Page 181 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

166 Maria José A. de Abreu

Padre Jonas start to heal; that like an effusion from heaven his unyielding
lungs began to inflate, his chest expanded, his chronic fatigue mysteriously
disappeared. Padre Jonas spent seven years moving back and forth within
and around the green Valley in order to baptize new individuals and orga-
nized prayer groups to whom he witnessed his healing and revival experi-
ence. With incessant energy, he organized weekly prayer meetings and
preaching sessions to Catholic youth. Throughout seven years of meander-
ing in service within and around the Valley, the body of Padre Jonas’s body
fused with the local landscape. Through the intakes of breathing in and
out, his body became dissolved and distributed in it just as it became
embedded with him. Then one day, during one of the youth meetings, the
wonder aired its call. As words came out of his mouth, Padre Jonas realized
how the call he was about to ensue had been building up inside him for all
those years; how its spelling out was but the expelling of the last residue of
his phlegmatic past along with the outline of a new creation under the
pneumatic intervention of the Spirit. Padre Jonas’s airways were finally
unlocked.

Channeling Proprioception

Unlike Father Dougherty, Padre Jonas lacked financial resources, market-
ing expertise and technical equipments, as well as, in fact, any experience
with televangelism. The only thing he had, he likes to tell, was his faith,
and his twelve followers. Such lack, however, was what allowed Padre Jonas
to stick closely to the message of Pentecost and, more specifically, to the
aesthetic economy of charisma. Having no palpable capital to launch his
call, Padre Jonas focused on his charismatically, unlocked body in order to
tune into his immediate surroundings. It is said, printed, recorded in doz-
ens of Canção Nova media productions that from the very first, nobody in
the community knew what the next step would be. The group was primar-
ily an assemblage of individuals baptized in the Spirit. In a vivid reenact-
ment of the apostolic community, they gathered in stables, tents, and other

improvised areas, often in open air, in the green Valley of Paraiba River.
Words fluttered out of his mouth in ways that, as his followers maintain
today, “intoxicated our hearts.” It was as if the air that formed his words
had the power to carry his listeners into another time, and yet made that
language adjustable to the present. One often cited example tells how he
recalled Jesus addressing the apostles, exclaiming: “It is now time to launch
the nets.” Another time, he impersonated St. Mathew’s call “to evangelize
through the roofs,” repeated St. Paul’s prophecy on the Second Coming or