Possibility in Your Pocket: Magic, Tarot, and Conflict Transformation
Suzanne talks with magician James Warren and Tarot reader Sally Graciela Ramirez about how magic and mysticism touch the irreducibly artistic heart of peacebuilding.
This week’s episode of Third Things First might stretch your imagination in some surprising directions—at least, I certainly hope it will!
For this conversation, I invited two talented friends—magician and Girard scholar Jim Warren, and Roman Catholic mystic Sally Graciela Ramirez—to talk about how their art forms can serve as “third things” for communities stuck in conflict.
Jim insists he doesn’t “do magic” in the Harry Potter sense; he does sleight of hand, misdirection, and illusion. But he also knows that when a mind‑blowing trick lands, there’s a release—laughter, a jaw‑drop, a burst of energy—that momentarily pulls someone outside the cramped box of their day-to-day lives and expectations.
Jim has experienced magic's power to bridge cultural divides, precisely by shaking people up in this joyous way. Drawing on Kierkegaard, he describes magic as "breathing possibility" into lives overloaded with duty and pressure.
Sally then describes her own eclectic spiritual journey through Zen Buddhism, yoga, psychic development, and ultimately a renewed love for Christ and the Catholic tradition. Today, she is constantly rediscovering Christ in an unexpected place: the symbolism of the Tarot! For Sally, though, reading Tarot is not an exercise in predicting the future. Instead, she uses its symbols and stories to invite people to pay deeper attention to the Spirit’s work in their lives. Through this mindful practice, Sally has helped hundreds of people interrupt cycles of rivalry in their own lives. Most of her readings, she notes, are about healing family relationships so that love and peace can take root close to home.
We also talk candidly about skepticism and fear, and the responses Jim and Sally have gotten from people who see sleight‑of‑hand as demonic or who view Tarot as an occult practice. By wrestling with and responding to these objections, Jim and Sally show how clearly they root their work in prayer, ethics, and neighbor love, not in spiritual shortcuts. They’re inviting us to see art, symbol, and mystery as gifts that can cultivate in us a deeper attention and sense of how all things are interconnected. “[Tarot is] not about changing God’s path for me,” Sally says: “It’s about getting closer to the Creator’s path, so I can really love and be at peace with others.”
John Paul Lederach has written that there is an irreducibly artistic core in the work of peacebuilding, a core that is just as aptly described in terms of faith, mysticism–or even magic! If you’re hungry for more imaginative tools to heighten your sense of gratitude and mystery, or even if you're skeptical that such things can have meaningful peacebuilding power, I think you’ll find this conversation both playful and serious in all the right ways.
📺 Watch the episode on YouTube now!