The title on the charismatic news site caught my eye, as it would yours: “Why Bill Johnson Didn’t Immediately Shut Down Grave Sucking.” The article explained that grave sucking (also called “grave soaking”), “is the process by which someone lays on the grave of a deceased Christian in order to absorb their mantle or anointing.”
The practice had been “sweeping through charismatic circles,” apparently mostly among young seminarians, and some of the movement’s elders didn’t like it. “Many charismatics want shortcuts to the anointing and desire results from an instant microwave experience or a one-time event,” said one. “Instead of wasting their time traveling to ‘grave suck,’ they should discipline themselves to seek God, pore over his word and dig down deep in his presence.”
My first reaction, which I’m guessing many of you share, was to roll my eyes. Where in Scripture do these Bible Christians find any possible justification for lying on a grave as a quick and easy way to gain special powers as a minister?
But there’s a problem with rolling your eyes.
Catholicism has its own versions of this kind of thing, and they probably don’t seem very different to a religious outsider. Dust eating, for example.
Superstition or act of faith?
Lucile Hasley was a popular Catholic writer in the late 1940s and ’50s. She published her articles, some of them very funny, in major Catholic magazines and books, the first with the great title, “Reproachfully Yours.” A convert from the Presbyterian church, one of the more formal of the mainline Protestant bodies, she lived in South Bend, Indiana, and was married to a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
In 1948, Hasley was diagnosed with an incurable disease and “faced much suffering and a messy death.” She asked many people for prayers, including the English spiritual writer Caryll Houselander, with whom she’d been corresponding. (The exchange can be read in “The Letters of Caryll Houselander.“)
On the morning she was going for an important examination to find out how far her disease had developed, Hasley got in the mail a packet of dust from Blessed (now St.) Martin de Porres‘ grave, apparently with the instruction to eat it. She had not been the kind of person to do this. I can’t think of anything less Presbyterian than eating the dust from a Catholic saint’s grave.
“Well now,” she wrote Houselander (the ellipses are hers), “two months ago I wouldn’t have swallowed the dust from anyone’s grave but … you know … fear and helplessness have a way of dispelling sophistication. So, at noon, I swallowed the dust (and my pride).”
An embarrassing miracle
She was healed, with one of her doctors claiming “supernatural intervention.” Her priests, her husband (who had grown up Catholic), and her Catholic friends accepted the miracle “without batting a theological eye,” but the dust eating scandalized her two best friends. I think they were Protestant.
“They had the faith to pray for me, but not to accept it, once granted,” she wrote. “I scandalized them by swallowing that dust. It embarrasses them; they prefer not to notice it.” They thought it “very superstitious.”
Houselander wrote that she would have happily swallowed a whole bucket of dust for her, as long as she could mix it with water or gin. “How can anyone take scandal over the dust, since Our Lord mixed up clay and spittle to put on the eyes of the blind man he cured?” she asked.
“Over and over again He asked for, or made use of, some very small, humble, seemingly absurd and inadequate thing to work a miracle. That was His choice: why, since God doesn’t change, should it be any different now?”
What we both know
Grave sucking, dust eating — it’s hard to see the difference. The secular person couldn’t. This suggests three things, I think.
First, we should avoid making fun of our coreligionists’ weirdness. The secular person, who puts all Christians in the same category (“religious and wrong”) will only think of us as hypocrites and bullies, making fun of the poor Pentecostals for doing the same thing we do. They won’t be saying, “See how those Christians love one another.”
Second, we have something important in common with the Pentecostals that we don’t with the mainline Protestant bodies: the belief that God uses matter in ways — weird ways — we don’t expect. They’re the only ones who’ll understand what Lucile Hasley did and why her fellow Catholics didn’t bat an eye.Third, we need the Church’s guidance — mediated through tradition and other Catholics — in telling the difference between God’s unusual ways of acting and plain weirdness. To know, for example, that we may eat dust but shouldn’t suck graves.
