They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire

What are we to make of such a saint or his levitations? And we are referring here to the saint, not the man. The saint can be encountered in many documents, but the man himself is much harder to find. Saint Joseph not only levitates more frequently than an other saint in Christian history but also rises higher off the ground. He not only hovers but actually flies--not just indoors, where it is relatively easier to employ wires or other props and fool people, but also outdoors, where such trickery is relatively more difficult or impossible. And he flies forward and backward too. Unlike Saint Teresa of Avila, whose levitations ceased after she complained to God about them, Joseph's gravity-defying ecstasies continued to occur up until the last few days of his life. Moreover, his levitations often point beyond themselves: while they are always carefully described as a side effect of sudden ecstasies brought on by God, rather than as events willed by Joseph himself, they often serve practical purposes and thus are much more than mere wonders.

They Flew, Carlos Eire's survey of flying miracles in medieval and Renaissance history, comes with a readymade pitch. If you've read a review of the book, you probably know it: Eire takes the flights seriously. That is to say, the book remains open to the possibility that what is said about those holy figures who were known to fly is true, and refrains from seeking alternative explanations, or a "true story." In some cases, as Eire explains, this is mere parsimony. As with the case of Saint Joseph of Cupertino, a 17th century friar, there are simply too many eyewitnesses not to remain open to the possibility. And perhaps to assume that the flights really happened is to deal with the people of the past on their own terms. Even Protestants and the skeptics of the Inquisition, Eire explains, believed that these miracles happened: the only difference is that they assumed it was the devil, not God, who gave people these powers. The impossibility of human flight as a rationalist stance simply was not in the cards. And yet, it might be said that this pitch is just that, a marketing ploy, and that the much-advertised credulity of the book only distinguishes it from alternative accounts in superficial ways. Still, it's a lot of fun.

They Flew offers up three case studies of flying saints: Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Joseph, and Maria de Agreda, known as Maria de Jesus or simply "Sor Maria." Saint Teresa, in Eire's telling, was a reluctant levitator, prone to ecstasies of divine communion that lifted her off the ground, embarrassing her so totally that she eventually asked God to cut it out. Saint Joseph, Eire describes, flew much more often and more happily, but his levitations seemed to have been tied up with his simplicity and incompetence as a monk: they are the miracles of someone transported not by ambition or calculation, but pure joy in the Holy Spirit. It must be said that these are the only two "pure" levitators on which the book focuses; the third, Sor Maria, levitated in the process of "bilocation," in which she was transported during her ecstasies to the New World, where she ministered to the Indigenous people of Spain's New Mexican territories. Although I didn't feel that bilocation was quite within the thematic framework of "flying," I enjoyed Sor Maria's story the most. Later, the book deals with a certain number of "cheats" and frauds who confessed their flights were made with the help of demons, and then with more pointedly "wicked" levitators like witches.

These sections don't quite have the focus that makes the three case studies so engaging; I spent some time wondering when it was, exactly, that Eire was going to get to the parts about flying. But these sections do offer the opportunity to put the flying in a larger context about belief and our changing relationship to it, which might be said to be the "true" thesis of the book. The epilogue, for instance, argues for approaching history with certain post-rationalist or post-materialist methods that are, as Eire suggests, outside the mainstream. One thing that interested me among these discussions is how, far from being credulous, those who lived in the world of Teresa, Joseph, and Maria, could be skeptical in the extreme. All three were, in different fashion, mobbed by attention, both by their admirers and their detractors. The Inquisition, for instance, examined claims of miracles with great skeptical intensity. They would do things like lock nuns who claimed to be able to survive with no food but the eucharist (a common miraculous claim) in their cells until they revealed their fraud by nearly starving to death. In the case of Joseph of Cupertino, the saint's flights were such a political headache that the authorities shuffled him around from monastery to monastery, eventually shutting him up in a cell by himself and letting no one enter. Ironically, this skepticism emerges from an attitude, as Eire shows, of taking these possibilities seriously.

Eire points out that some of these flights are basically happening at the same time as the Enlightenment, and encourages the reader not necessarily to think of them as in tension, but part of similar fronts in a changing relationship to belief. Did they fly? Who knows. Why not. Maybe it doesn't matter. But as the book shows, their flights, "real" or whatever, had a political, cultural, and theological reality that reveals the fault lines of doctrine and power.

