Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [77]
But as he talked, his words flowed in a torrent of power and passion. I began to wonder if he was one of them, one of those people who fell on the floor. I asked him how he came to be at the Toronto Blessing. That is when he told me about his vision.
Scott first heard about the Toronto church in 1996, two years after the Holy Laughter had started there. He was skeptical.
“I’d seen enough of this kind of thing in American religion,” he told me. “I did not want one more emotional experience. I was really put off. But enough people were asking me about it that I thought,Well, I should at least check it out.”
Scott caught up with the Toronto pastor, John Arnott, at a church conference in New Orleans. At the end of the day, Arnott prayed for him.
“And when he did, I fell to the ground. And I felt waves of the Spirit flow through my body, from my hands to my feet, and back to my hands. Then the most unusual thing happened.”
Scott paused, embarrassed, but the spigot had been opened and the story would not be stopped. He had a vision, he explained, that he was in Israel, overlooking the Judean desert.
“And I began to run on the floor. I’m on my back, and I began to run. I’m pumping my arms and legs, and I’m running from Jericho to Jerusalem. I did this for one and a half hours. And the other pastors in the room began to cheer me on. I saw them on the road in my vision. It was like the New York Marathon, people cheering, ‘Run the race! Run the race! Run the race!’ I ran as hard as I could past the Mount of Olives. I ran through the Garden of Gethsemane, through the Kidron Valley, and up the other side to what is the Eastern Gate of the Temple. It’s presently walled shut, but there it was open. There was a finish line across it, and Jesus stood on the other side of the line with His arms outstretched, and I fell across the line into His arms and He just grabbed me and held me, laughing, holding on to me.
“At that point,” Scott said,“I had stopped running on the floor, and I felt the Lord say something to me that surprised me. He said, ‘I want you to go with them, with my faithful servants.’ But in my heart, I thought I didn’t belong with them. For years, despite having a Ph.D. in the New Testament, despite teaching at a university, despite being a senior pastor of a pretty good-sized Methodist church, I didn’t feel I measured up. And so I cried on the floor. I said, ‘No, I do not belong with them. I do not.’
“And the Lord looked at me, with such intensity, and He said very firmly,‘You go with them.’ And when He did, there was this indescribable love, it was beyond words, and it began to fill me. All that low self-esteem, all that sense of not being valued, began to melt in this love.”
Scott paused to steady his voice.
“The change has been dramatic. I can’t say I’m a perfect man as a result of this, or that every day I walk on cloud nine, but I will tell you this: Because of that, I know how much I’m loved by God. And when life gets hard—and life does get hard—God’s love is there to see me through.”
After his mystical marathon, Scott said he was horrified that he had made himself such a spectacle. But the next day, he said,“People would ask, ‘Why would you have an experience like that and not me?’ And I didn’t have an answer to that one.”
I think I do. Scott McDermott is a spiritual virtuoso.
Scanning the Mystical Moment
I thought about Scott McDermott often over the next three years, because he possessed an uncommon combination of qualities: the polished intelligence of a scholar and the all-consuming spirituality of a mystic. What was more, Scott practiced the presence of God, and his long, daily prayers seemed to give him access to another reality.
When I read