Summoning the supernatural
No, you don’t control it
I don’t know what your interface with the supernatural is. By ‘supernatural’ I mean anything you hold to be beyond nature, whether in some animist spiritual sense or a developed doctrine of holiness, or something in between, maybe nuanced and detailed, or maybe left alone as unknowable. Do you talk about Spirit? Do you have a scientific sense of dead people leaving traces of themselves in the air? Are angels all around you? Do you talk with Jesus? It can be anything. It all counts.
Here’s something interesting about all of them. This goes for the shaggy people hunting ghosts on YouTube and for those of us in formal ministry, with seminary behind us and everything, and also everyone else. It has to do with the commonalities of summoning the supernatural (or trying to) and interacting with it. Several things appear, to me at least, to be constant among all of them.
1. You don’t know what’s going to happen.
2. If something does happen, it won’t arrive on time.
3. When it happens, it will come when you don’t expect it.
4. When it happens, it will involve something you hadn’t been thinking about. It will come from some quarter you hadn’t considered, or couldn’t have expected.
5. Its significance will not be clear. You’ll spend a lot of time unpacking it retrospectively, and wondering what just happened.
6. It will always destabilise. Things will be different for it.
If you go to God, however you conceive of that, or if you summon familiar spirits, however you conceive of those, they will not do what you tell them to. What they will do, they’ll do in their own time, not yours. Really, they’ll turn out to have been acting all along, just not in ways you’d been aware of.