The effects that I was witnessing from the Intentions of the Week could not have been placebo effects. There were babies, fetuses, even, who were getting healed. There were people who were unconscious or weren’t told they were the object of intention. Baby Isabella was born in Spokane, Washington, at twenty-four weeks’ gestation weighing just one pound four ounces with intestines detached, a strep infection in her stomach, and weak lungs. Two days after the doctors operated on her intestines in an attempt to connect them, she developed an infection, and they had to operate on her lungs for a second time. She was placed on a number of different antibiotics, and a specialist was brought in, who then determined her infection was antibiotic resistant. The doctors attached a colostomy bag. Her case looked almost hopeless.
Her mother reached out to us to nominate her baby for an Intention of the Week. Seven days after we sent our intention, Isabella had another operation and came through amazingly well. Although the doctors had been concerned that the strep infection had returned and they might have to operate again, to their astonishment, her blood levels, the cause of the alarm, quickly reverted to normal. She began developing normally and after eight months was discharged, a totally healthy child. Her mother called it a “miracle.”
In May 2009 Jeuline, from Gothenburg, Sweden, was due to give birth, but the baby boy she was carrying was diagnosed with a rare and severe heart defect that was certain to affect the function of his heart and lungs. The doctors were fearful that the baby would not be able to breathe on his own when born because his lungs were likely to be damaged. And even if he was able to breathe, he’d need to be strong enough to go through at least three different operations on the blood vessels of his heart.
Before her due date, Jeuline asked to be put into the Intention of the Week circle. After our group intention her son was born in far better shape than doctors had predicted. They were amazed that he was able to breathe unassisted and his oxygen saturation rose after breastfeeding, since the reverse usually happens in children with heart problems. He continued to gain weight and remained healthy for his operation two and a half months later and afterward continued to thrive.
“Doctors are surprised at how healthy he is and looks,” his mother wrote us at the time. “He has been healthier than other heart kids in a similar situation. A very content, calm, and happy little guy.”
There was a teenage runaway who was reunited with her parents. Juracy from Mexico wrote us about her sixteen-year-old daughter, who had run away from home. She was failing math, spending all her free time at parties that didn’t break up until the early hours of the morning, and socializing with friends her mother disapproved of. Our community sent an intention for the daughter and her mother to be more loving, to communicate more honestly, and to respect each other’s differences. After several weeks I received an effusive note from Juracy reporting that her daughter had come home three weeks after the intentions started and they’d begun having honest, heartfelt talks. The daughter also changed her social media pages, which had been very dark and defiant, to powder pink.
I didn’t know what we were witnessing here—a healing success or pure coincidence. The fact that the process was working on a baby—and even a fetus—and also people who were unconscious or ignorant that any effort was being conducted on their behalf tended to rule out an expectation effect. Did this have anything to do with some sort of amplified power of group intention?
I’m just reporting on this.
I don’t pretend to understand what “this” is.
I’m learning with you.
For years, these were my standard disclaimers during the Power of Eight workshops, my get-out-of-jail-for-free card. I am not a healer. I’m just the journalist here. After witnessing so many miraculous changes in people’s lives, for a while I even became indifferent. Ho-hum. Another miraculous healing. Big deal.
At the same time I became obsessed with trying to find a precedent for these collective healing effects. Somebody had to have thought of this before me. Certainly prayer circles are now an integral part of most modern Christian churches. But my Power of Eight and Intention of the Week groups, in some instances, were producing immediate healings. What was it about a group of people thinking a single thought at the same time that was producing such dramatic effects? This ritual must have been discovered and employed in an earlier civilization.
I began casting around for ancient circles used for healing, and began with the most famous circle of them all: Stonehenge, the giant prehistoric ring of standing stones in Salisbury Plain in England.
