“Then the father stumbled forward, falling onto his hands and knees. His daughter stood next to him, with both of her hands over her mouth. She seemed frozen, unable to move or speak. The teacher reached down and held the back of the man’s head with one hand, while his other hand clenched. I was horrified when the teacher swung his fist and struck the man in the back of the head. He struck him, not softly, not hesitantly, but with power that caused the already struggling man to buckle and fall to his face.
“After a moment, water poured from the man’s face as he slowly pressed himself back up to his hands and knees. It was more fluid than either sweat or tears could account for. He coughed, and more water gushed from his mouth.
“The teacher still stood with one hand on the man’s head, his other no longer raised, but relaxed at his side. He waited as the man remained on his hands and knees, facing the ground, silent, as if recovering from the trauma of the healing process, for indeed he was healed. He glanced up at the teacher, his face as normal as yours or mine.
“The young woman helped her father to his feet. He wiped at his face with his sleeve, mopping away some of the remaining moisture. Women screamed and men shouted in amazement. One woman stepped forward and looked as if she wanted to grab the healed man’s face in her hands. She seemed barely able to restrain herself, standing close and staring into the handsome face.
“The man returned a brief glancing smile, his head slightly bowed. He swung his attention back to the teacher, looking at him with such love and thanksgiving. And the teacher looked deeply into the man’s now bright eyes. The healer put his right hand to the side of the face that had once been so swollen and distorted. The man’s hand followed. He tenderly felt his own cheek, chin and neck, and he smiled again at the teacher.
“The teacher said to him, ‘Trust God to keep you free; don’t be afraid of anything, not past, present, or future.’
“The man nodded then turned to his daughter, whose face was wetter than his. Tears washed down her cheeks as she embraced him. She gasped and then sobbed some more.
“Worship had spun into the air once again, dancers and singers raising hands and voices to the sky to praise God for his goodness and mercy. Robes billowed like bells as men and women twirled in spontaneous dance. High-pitched voices warbled above the washing wave of open song.
“The teacher bent to speak to a hunchbacked woman and touched her stooped back, briefly closing his eyes. Several people pushed toward the teacher, evidently eager to be the next beneficiary to this amazing healing. The teacher’s friends formed a tightened circle around him and pressed back against the crowd. To the right of where the teacher stood, I heard a cry of pain and a scuffle, accompanied by swearing and accusations. The teacher gave a sidelong glance but returned his attention to the little old woman, who was giggling as her back grew progressively straighter.
“Peter addressed Bartholomew with some guttural instructions, and then shouted to the people pushing toward the teacher, ‘Please, everyone, move back. The teacher will get to all of you, but you must make room for him. Stand back!’
“His words seemed to have little effect, and the disciples pushing back only compressed some of the people to where the most intense scuffle was happening. Someone swore loudly and people started falling over one another. I heard a loud crack from the bottom of the resulting pile.
“The old woman stood tall and graceful as she walked away, her hands raised and her eyes lifted to the sky. Two of the women with the teacher helped her through the tight crowd.
“The teacher waded into the struggling tangle of people, mostly men, where Peter and Bartholomew were trying to dig out whoever was on the bottom. As he pushed in, people backed away, making room for the teacher. This allowed Peter to make progress through the avalanche of arms and legs, and to work his way to the root of the pile.
“The teacher, meanwhile, healed a small man with a bandage on his head and helped him move out of the crush. The small man moved away with a laugh and a quick squeeze of the hand that the teacher held out to assist him.
“Finally, Peter stood over a man who lay on the ground grasping a large broken stick, what remained of his crutch. Peter picked up a shattered piece, about two feet long. The man reluctantly released the larger portion of the crutch when Peter pulled it from his grip to take custody of the potential weapon in a mob situation. The teacher took both pieces of the crutch from Peter. I expected the teacher to throw the pieces aside; as they had been doing with unneeded crutches.
“Instead, the teacher—also a master carpenter, remember—held the broken pieces up and pressed them together, joining them as they had been before the accident. As dozens of people looked on, the teacher restored the crutch to one single solid piece. He shook it above his head and bowed it slightly with two hands to show that it was restored. He handed it back to the crippled man, who still lay on the ground, propped up by one elbow. As he received his crutch, the man glanced between it and the teacher, no sign of gratitude for a healed crutch. Obviously the man had come for the healing of his lame leg.
“The teacher studied the man. I glanced at Peter and his other friends, who seemed to be the most perplexed. I overheard Peter murmur, ‘Okay, James, what is he doing now?’
“‘Why would he bother to fix a crippled man’s broken crutch?’ Bartholomew said.
