The Horse Boy

I had a quiet day today, popped into the office, pruned a hedge, did all that kind of thing. After dinner Clemency and I watched a DVD which I found almost unbearably moving. It is a documentary called The Horse Boy which records the story of Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff and their 4 year old autistic son, Rowan. Rupert is a journalist with an interest in the bushmen of the Kalahari and their shamanic traditions, and Kristin teaches psychology. Rowan is incontinent, prone to daily 4 hour tantrums and the other trials to which severely autistic people are subject, but he has an uncanny rapport with horses. Hoping against hope for some help from shamanic healers, his parents decide to take him to the place where there is a strong shamanic tradition and a strong horse culture: amongst the reindeer herders of Mongolia. The film is the story of their journey.

It traces a familiar inspirational arc for this sort of film, but does it with a good deal of sensitivity. It is a portrait of some absolutely wonderful parenting and a moving glimpse into autism and the burdens of those who live with it. But of course it is more than that. Kristin and Rupert finally reach their goal and a shamanistic ritual is performed and from that moment on an extraordinary transformation occurs in Rowan. His autism remains, but he becomes, almost instantly, continent and free of the terrible tantrums. His social isolation ends and he is able to relate to other children and to his parents.

Which all raises some interesting questions for a Christian. What on earth has happened here? I don't know a lot about shamanism, but had always assumed that when it worked it worked through the power of suggestion. The shaman becomes a focus, by agreement of the community in which the shaman lives, for spiritual values. The shaman performs his (usually) rituals, wears his symbolic garb and evokes the archetypes buried in the psyches of us all; healings are thus effected by the working of the unconscious mind on the body. Of course, all this can hardly have been happening for Rowan. And yet demonstrably, dramatically, he finds a measure of real healing.

This is one of those movies I am reluctant to speculate on. The experts gathered for the documentary seem, none of them, to understand the causes of autism or even what it is. The shamans diagnose it in terms of the spirit of a dead grandmother and of "dark energy". The shamans effect a cure. The experts do not. I am left with questions about consciousness and its relationship to our bodies. I am left also with questions about healings effected in the name of Jesus and the claims of many Christians to exclusivity in the area of healing. What was going on for Rupert, Kristin and Rowan? God knows. But watch it and tell me what you think.

Comments

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...

Available Light

Search This Blog