“Theologians have always said that Jesus is divine and human. He lived fully on this earth in the community of his friends and family, but he also never lost contact with his heavenly father. He was shamanic, skilled at being both earthy and visionary. He could be profoundly involved with his fellow humans and yet also metamorphose and be in the company of his visionary forebears.”
~Thomas Moore Writing in the Sand; Jesus and the Soul of the Gospels
Jesus was a shaman, a spirit person, who, through his mystical experiences, deeply understood that the energy of spirit or God exists within our own beings. The key to accessing this energy is to be open to renewal, by changing our perceptions of who we think we are, and the way we look at the world, so that we can become agents of healing and compassion for ourselves and all those we encounter.
I rejected the Jesus of my childhood because I was uncomfortable with how the Catholic and Greek churches presented him. But rejecting Jesus and the religions of my childhood left me yearning and searching for a God or spirituality resonating with my intuitive sense that there was more to life than meets the eye.
My journey to find hope and healing led me into various religious and spiritual practices. Somewhere on the journey I studied with Michael Harner, founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. I remember feeling cold and skeptical while lying on the basement floor of the Congregational Church in Harvard Square, a bandana tied around my eyes, nervous and excited. I was going on my first shamanic journey, a process of moving into non-ordinary reality, beyond time and space, for healing and knowledge. We had been instructed to take a journey to the upper world of spirits with a question for a guide we would meet. Michael started drumming, the journey began. I went through many levels in the upper world, meeting interesting spirits and teachers, including my grandmother who had died a few years back. None of them said they were my guide. I was growing weary thinking I would not get my question answered.
I immediately knew he was my guide. He answered my question with a riddle. We communicated telepathically; he laughed with me, and flew with me through the atmosphere, showing me places on the earth where I would receive great teachings.
I had come full circle to Jesus, not to the Jesus of the church, or even Christianity, but Jesus the shaman. Jesus is the guide who takes me into the tomb of the soul, who moves between worlds, a spirit who is not bound by time or space, earth, or body. The Jesus I now know is not a purist or a perfectionist. He does not care about morals or dogma, rules or religion. The Jesus I know invites me to see myself and the world from a different perspective.
I realized all those years ago that my first step towards seeing things differently began with my seeing Jesus differently. But I kept my ideas to myself, fearing people would see me as odd thinking Jesus was a shaman. Then I went to seminary where I studied the Gospels and the historical Jesus. I noticed that so many of the stories about Jesus involved shamanic activity. The Gospels describe Jesus as a folk healer and miracle worker, casting out demons from the sick, resurrecting the dead, turning water into wine, and parting the sea, all of which are commonly found in legends concerning shamans. Jesus engaged in many shamanic practices: healing, soul retrievals, psychopomp, and apocalyptic vision. He engages in fasting, praying, vision quests, talking to angel guides, and rituals.
I discovered that anthropologists linked ancient Siberian legends to the stories of Jesus: legends like walking on the water, feeding the starving, and manipulating the weather.
My Hebrew Bible professor turned me on to Stevan Davies and Marcus Borg, two biblical scholars who see Jesus as a shaman. Davies claims that if we look at Jesus as a spirit-possessed prophet and healer who spoke in the voice of the spirit of God, then the Gospels make more sense. Borg argued that Jesus was a spirit filled person, in the manner of shamans, the prophets, and the Buddha, acted on special insights into the primordial tradition which is accessible through mystical experience.
If we look at Jesus’s disciples, they engaged in healing, predicted the future, entered dream states and trances, and took journeys to other realms.
I am again lying on a cold floor with my eyes closed, once again in Harvard Square, but twenty years later while in seminary. I am in a prayer class, in the beautiful chapel at the Episcopal Divinity School. I had recently endured a lot of dental work, resulting in constant pain deep in my jaw. My dentist said everything was fine. The pain had been with me for months. The professor was guiding us in Lectio Divina, a contemplative prayer practice using scripture. I meditated on Jesus’s words, allowing myself to surrender. Within minutes, I felt a warm light filling my body, washing all the pain away. Tears of joy rolled down my face. The pain never returned. I cannot recall the words from the gospel that I was using. It doesn’t matter. I went into the tomb of my soul, encountered my suffering, and it disappeared.
Jesus invites us into the womb of our soul to find what is alive in us, both the conscious and the unconscious, to discover what is hidden.
What if you asked Jesus, the shaman, to assist you? To transform your perception, making room for hope and healing? Call upon him now in your own way. And if Jesus is not your teacher or guide, call upon some other energy that is beyond you … the Buddha, Mohammed, Mary, your higher self, the natural, an ancestor, the stars.
What in your life do you need to see differently? What reality are you living in that is creating suffering, or confusion, or preventing you from living fully? Would you like to shift the way you see your life? Can you call upon Jesus the shaman for help?
Jesus asks me to cultivate a deep respect for people who are not in my circles, and whom society rejects. He is asking me to do everything possible to deal effectively with demonic urges in me and in society. He is asking me to play the role of healer in every situation. He is asking me to stay awake and not to fall into the unconsciousness of these times. If Jesus was a shaman, then the resurrection makes sense, because he returned to the world as a spirit guide for people who could see.
Articles about Shamanism and Christina’s life experience
