As any scholar of spirituality can tell you, there is a long history of engagement between the medical sciences and the mystical arts. Furthermore, the appeal of such mediums to a mass audience has an equally long history, including stages and pulpits much different from this drab corner of network headquarters. So, I wasn’t surprised at all that John Edward had solicited such attention for Oz’s viewer audience.
I was surprised by the sophistication of the show’s writers. They were not asking, yet again, the same old question: Is it all real or all fake? Instead, they asked: Do psychic mediums sometimes function in a therapeutic fashion for grieving individuals? (Answer: Absolutely.) In effect, they did an end-run around the question of belief, evading the classic debunking postures that had populated so many of these magic-science encounters. And they covered their bases, too. Dr. Oz and his producers invited a representative from the American Psychology Association to sit in the front row. And Edward himself spoke about his strong feelings that newly grieving parents should not visit a medium and how one should never substitute a visit to a medium for needed psychotherapeutic or psychiatric help. In the contest between faith and science, Dr. Oz and his guests had one clear reply: therapy first.
Within this therapeutic certitude, however, there was some intriguing ambiguity. One might expect from Dr. Oz—or from any doctor, really—an arrogant dismissal of mediumship and its therapies. However, this is not what we got from Oz. Instead, we got a thoughtful, open-minded, even humble heart surgeon who began by confessing that, “I have seen things about life and death that I just cannot explain, and that science can’t study.” Later, he would gently identify himself with the quarter of the American population that does not believe in an afterlife, but he was obviously intrigued and moved by what he witnessed John Edward doing with his audience. Mom was right. Dr. Oz was cool. I immediately liked him.
Edward began by explaining how he gets the messages—like daydreams—and how the message is seldom, if ever, perfect because of its medium, that is, him. He can only interpret what he senses, much like one must interpret a dream. Edward explained that he can only do this through his own terms of reference. In short, he explained that his ability is not a direct line to the beyond. It is something mediated, filtered, and interpreted again by him. Sounded right to me. Edward began with a young woman named Jen. The hits started immediately. He somehow knew that Jen’s mother had died of breast cancer. He asked her if “she got the car.” She had. She had been given her mother’s Lexus, which her mother had purchased right before she passed. He also knew that Jen and her sister had been discussing “sexting” on the way to the studio. What they had actually been doing was obsessing over which bachelor party photos to post to Facebook. Close enough. Meanwhile, as Edward thought through Jen, I was observing pretty much what I am always observing, namely, that the erotic always finds a way to peek through, even when you are talking to the dead.
It looked as if Jen had asked to go first, since she explained that Edward had done a reading for her mother while she was still alive and she herself was a fan. So his reading of Jen was impressive, but not quite spontaneous. Dr. Oz now opened the show up to Edward’s own intuition. He quickly turned to his left and identified a spot in the audience where he sensed something coming through. Something to do with St. Patrick’s Day. Audience members on the other side of the studio tried to get his attention. Hey, they wanted to be on TV too, and, apparently, they had a St. Patrick’s Day story. But he would have none of it. Edward knew exactly where he wanted to go: somewhere around a woman with a red shirt and a black jacket. He described again getting hits around “St. Patrick’s Day” and, now, a sense of being run or rolled over by a tractor or train.
Nope. Nothing. The woman in red and black knew nothing. Then the opposite side of the studio tried to get Edward’s attention again. No way.
Finally, a young woman (to the immediate left of the identified target) sheepishly stood up and told the story of her friend’s roommate, who was struck by a car on St. Patrick’s Day. Close enough.
And so it went.
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