“When He Saw Who I Was, He Saw Who He Was Called to Become”
A Two-Part Essay on Becoming a Healer and How to Pray
We finished our Guild season in early May, and now I am looking back through the visionary material that came down to us since last October. When the dreams pour down nightly, which they often do in this house, we don’t have a lot of time to soak deeply in each one. We grab its main teachings and re-board the train to our next destination. This past season we shared our visionary stories with the Guild mainly through audio and video productions. But I also love reading the written reports. So now I’m going back through our archives to sift and savor.
Below is an essay in two parts. Part One is a dream Brad received sometime last fall. It’s the kind of story I like to read when my spiritual senses grow dull and I start to feel distant from the sacred. Part Two is a response Brad and I wrote to a Guild member’s question about prayer. Specifically, what to do when some of the words in a prayer feel . . . off-putting. Cringey, as the young people say. Reading Part Two may help some of you more fully embrace Part One.
Enjoy!
Hillary
Part One
Brad dreamed he was in Campinas, Brazil:
This was the last city where the great Brazilian healer, João Fernandes de Carvalho, lived before he passed on at 99 years of age. It is also where João’s nephew, José Carlos, lives. He is a friend of mine and the person who first introduced me to João. In the dream, José and I were in a clinic that was set up for spiritual healing. I was in an examination room and José was dressed in a white coat, appearing as a doctor. He rubbed my arm with cotton that had been dipped into a solution, and then left the room. I watched him walk down a hall where an old man was sitting and waiting for help. José asked him to stand and then proceeded to give him a vibratory hug. It was the kind of healing hug I often administered in the past when I applied “shaking medicine” to others in the manner taught to me by the Kalahari Bushmen. The old man began to weep. His formerly anguished expression, filled with pain and suffering, turned into a broad, joyful smile.
Then José came back to examine my arm. To my surprise, my skin had changed. Many spots had appeared. I was surprised and confused as to what this meant, but I was more curious about how José had changed. He was becoming a healer, and that included administering a diagnostic examination of me. In that moment, I felt the voice of his uncle, João, come through me. He spoke words of guidance to José that I knew were also meant for me and the entire Sacred Ecstatics Guild:
“Only learn how to say the Lord’s Prayer. That’s all you need. If you say it correctly, there is no need to know or use anything else to find and fulfill God’s mission for you. Say it in a way that makes it feel alive, so it administers its higher power through you. Only then can you know who you are and what you must do.“
I wanted to smile with joy like the old man in the hall who had felt the electricity of shaking medicine penetrate his heart. I looked at my arm and could feel it was still changing. My skin was now spotted like the hide of a leopard. I also noticed that José was feeling the presence of his uncle in the room and that his mind would try to understand more about what was going on and what the instruction meant. João spoke through me again, “Don’t think about the Lord’s Prayer. Just say it correctly so you feel it wake you up. That’s all you need to do your job.” As I spoke these words to José, I felt a great peace come over me. I remembered that I always felt this way when I was with João. Being with him always made me feel I was in my truest home, the place where I belong. I noticed that Hillary was now by my side. I laughed and said, “We found our home.”
In that moment, I woke up from the dream and wondered whether we were moving to Brazil, until I realized we had been spiritually traveling in First Creation. I then tried to analyze why my skin had spots on it in the dream. Was something wrong with me? I then remembered that I used to be known as the “leopard” to healers in southern Africa—it was my sangoma name. I had forgotten that name and that truth about myself. In the dream we learned that when José saw who I was, he also noticed who he was called to become. More importantly, he was able to hear spiritual instruction. In all this changing, João arrived to remind us that performing the Lord’s Prayer with all your heart is the only medicine, compass, and energy needed to carry on. Saying the prayer like João brought us home.
In the background, as I lied awake, I could hear the old gospel song, “Precious Lord.” I then remembered I had sung it before going to sleep:
Precious Lord, take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn
Through the storm, through the night
Lead me on through the light
Take my hand, precious Lord
And lead me home.
Part Two
A Guild member, trying to follow the instruction offered by João to pray the Lord’s Prayer, wrote us: “I want to learn and pray the Lord’s Prayer more. But I still get stuck at the ‘Lead us not into temptation’ part. Is there a better version of the prayer I could use?”
We responded: The easy answer is to convert the word “temptation” to something that evokes less Pavlovian salivation and hopefully leads to more salvation from locked-in interpretation. For example:
“Lead us not into explanation . . .
“Lead us not into soulless recitation . . .
“Lead us not into refrigeration. . .
“Lead us not into the goo and pooh with you . . .
Or experiment with oddly pronouncing “temptation” (tem-tah-shee-oon). Or start to ponder how “temptation” is almost the word “temperature.” Then interrupt that thought and say out loud, “I decree that it is about the right degree.” Then say “Lead us not into . . . (instead of saying the word, substitute three hand claps). Do a cha, cha, cha along with the clapping to be more rhythmically aligned and inclined.
Word changes or complete re-translations, while they have their fun and pun contribution, may miss the opportunity to make a holy room change rather than stay in the same room and only alter its parts. Changing the words to please the mind, after all, only maintains the habit of getting hung up over preferences. Remember that getting over your mind’s preferences is a very Buddhist instruction, and a spoonful of Buddha may open your mind enough to help the Jesus medicine go down.
Spiritual cooking is not primarily about meaning, interpretation, and explanation. It aims to rise above the words where tones and rhythms make you a song-and-dance hoofer rather than an ideological looker. Let’s get that ideo-log out of the eye. Easier said than done. In fact, better not said and preferably undone through expressive tinkering until the mind is tripped and the heart rises.
One way to step into a room change is to imagine you are seeking serious help from the great Brazilian healer from whom this instruction came. You are desperate and he tells you to pray the Lord’s Prayer in a soulful manner and that this will provide the cure. In his room it is less likely you would be fussy over words, phrases, and meanings. If you really needed help you would trust the healer’s instruction. If he told you to memorize and recite the prayer in Portuguese you would do it, even though you would not know what the words meant.
Try stepping into the visionary dream before saying the prayer. Go ahead and change the word that has a stinky habitual association for you. Then say the word differently. Or say it in Portuguese or French or Chinese or Swahili. Then be an actor asked to convince an audience that you feel the words, knowing that you must tap into a real emotion to pull this off. Search for the right tone, rhythm, and movement to catch the right feeling rather than remain stuck in dictionaries, translations, definitions, explanations, commentaries, ideologies, and word preferences.
Sometimes Brad finds that he spontaneously replaces the word “evil” with “boll weevil.” We don’t know why but it makes us giggle and that helps us wiggle and rise above theological contemplation in search of ecstatic ignition.
Our Dada and Mama which art and dart in heaven, shallow be our name games but hallowed be your heart flames. . . Lead us not into the entangled knots of preferential knowing but deliver us from the sticky bowl of weevil that prevents our upheaval and the retrieval of our relations with tone, beat, and movement heat . . .
Next, pray the Lord’s Prayer in its classic form to please João because that will strengthen his rope to God, and you can lean on that relationship with full certainty. Finally, it may help to know that the Kalahari Bushmen see two sides of God—one is the steadfast, all-loving side of the Creator and the other is the changing trickster side mediated through the mind and language. An elder Bushman professor would regard “Lead me not into temptation” as asking God to not let the trickster side mess with her too much.
-Hillary and Brad May 13, 2022.