I could beweeeeve I could fwyyyyy...

Today I was listening to the Bryant Park Project, one of my favorite daily NPR shows. It's two hours long but it usually takes me an entire work day to listen to the whole thing, between games of tetris. Just kidding. It does take me all day though- between phone calls and chats with co-workers and hard, hard work.
Anyway. Today on the BPP, they featured a story of a tantric practitioner who was on a live tv show in India, and claimed that he could use his powers to kill another person on the show. (Apparently tantric has more to it than the whole sex thing.) Anyway, the host of the show (or maybe another guest, I had a bit of a hard time following who was who) said "okay, if that's true, kill me now."
It's kind of a long story- the tantric guy agrees to kill him and says it'll take 3 minutes. The time passes and the host is not dead. He asks for 15 more minutes. Still alive. The Indian tv station runs the show, live, into the next half hour with the words "BREAKING NEWS" across the bottom of the screen. Finally they agree to do a big deal gathering where he'll perform the Gigantic Spell of Super Destruction, or something like that. The host says "Sure". This, alas, is not effective either and the host lives on happy and smiling, and the tantric guy's rep. is seriously damaged.
I laughed, marvelling, through this whole story and the accompanying youtube videos, and then thought, "there but for the grace of God go I."
Well, not really- I wouldn't threaten to kill anyone with my religion or philosophy, and don't belong to one that claims I could anyway. In fact, my faith isn't one that would easily be used to do physical harm in the way the tantric guy said he could. Emotional and spiritual damage, yes- but not killing anyone with my chant.
But, I wondered what the tantric guy is thinking now- he put all his faith in his chant and ritual to do this big feat, and in front of the entire country, he fails. Where does he go now?
When I was little, I remember sitting one day at St. John's- I don't remember why I was there, because our parish was St. Charles, but whatever- and looking up at the beautiful church architecture. It's a beautiful church with paintings on the ceiling and high peaks and marble and whatnot. The space above the pews seemed massive to me then. I remember thinking to myself, "I could fly right now."
I really believed that if I put my faith in God, and stood up on the back of the pew in front of me, and pushed off, I could fly around that empty space above everyone. I BELIEVED it! But, I didn't try. Because... what if I couldn't? I'd be completely embarrassed, standing up on that pew back and tumbling into the laps of the people in front of us.
I was extremely disappointed in my own lack of faith in God. I could see how weak my faith really was. I still kind of wish I'd given it a shot- but now I guess I'll never know if God and I could have made miracles way back then.
How many of us are so faithful that we're willing to put our own faith to the test? Where would we be if we failed that test? Is it better not to look that closely at the possibilities?