The Phenomena of the Interceding Celestial Christ

or, Your own personal Jesus

I’m starting this post off with an experience of the phenomena of Jesus interceding in an earthly event which had a profound effect upon my own life. It happened just after my birth. My mother had a caesarean, and afterward developed a very high fever, over 104, likely due to some infection incurred during the operation. The nursing staff was instructed to give her cold compresses on the half hour until the fever came down, but in the shift change, that information was somehow lost. So, overnight, she wasn’t visited by any nurses.

She told me this story late in her life, I was around fifty years old, and told it to me in confidence, since she wasn’t at all demonstrative as to her beliefs. She’s no longer alive, and I feel it’s all right to tell it.

As she told it, she was in the midst of a furtive night of half sleep, in a fever, falling off and waking. At some point, a figure appeared at the end of her bed. A vision. It was Jesus. As soon as he appeared, she began to feel calmer. He raised his arms in classic Jesus style, and said, “Peace be with you.” Immediately, she felt a wave of relief, and her fever broke. She soon fell asleep, peacefully.

In the morning the doctor saw the nurse’s charts and came rushing into her room, expecting the worst. She was awake, calm, had no fever. The doctor was baffled and told her it was miracle she survived the night. She didn’t say anything about her vision to him.

I asked her what Jesus looked like, and she said exactly like the picture of Jesus in the Catholic Bible, white robes, white skin, blue eyes, long light brown hair and beard.

She said the thing that made her sure it was Jesus were the words he used, “Peace be with you.” In the Catholic translation of the Bible, it was rendered “Peace be to you,” which my mother, who wrote and was particular about words, thought was incorrect. The editor in her always thought it ought to be “Peace be with you.”

I took away two things from this. One - that something transcendent had happened to her. And two - however that occurred, it wasn’t coming from the historical figure we know as Jesus, but rather, some energy, both within and without her, made a healing connection, which she experienced and filtered as the familiar figure of Jesus. She didn’t see a dark-haired Judean speaking Aramaic. She saw what she knew. And heard what she wanted to hear - Jesus giving her the translation of the Bible that fit her preference.

But what’s the difference? Why couldn’t it have been the celestial Christ revealing himself to her in a form she could understand? Throwing her the personal bone of an edited phrase?

In a way, it was.

Joseph Campbell talked about the masks of god, the many portals humans have used over history to probe into the one universal, transcendent substance, whatever that is. Atheists and naturalist science will disavow this essential idea, but countless mystics, poets, artists, philosophers and thinkers throughout history can’t all be delusional. To call such metaphysics the dismissive ‘woo’ is a rather odd form of childish scientific fundamentalism, quite non-scientific in its method, closing the mind to what has undoubtedly been a hugely significant part of the entire human experience. The development of relatively recent scientific rationality betrays within it an arrogant uncurrent, another set of church-like dogmas, once again attempting to overwrite inquiry with its pronouncements from on high.

Something is there. Like dark matter, we can’t see it, but we can definitely see its effects. We can’t see the thing called love either, it emerges out of nowhere, is 100% anecdotal in the eyes of the scientific method (there are hormones and pheromones and such talked about, but that naturalist reduction of the experience of love to mere chemical reactions has to be said to be a crude, absurdly mechanical rendering of what people in love actually feel) and yet it’s been attested to in song, poetry, letters, prose, paintings, dance, and even architecture - the Taj Mahal was commissioned by Shah Jahan as a tomb in memory of his beloved wife.

So what is the great unseen thing? I’m sure as hell not going to pretend to know. As to whatever came to visit my mother that night, though, I am completely grateful. Had she died, my life and my family’s life would have been forever changed. I never would have met her, and she shaped my life in many ways. I personally would grown up in the shadow of, “Your mother died when you were born.” The unsaid thing being, “She died because of you.” Not fun to live with.

So. Where are we in this discussion? People have transcendent experiences. They chalk them up to many different things - Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, the immersion into nature, solitude, meditation, prayer. And things happen.

That’s all I know. Call it what you will, it’s all good. The exception, of course, is being guided by voices to do something harmful or crazy. That’s a whole other story.

People have profound experiences outside of the ordinary realm. It would be a short-sighted mistake to use your own frame of belief to call another’s experience false. They’re the one who experienced it, after all.