Lenten Weblog, Day 15: Strange Spirits

A standard media line is that those who object to starving Terri Schiavo to death are motivated by fanatical Christianity. That surprises me a bit, for I had charitably thought that hardened secularists also disliked the idea of depriving people of food and water. At issue in Mrs. Schiavo’s case is whether she is aware of what is happening to her, a question of fact that cannot be decided on religious grounds. I assume that morally sane nonbelievers do not advocate cruelty and have sincerely convinced themselves that there is no rational possibility that Terri Schiavo feels anything as her body dies. Were that my conviction, too, her circumstances would not distress me. (This morning I happened to see a snippet of CNN Headline News reporting that her doctors were administering morphine, which suggests a certain lack of confidence in the diagnosis of total unconsciousness.)

If the role of Christian zeal in this dispute is overstated, a different religious impulse has been overlooked. Michael Schiavo’s lawyer, Gregory Felos, also adheres to a supernatural creed, the tenets of which he has espoused in a book entitled Litigation as Spiritual Practice. He believes, to summarize baldly, that death is a stage in a divine procession. Hastening it for the disabled is to help them on their journey and doesn’t actually deprive them of life, as they are drops in the ocean of God and will be reincarnated in due course. A few quotations (from sources ([1] and [2]) that, while hostile to Mr. Felos, do not appear to be plucking his words out of context; cf. his publisher’s Web page):

[Mr. Felos’ reaction to reading a book on “conscious dying”:] Scripture says neither hands, nor feet, nor emotion, nor mind, nor body are we. Our death—the permanent separation of our spirit, our consciousness, from the body—if experienced with awareness, can provide the opportunity to dispel the greatest of illusions: that we are this body. The author [of the book] goes on to describe how meditation and spiritual practice is the process of dying—the means by which we extinguish our ego and body identification and realize we are the expression and manifestation of the Divine. Pretty heady stuff, especially for one who had just died and been reborn, so to speak. I deeply connected with the message of this book, and as I gazed out the window upon the clouds and surface below, I felt death move a bit closer.

[On a different occasion, by his own account, his thought “I wonder what it would be like to die right now” caused an airplane to go into a sudden dive.] At that instant a clear, distinctly independent and slightly stern voice said to me, “Be careful what you think. You are more powerful than you realize.” In quick succession I was startled, humbled and blessed by God’s admonishment.

This autonomy from mental control is characteristic of how events and emotions are encountered during Grace. . . . Nothing holds permanent and immutable except the ocean of God’s consciousness from which and upon which the forms of Divine consciousness play. Life in Grace is a succession of these unfolding moments. Whether the next moment brings death or a fortune is irrelevant because nothing that can happen can ever harm or hurt you, or improve or make you better. In reality you have never been born and never can die. You are the expression of the Divine.

If we are infinitely large, if the Divine within us, which is us, contains all of creation, what can be taken from us and who is there to take it? [emphasis in original]

[An experience that he claims to have had while he and his wife were debating whether to have children:] I heard the soul of my yet-to-be-conceived child emphatically shout: “I’m ready to be born . . . will you stop this fooling around!” . . . The voice I heard was distinctly male, and I beamed with the idea I had a son—or was going to have a son—or sorta had a son out there—or something like that. [James Taranto: “Of course, if Felos (or a talking gleam in his eye) thinks the way to conceive a child is to stop fooling around, some medical expert ought to sit him down and explain the facts of life.”]

Gregory Felos, then, embraces the “right to die” (or, to be more precise, the right to have others liberate your God-spirit by ending your life), because he has received what he regards as spiritual enlightenment. I take it for granted that he is sincere and regards his mystical experiences as authoritative. But how does he know that they derive from God rather than from his imagination or a malign spirit?

Christian mystics not infrequently report diabolic visions that are every bit as vivid as those sent by God. They can distinguish the one from the other by drawing on the teachings of the Church. If a saint is urged by an angel of light to kill an innocent woman, he knows that the “angel” is a demon in disguise, because it calls him to do what the law of Christ forbids.

Mr. Felos, by contrast, has no theology but that inferred from his visions. No independent authority can test the validity of the visions, and he has never thought to raise skeptical questions. Thus he has been led to a self-righteous zeal for what can only be characterized, by those who do not share his faith, as a cult of death. In our era of “New Age” spiritual experimentation, he is far from alone in following unexamined impulses into terrain that is dangerous to soul and body.