I wonder, do we understand what sorcery is—and that it’s forbidden? There are Christians who, for example, try to exercise supernatural power by praying inside a magick circle.
It’s interesting that one of the children in The Silver Chair (of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series) was savvy about this. Jill and Eustace were wondering if there was a way to force things in order to get to Narnia. Jill asked, “You mean we might draw a circle on the ground—and write queer letters in it—and stand inside it—and recite charms and spells?” Eustace conceded that such a plan had occurred to him, but he’d thought it through and came to this conclusion: “I’ve an idea that all those circles and things are rather rot. I don’t think [Aslan would] like them. It would look as if we thought we could make him do things. But really, we can only ask him.”
That’s the problem exactly. Some Christians try to make things happen by walking a “sacred space.” Some try to ensure an answer to prayer by burying a Catholic saint statue upside-down. Others chant “sacred words” in “sacred breaths” to break through some presumed cosmic barrier…
These are all attempts to manipulate God. Sorcery. And no different, really, than on The Andy Griffith Show when Charlene Darling comes out of the hills with a bag of specific items to bury (at night and under an oak tree, of course) and then offers up the incantation: “Beak of owl, strip of swine…”
Young Eustace was right: Such things are “rather rot,” and the Lord doesn’t like them. We need to think this through.