Archaeologists are still mystified by the actual purpose of Stonehenge and what would compel a Neolithic civilization to transplant eighty-two Carn Menyn bluestones some 250 km from the Preseli Mountains of southwest Wales to their present location in Salisbury Plain, each of the stones, weighing up to three tons, requiring up to thirty men carrying or pulling them along on leather ropes, transferring them to boats that sailed up the River Avon and eventually the Salisbury Avon for their final journey. Many researchers still take the lead from Stonehenge’s first archaeologist William Stukeley, who concluded that the Mesolithic structure was a place of worship; as he wrote in the early 1720s: “When you enter the building and cast your eyes around, upon the yawning ruins, you are struck into an exstatic [sic] reverie, which none can describe.” Others were convinced that the stone circle acts as enormous calendar, as the positions of the stones allow for the precise identification of the summer and winter solstices, which would have been essential for agricultural planting and harvest at a time when no other means of marking the seasons existed.
But in the month before our first workshop, as I subsequently discovered, Professor Timothy Darvill and Professor Geoff Wainwright, two of Britain’s top archaeologists, had broken ranks with colleagues after beginning a three-year excavation project and putting their findings together with the unduly large number of bones that had been excavated previously, showing evidence of some sort of traumatic injury.
“The whole purpose of Stonehenge is that it was a prehistoric Lourdes,” Wainwright said. “People came here to be made well.”
“Initially it seems to have been a place for the dead with cremations and memorials,” added Darvill, “but after about 2300 BC the emphasis changes, and it is a focus for the living, a place where specialist healers and the health-care professionals of their age looked after the bodies and souls of the sick and infirm.”
Darvill and Wainwright focused upon the stones themselves and the ancient belief that they were imbued with mystical healing powers, largely from the springs and wells in Wales that had poured over them. But I wondered about the power of their arrangement. Their placement had been no accident. The avenue was aligned with the midsummer sunrise, the blue stones forming a circle within what is now a horseshoe arrangement of two rings of stones.
Archaeologists have discovered patches of soil suggesting there may once have been other stones present. Perhaps the healing was thought to be carried out not just by the stones but also by the placement of healers in a circle, with the circle itself meant to have its own healing power. As there are hundreds of ancient stone and timber circles all around Britain, Darvill doesn’t doubt that circles played an important part of healing, but he’s seen no evidence to prove that the people standing in the circle were as integral to the healing process as the stones themselves.
Throughout the ages, small circles of people have held a special significance in many cultures and religions, from pagan Wicca to mystical Christianity. The Arthurian legend of the Round Table and the medieval brotherhood of the Rosicrucians were said to have incorporated both Arthurian practices and those of the ancient Essenes, the early mystic sect of ascetics reputed to have educated Jesus.
I contacted Klaas-Jan Bakker, the grand master emeritus of the Rosicrucian order AMORC, who explained that the Rosicrucians believe that they employ healing methods first used by the Essenes and taught to Jesus. The closest parallel to my Power of Eight circles was the Council of Solace, members of which are chosen specifically for healing individuals. Members of the council would usually connect with an ill person to ensure he or she is receptive, then send healing thoughts at specified times of the day by getting into a focused mental state and visualizing the person to be healed. In addition to individual healings, at noon every day, in all Rosicrucian Temples a ritualistic Council of Solace ceremony takes place, in which Rosicrucians are to send a positive healing intention for those in need and for the planet. A number of other practices offered some parallels with the psychic internet I’d discovered in our experiments and circles.
As the Rosicrucians claimed to have inherited their practices from those of mystical Christianity, I started exploring more traditional religious uses of the circle.
Many books of the Bible, such as Acts, Ezra, and Jonah, talk of the power of group prayer to conjure up divine guidance and protection and to prevent disaster, and St. Teresa de Ávila allegedly pioneered the use of small prayer groups in the Catholic church. Muslims make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, where they form concentric circles to pray around the Kaaba, Islam’s holy center. In Judaism, all synagogues make use of minyans, a group of at least ten (and men, in the case of orthodox churches), one function of which is to pray together for the healing of a member of the congregation. When congregation members recite the Jewish thanksgiving prayer Birkat HaGomel to give thanks for surviving a traumatic experience or life-threatening illness, a minyan must be present. “Minyan” comes from the Hebrew word maneh, which is related to the Aramaic word for “mene,” or number, connoting a need for a certain critical mass of people. Clearly, prayer groups had been extensively used in most religions.
