While it is certainly understandable to react against an overly physical view of the resurrection, this should not prevent us from taking a look at the strange qualities that bodies can possess. Michael Murphy, the cofounder of Esalen Institute, for example, in his The Future of the Body makes an encyclopedic effort to collect data that allows us to see that our potential for bodily development might be much greater than we suppose. Here we find material drawn from sources as diverse as shamanism and spiritualism, and modern scientific studies of the remarkable powers of yogis and Buddhist meditators. But Murphy recognizes that the lives of the Catholic saints, as well, are fascinating storehouses of strange phenomena upon which we can ponder in order to fathom what the human body is capable of. “Catholic saints and mystics have exhibited psychophysical changes as dramatic as those found in any other religious tradition. Moreover, such phenomena have been subjected to much skeptical appraisal through canonization proceedings and investigations by journalists and medical researchers. Surveying the enormous literature about Catholic religious life produced in the past 200 years, I have been impressed by the sheer volume of medical reports, ecclesiastical reviews, and investigative journalists’ accounts it contains. Taken as a whole, studies of Roman Catholic sanctity provide a unique body of evidence for human transformative capacities.”53

Murphy gives pride of place in examining the stories of the saints to the work of the Jesuit historian Herbert Thurston who wrote during the first half of the 20th century and whose articles were collected in The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism. If we turn to Thurston we see that he explored the lives of the saints and the strange happenings to be found there with a critical eye: the stigmata, or manifestations of the wounds of Christ, a phenomenon which started to appear around the time of St. Francis of Assisi, the strange lights that have surrounded these holy men and women while at prayer, the burning fires of love that seemed to consume them, and produce at times an inner physical heat, and even several well-documented cases of levitation like those of Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Copertino, and other marvels.