of the words of consecration in the Latin Mass\u2013Hoc est enim corpus meum<\/em>: This is my body.<\/div>\n

This illustrates a problem that has troubled the Church off and on since the very beginning: the inability of some people to distinguish between grace and magic.<\/p>\n

Jesus himself, for instance, was accused of doing cures and exorcisms by demonic power.\u00a0 \u201cHe is possessed by Be-elzebul, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons\u201d (Mark 3:22) was the charge. (Jesus\u2019 reply, of course, was that the very disciples of his critics drove out demons too, so by what power were they acting?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 If Satan is driving himself out he is a house divided.\u00a0 That\u2019s ridiculous, so Jesus must be acting with God\u2019s power.)<\/p>\n

On other occasions, the charge of occult power against Christians was not a criticism, but a seeming selling point.\u00a0 The most famous such moment is seen in Acts 8:9-24, when a Samaritan magician named Simon joins a small stampede of new converts eager to get himself baptised. He quickly reveals he has not the faintest idea of the difference between sacramental grace and magic he has practiced.\u00a0 When the apostles lay hands on new disciples in the sacrament of Confirmation and they begin to manifest the gifts of the Holy Spirit, all Simon can see is power.\u00a0 He offers money to Peter in order to purchase such power (thereby lending his name to the sin of simony) and is properly rebuked by the apostle.<\/p>\n

Various other scenes in Acts likewise distinguish between the magical impulse that seeks power apart from God and that of surrender to grace.\u00a0 Elymas, a Jewish magician with a cushy place at the side of a Roman proconsul understood instinctively that Paul was a threat.\u00a0 So did Paul, so he invoked the divine power of Jesus and rendered Elymas miraculously blind (Acts 13:4-12).<\/div>\n

Another time, some exorcists in Ephesus tried to treat the Name of Jesus like a magic spell, saying to the demonic powers:<\/p>\n

\u201cI adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.\u201d Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. But the evil spirit answered them, \u201cJesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?\u201d And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, mastered all of them, and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. (Acts 19:13-16)<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the difference between magic and grace?\u00a0 Both seem to involve some kind of supernatural power, after all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To discover the answer to that question, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026is under discussion by Yr. Obdt. Svt. over at Catholic Weekly: I love magic.\u00a0 When I was a boy, my brother did magic tricks that filled me with wonder.\u00a0 Once, he made me invisible.\u00a0 I remember running through the house, waving my hands in my parents\u2019 faces and shouting, \u201cHere I am!\u201d while they looked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[836],"class_list":["post-101952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholic-weekly-stuff"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Magical Thinking that Blinds...<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"...is under discussion by Yr. Obdt. 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