When studying uses of group prayer in Christianity, I stumbled across an old sermon by the nineteenth-century British Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon discussing the meaning of certain passages in Acts, the narrative of how the apostles built the early Christian church. Spurgeon focused on Acts 1:12–14, which relates the story of how the twelve apostles of Christ essentially carried out their first prayer meeting. They’d returned from a journey near the Mount of Olives, close to the old city of Jerusalem, and headed to an upper room (some religious historians believe that room to be the Cenacle on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the place of the Last Supper), where they all engaged in prayer.
Many biblical scholars conclude that the New Testament was written in Hellenic Greek, and, according to Spurgeon, Saint Luke, a Hellenic physician and reputed author of Acts who may have been present during some of the events, chose to use the Greek word “homothumadon” to describe their method of group prayer.
Homothumadon is mentioned twelve times in the Bible, mainly in Acts, always to describe the nature of the apostles’ prayer. The Authorized King James version of the Bible translates homothumadon with the anemic phrase “with one accord,” but Spurgeon maintains that homothumadon, an adverb, is in fact a musical term, which means “striking the same notes together.” Elsewhere it has been translated to mean “with one mind and with one passion,” and Spurgeon takes it to mean that the apostles prayed “unanimously, harmoniously, and continuously.”
Even that latter definition does not convey the depth of the original, I discovered when I looked up the definition of homothumadon. The Greek word itself is a compound of two words: homou, which literally translates as “in unison” or “together at the same place at the same time,” and thumous, which means “outburst of passion” or even “rush along,” and is often meant to convey intensity of some sort: “getting heated up, breathing violently,” even wrath. When combined, the two words evoke the musical image of, say, a Beethoven symphony, of notes that race passionately along in different ways but blend in pitch and tone to perfect harmony, building to a climactic finish. The word emphasizes that apostles were to pray as a passionate unity, with a single voice. “Here is an overlooked secret of the early church,” Spurgeon notes. “Over and over again Luke stresses that what they did, they did together. All of them. United and unanimous.”
According to Spurgeon, Jesus considered prayer a communal act. He wanted his apostles to pray together, with the same thoughts and words—like an intention stated together—and many other historical biblical scholars have concurred with him. The nineteenth-century American Presbyterian pastor and biblical scholar Albert Barnes said homothumadon emphasizes that the apostles were operating “with one mind. The word denotes the entire harmony of their views and feelings. There were no schisms, no divided interests, no discordant purposes.”
Praying in this manner may have even brought the apostles closer together, with a sense of indivisibility; in both life and in their prayer, the apostles were “knit by a bond stronger than death,” according to the nineteenth-century biblical commentators Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown. Jesus may have suggested this, knowing that the apostles were about to face a huge struggle in mounting essentially a religious revolution. Seventeenth-century English nonconformist theologian Matthew Poole believed the use of the word homothumadon signals their sense of stalwart unity in the face of difficulty, leading to a “great resolution, notwithstanding all opposition and contradiction they met with,” which they no doubt faced when setting up the early church.
Many of the church’s scholars are convinced that Jesus specifically used this kind of small-group prayer as a blueprint to assist the apostles in teaching members of the early church in the preferred new way to pray, and as a sign of Christian fellowship. British clergyman, dean of Canterbury, and archdeacon of Westminster Frederic William Farrar suggests that Jesus deliberately taught them to pray in this manner to have them move away from “mere individual supplication:
“The disciples had long before made the request ‘Lord, teach us to pray’ (Luke 11:1), and during the three years of association with Jesus, the form given them as an example may very well have grown into the proportions suited for general worship.”
This would suggest that the plan was for the members of the fledgling church to pray as a group, of one mind and heart. More recently, Peter Pett, a retired Baptist minister and university lecturer, argued that this technique of praying as a passionate unity was meant to be used by the entire church congregation.