The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

"Before and with God we live without God." -Protestant theologian Bonhoeffer

Warning: This is kind of sloppy and disjointed. It is 3 a.m. I'll fix it later.

While The Mermaid Chair is a novel about a restless woman in her forties struggling with restlessness due to her creativity and love for her husband having atrophied, Jessie's feelings of loss of self really resonated with me and made it hard for me to put the novel down. I wanted to watch her climb out her dormant state towards some kind of awakening. I wanted her to take me along for the ride.

Jessie ends up escaping her home in Atlanta and her husband Hugh when she is called to Egret Island to watch after her mother, who has just cut her finger off with a meat cleaver and won't tell anyone why. Since Jessie's father's death years upon years prior, her mother Nelle has always been a bit off--slaving endlessly away in the kitchen at the Benedictine monastery beside her home to avoid facing her own realities. The monastery is home to the Mermaid Chair, a relic that seems to cause Nelle endless suffering regardless of her fixation with the story that accompanies it. The myth around the chair is that a wild mermaid named Asenora who had tried to draw the monks away from their monastery was converted and decided to lead a Godly life inside the monastery. She shed her fish tail and the monks kept it hidden away under the Mermaid chair, but when she was tired of living the life of a saint she would steal her tail away to go back into the ocean until ready to face her other life again. Nelle's personal saint is Saint Senora, and when Jessie finds her on the island , Nelle is burying her severed finger under a statue of the saint.

While Jessie tries to coax her mother back towards sanity in the months that follow her own life starts to spin out of control. Next door at the monastery, a former lawyer turned monk dubbed Brother Thomas for his doubt struggles with the reasons he came to the monastery four years ago after his wife died and is questioning whether or not he should take his final vows and choose to remain there indefinitely. He knows he doesn't belong with the other monks but isn't sure he can "be spit back into that other life. Phil, Oprah, Sally. Madonna's fishnet hose. Revenge of the Nerds movies. Out there where normal people, even bank tellers, used the words 'totally aswesome' to describe the most banal things." Since Jessie and Brother Thomas are both waiting for something to bring about cataclysmic change that will carry them towards life changing revelations, it only follows that they meet one another. Jessie finds a kind of sexual awakening and artistic rebirth while her psychiatrist husband analyzes their failing marriage back in Atlanta and Brother Thomas experiences spiritual anguish. As Thomas puts it, what happens both saves and damns them all.

Just as Nelle seems to be getting better, she cuts off another finger with a meat cleaver. Eventually, we find out that this is an act of "white martyrdom"--in other words following the footsteps of a saint. In this case, Nelle was copying the actions of a fictional St. Eudora who had taken the verse about severing the hand that sins instead of letting your whole body be cast into Hell a little too far. The story escalates and gets a lot messier before anything is resolved, but assuming that you might be interested I won't ruin the ending for you.

The reason that I enjoyed the book so much was maybe not so much the actual plot as it was the questions that were brought up, most of them coming from the floundering Brother Thomas who had committed himself not to God but the search for God, "the one whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere." Another interesting character in the book was the quirky and slightly dissident Brother Dominic, who often referred to himself as a heretic despite his calling. The novel is littered with nods to various theologians both Protestant and Catholic and myths and stories of saints. I kept my notebook beside me while I read so I could scribble down different things to look up after I was finished reading. The abbey definitely created a kind of setting for both the characters and myself that led to a lot of thinking about those Big Questions beyond the ones that plagued Jessie about infidelity and marriage. While all of the characters were deeply flawed their earnest search for answers and the ways that they stumbled upon their own truths were what made them forgivable. Its strange how fiction often offers a more inviting way to work through your own spiritual frustrations than reading any kind of apologetic writing can. It's easier to feel like another average person bogged down with doubts in the the face of a fictional character than it is to feel like an inept heretic in the face of people who have already gone through hell and made it out with clarity to show for it that you can't yet begin to conceive. Or maybe that's just me. I've also always been kind of fascinated how certain Druid myths have been woven into different Catholic and Christian traditions, which is something Kidd also touches on, but I guess that's territory that I should stay away from.

Also, the novel really made me want to drop everything and plan a trip to one of the South Carolina islands that Egret Island was based off of, with its depictions of the rookery and the marsh and the remnants of the Gullah culture. Kidd really has a knack for drawing you into the world her characters inhabit and despite the tragedies that happened on her island, she still managed to make it a magical place.