• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It makes sense that those epiphanies physically alter the brain as well as one’s life. After all, being bitten by a dog, or memorizing 2 + 2 = 4, lays down permanent tracks in the brain. What might a moment with God do?

The brain of someone suffering with temporal lobe epilepsy is like a stallion that has not yet been broken and trained. It becomes too activated, it spooks too easily, and for those people, their spiritual experiences are wild, ragged, scary things, galloping through a forest with low-hanging limbs. For them, nothing but a shot of tranquilizer or an operation will calm down their wild lobes—and then, often but not always, the religious experiences disappear.

And yet I know people who connect with this “Other” and visit another reality without the drama of disease or the aid of drugs. These are the horse whisperers: they have trained their brains through years of meditation, and their restraining hand turns the wild stallion into an Olympic jumper or a Secretariat. These people are spiritual virtuosos, and none is more winning than Scott McDermott.

CHAPTER 8

Spiritual Virtuosos

NOT OFTEN DO MAGAZINE ARTICLES rob me of sleep. But the Newsweek cover story of May 7, 2001, gave me insomnia for a week. The article discussed “neurotheology,” the neuroscience of spirituality—in this case, the brain activity of Buddhist and Catholic meditators when they dived deep into meditation. These experiments turned a corner in the study of spirituality. No longer would neurologists be reduced to merely extrapolating about spiritual experience from what they knew of abnormal conditions like epilepsy and psychedelic drug trips. They had moved into the realm of clinical, replicable research on spiritual events. And their subjects would not be mere mortals but spiritual Olympians, the Michael Jordans of meditation. I was hankering to get my hands into this research. It would take me another six years, but in June 2007, I would watch as a scanner took snapshots of my friend’s brain while he communed with God.

I met Scott McDermott on January 20, 2004. We were sitting in a quiet room at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship Church. We could hear the quiet brrrr of hundreds of people speaking in tongues in the sanctuary below us. I was there on assignment for NPR to understand this boisterous brand of mysticism. Scott was ready to explain it to me.

Ten years earlier, the story went, the Holy Spirit had “fallen” on the worshippers during a Sunday-evening service. People began swooning and falling to the floor, where they remained pinned like upturned beetles for hours at a time. They began speaking in tongues, barking like dogs, and, most of all, laughing—laughing hysterically, hour after hour, sometimes for days. It would later be dubbed “Holy Laughter,” and the phenomenon named the “Toronto Blessing.”

I arrived for the tenth anniversary, hoping to witness the “blessing” in action. I was not disappointed. During the evening service, people in the audience began to chuckle, one or two at first; then the laughter rippled across the crowd like a squall across a lake. People fell at random, weeping piteously or laughing maniacally. I recorded people barking like dogs and clucking like chickens. I even heard a rooster or two. At the end of the service, people lined up to be blessed by a team of pastors. One pastor would touch a person’s head, while another pastor stood behind to catch the worshipper as he toppled backward. They worked methodically, these anointed of the Lord, like woodsmen felling trees, one by one, row by row. I left well past midnight, with hundreds of people still sprawled on the floor, quietly clucking or barking.

At eleven the next morning, I sat down with Scott McDermott. A self-effacing man of slight build, his blond hair parted in the middle, Scott was the senior pastor of Washington Crossing United Methodist Church in Pennsylvania (about an hour north of Philadelphia). I expected him