“The total unity of the infant church is emphasised. Both men and women disciples share an equality not usually known outside Christian circles. They pray together as one. Most of the actual praying probably mainly took place in the Temple where they gathered daily with other disciples of Jesus” (Luke 24:53).
Presbyterian minister and former US Senate chaplain Lloyd John Ogilvie believes that the new Christian “movement” was meant to make use of a new type of communal prayer. “In their early goal to build the church, they devoted themselves to prayer together. More than physical proximity, this meant a spiritual unity.”
Prayer, writes Ogilvie, is meant to be carried out in relationship:
If we want power from the Holy Spirit as individuals, we need to do a relational inventory: Everyone forgiven? Any restitutions to be done? Any need to communicate healing to anyone? As congregations we cannot be empowered until we are of one mind and heart, until we love each other as Christ has loved us, and until we heal all broken relationships.
Some scholars maintain that the Gospels and Acts of the Bible were originally written in Aramaic, Jesus’s native tongue. If so, one word that appears is kahda, an adverb that means both “together” and “at the same time.”
Small prayer circles had been an essential part of the early formation of the Christian church. In fact, small intention circles may have been employed, if not invented, by Jesus Christ.
Many of the references in the Bible about the apostles being “of one accord” mention an act of group healing. In Luke (9:1), Jesus gave his apostles “power and authority . . . to cure diseases” and sent them on their first missionary journey together from village to village in Galilee “to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick,” and Saint Matthew also noted that when sending the apostles forth to “the lost sheep of the House of Israel,” they were to “heal the sick.” In Acts, a “multitude out of the cities” traveled to Jerusalem “bringing sick folks,” and “they were healed every one.” In his commentary, the eighteenth-century British Methodist biblical scholar Adam Clarke also noted about homothumadon: “When any assembly of God’s people meet in the same spirit they may expect every blessing they need.”
I thought about the words of Clarke, who once wrote this about homothumadon:
This word is very expressive: it signifies that all their minds, affections, desires, and wishes, were concentrated in one object, every man having the same end in view; and, having but one desire, they had but one prayer to God, and every heart uttered it. There was no person uninterested—none unconcerned—none lukewarm; all were in earnest; and the Spirit of God came down to meet their united faith and prayer.
When their thoughts were focused and concentrated and communal.
It may be that homothumadon is the state of mind necessary for a healing intention circle that is carried out in Christian churches as a practice without a full understanding of its special power. All this suggests that Jesus understood the power of group prayer and was passing the idea of it on to his disciples. Or maybe, as I believe, he was just trying to say that God is within every one of us, but that power gets amplified in a group.
I looked up the biblical Greek word ekklésia, which appears in the Bible some 115 times but is apparently mistranslated in the King James version as “church.” A closer translation is a “called-out assembly or congregation of persons who meet with a specific purpose—a group with a unified purpose, united into one body.” Church in those ancient times did not mean the building itself or even a vast organization, but just a small assembly, like the apostles, who were “called out” to meet and pray as a passionate unity.
Jesus’s original idea of a “church” may have been something akin to the Power of Twelve. Start with the twelve, learn how to pray together, then spread the word. In an early chapter of Acts, the twelve apostles, after their own prayers together, then pray with a group of 120, which includes Jesus’s mother, Mary, and his brothers, and slowly gathers adherents, teaching them to do the same.
In fact, in that same chapter of Acts (1:15–26), the first activity of the apostles, after the Resurrection, was to choose a replacement for Judas. It is commonly assumed that Jesus chose twelve apostles to represent the twelve tribes of Israel, but there may have been an additional reason for maintaining the group as twelve, even if the newest member had not been a witness to Jesus’s teachings.
The number of the twelve apostles may have mattered as much as the praying itself.
This “called-out assembly” exactly fit my definition of a healing circle. In fact, homothumadon and ekklésia are perfect metaphors, I realized, for a Power of Eight group: a batch of individuals passionately praying together as a single entity, thinking the same healing thought at the same moment. When people are involved in a passionate activity like a healing circle, they transmute from a solitary voice into a thunderous symphony.