Let’s see. If you were going to write a New York Times article in which someone claimed to be channeling the Buddha, would you, at some point, talk to Buddhists? Maybe even a scholar whose work is rooted in Buddhist thought?
What about Judaism? If someone was claiming to channel Moses, would you talk to a rabbi or two about that? Maybe a scholar who has studied Jewish mysticism?
How about Islam? How would a reporter approach the claims of someone who says she is channeling Mohammad? And what would Islamic believers think of this process?
With these questions in mind, let’s look at that chatty first-person piece that ran more than a month ago at the Times with this headline: “In Good Spirits — Carissa Schumacher channels the dead for her A-list celebrity clients. But most days, she’s in the forest.”
The headline omits the big reveal: Schumacher claims to channel the spirits of the dead, including her most famous connection — Jesus. This is tricky territory, as demonstrated in the wild correction at the end of this long feature:
Correction: Nov. 29, 2021
An earlier version of this article described incorrectly the biblical name Yeshua. The name refers to multiple people, including Joshua; it does not refer solely to Jesus Christ. The article also referred incorrectly to the Old Testament; while the name Yeshua appears in it, Jesus Christ does not.
Ready for the overture? Here we go, just after a reference to a group gathering to meet with spiritual adviser Carissa Schumacher at the Flamingo Estate in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles.
At the front of an open-air room, a seat awaited Ms. Schumacher under a large floral arch. After guests, including the actresses Jennifer Aniston and Uma Thurman, filled the rows of chairs, others moved to the floor. Andie MacDowell reclined on a rug among a heap of pillows. Ms. Schumacher was supposed to appear at 8:30 p.m. A gospel choir sang while everyone sat around and glanced at Ms. Schumacher’s empty chair and at each other.
Since 2010, Ms. Schumacher has worked as a medium, meaning someone who receives messages from people who have died. She doesn’t have a website and is often booked months in advance. Her prices are another obstacle, with sessions priced at $1,111 per hour. (She likes the synchronicity of the number.)
Ms. Schumacher might fall under a category of so-called New Age practitioners.
Is that enough A-list names for you?
Now it’s time for The Big One, a superstar even bigger than Aniston (and I’m not referring to the Brad Pitt material later on):
In late 2019, just as the world was on the precipice of a plague of biblical proportions, Ms. Schumacher said she began channeling Yeshua, as she refers to Jesus Christ. Transcribed recordings of some of those sessions appear in a new book, “The Freedom Transmissions,” out Nov. 30.
The party was for the book, but it was also a chance for her clients, many of whom hadn’t experienced the Yeshua channeling, to see what it was all about. Maybe she would channel him at the party. No one was quite sure.
Ms. Aniston, who’s been seeing Ms. Schumacher since 2019, has a Rolodex of healers, astrologers and numerologists that she’s acquired over the last 30 years. Ms. Schumacher’s advice, she said, has helped her navigate personal struggles, work and friendships. “The Yeshua channeling thing is way out there,” she had told me earlier, “and for some people, it’s going to be insane this idea of someone channeling Jesus, but it’s more about this message that she’s tapped into. Everything she’s communicated to me just resonates with me and excites me.”
This feature story includes some forms of research and many key facts.
Schumacher’s father was a Catholic who converted to Unitarian Universalism. She studied cognitive neuroscience at Brown University and then worked in biotech. She has dated men and women and, at one point, assumed she would need to be celibate to do her mystical work. There’s a Sedona reference, of course. And readers are told that Yeshua speaks in a voice that is deeper than her own, with a “slight British accent.”
Yeshua book No. 1 has “some Christian iconography in it,” but the “rest is a more neutral smorgasbord of divine power surrender,” with some Buddhism and Carl Jung. Two more of these books are on the way.
What is missing? Well, that would be that whole thing about “talking to Christians” and/or traditional theologians, scholars, priests, believers, etc. As veteran journalist and copy editor Deann Alford (a Christian) put it, this story demonstrates a “shocking biblical illiteracy of who Jesus is by the world’s newspaper of record.” And for Christian believers, “He’s not dead.”
Does these concerns have anything to do with this Times story? Did pros at the Times ponder whether they needed to handle such a delicate (some would say holy) subject with the standards the Gray Lady would apply to a world religion that is worthy of respect, such as Buddhism, Judaism or Islam? Come to think of it, Jesus is a major prophet in Islam. There are Muslims who will be upset about the tone and contents of this story.
Wait, the story does include one voice representing the “other side” of this story. Let’s start this final passage with a short, punchy, quote from Schumacher:
“I can’t even say ‘channel for Jesus’ without laughing,” she said. “It sounds so freaking blasphemous! And frankly, really insane.”
Ms. Schumacher isn’t the only medium to attest to channeling biblical figures. Besides Esther Hicks, whose best-selling “Law of Attraction” series in part inspired the popular 2006 documentary “The Secret” and was based on messages she said she received from “Abraham,” there are also authors who tour lecture halls with the promise of channeling John the Apostle and the Virgin Mary.
Susan Gerbic, the founder of Guerrilla Skeptics, a group that conducts sting operations of people she calls “grief vampires,” told me that the invocation of religion was consistent with a psychic’s desire to feel special. “If you are in conversation with dead biblical figures, then that is really special and holds a lot of power,” she said, adding that it also served as a shield against skeptics. “Who’s going to attack someone who’s playing the religion card?”
Ah, the “religion card.”
You see? This is just another story about religion. That’s the ticket.
FIRST IMAGE: Image of “The Sacred Heart of Jesus painting in wood,” for sale at Holy Art website.