“The cripple searched the face of the teacher. He tipped his head to the side. The teacher smiled and nodded. He reached out his hands, taking the crutch in his left hand and grasping the lame man’s outstretched hand with his right. The man leaped up, both feet firmly planting on the ground. He looked down at his legs, one of which had recovered even as he stood up. The formerly crippled man grabbed the crutch from the teacher’s hand and stabbed it toward the sky, shouting triumphantly.
“Even the trampled and bruised people around him laughed and shouted along with the healed man. The release of the ensuing celebration loosened the tangle of people so that the men who had been pushing and cursing now helped one another off the ground.
“The teacher focused his attention on healing those who had been part of the pileup that broke the crutch. There didn’t appear to be any serious injuries resulting from the incident, but he healed minor scrapes along with preexisting sicknesses, deafness, missing teeth, and even a man missing both of his thumbs.
“The teacher and his friends restored order and the crowd slackened their forward press. Into the space before the teacher stepped a man quite distinct from the majority of the crowd, a gaunt, tall, dark man in foreign-looking robes, a turban on his head. He bowed to the teacher, with an extra nod of his head. He did this without taking his eyes off the teacher. Behind the stranger stood four or five other men similarly, but less elaborately, dressed. One of these translated for the distinguished stranger.
“‘I am a magician from Syria, where I have many followers and my power is well-known. However, in spite of my powers, I am unable to heal my own illness; neither can any of my disciples nor the other magicians from my area. I do not know what my ailment is, other than to say that I am weak and tired most of the time. I spend many days or even weeks in bed. Some days I am struck with a fever. Most days my appetite is nonexistent.’
“The magician’s face remained unmoved, stoic while he explained his problem and his disciple translated. Then he held out a bag of coins, which another of his disciples had passed to him. But the teacher raised his hand, palm forward.
“‘What I have is given freely, not purchased.’
“The magician accepted this response and offered his double-jointed bow once again, as if in apology and deference.
“The teacher stepped toward the magician but looked past him to one of the foreigner’s disciples. The teacher pushed up the man’s headdress slightly. The young man was missing his left ear. Without hesitation, the teacher poked the scarred place where the ear had been. The young disciple, a man with nut-brown skin and black eyes, jumped back. I wasn’t sure why he rea
cted that way. Was it the suddenness of the teacher’s movement, the impropriety of bypassing the magician, or the healing power hitting the side of his head? Regardless, the disciple stumbled backward, but the crowd pressing behind him kept him from falling.
“While the crowd’s attention had been briefly diverted to the stumbling disciple, the teacher turned back to the magician. He motioned for him to put his hands out in front of him. The teacher placed his hands on top of the upturned palms. Within a few seconds, the magician winced, as if his hands were unbearably hot. Yet he kept his hands there. Before a minute had passed like this, the magician collapsed to the ground, as if all of his joints had broken loose and nothing remained to hold him upright. It happened so fast, his followers were barely able to break his fall.
“The teacher moved on to touch the next person to his right as he followed the line of the crowd before him. Behind him, the magician remained on the ground, shivering and making a sort of stuttering noise. The mostly Jewish crowd maintained a suspicious distance from the foreigner.”
Walter paused and reached for his water.
I smiled at him, speechless at first. Then I opted for practical considerations instead of the dozens of spiritual and emotional issues raised by the dream narrative.
“I’ll get you a little device that you can use for dictating your dreams, so you can remember more of the story.”
He nodded. “So you think there will be more?”
I shrugged slightly and offered a hesitant grin. “It seems to me like you’re just getting started.”
Walter shifted in the bed, sitting up straight, and reached for his favorite Bible. The energy with which he did this startled me, but I withheld comment, intimidated by where he might be taking this conversation. I hadn’t read a Bible for a decade, at least.
“I’ve been trying to fit the dreams into the Gospels.” He adjusted his glasses when he found the passage he wanted. “It says here in Matthew chapter fourteen verse fourteen, ‘When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.’” He looked up at me.
I didn’t respond, still feeling out of my depth.
“There are a bunch of stories like this, Jesus healing a whole crowd of people, many more accounts than I was aware of before. I guess the preachers I’ve been listening to haven’t gotten around to those stories yet.” He raised both eyebrows.
Walter drew a deep breath, and I prepared for one of those lectures that had enthralled me as a student.
“I think it’s too easy for us church people these days to just skim these words and not let them find traction in our souls. Think about this. This is not some holy automaton just doing what he was programmed to do. This is a living and loving human being who had feelings for those who were suffering. But how could it be any other way? He was Jesus, the living sign of all the love God has to offer. How could he look at the sick and the injured and not be moved?
“But, of course, he was not just teary-eyed about what he saw. He took care of them. Jesus’s feelings were normal, as was his desire to respond. For him, healing them all was normal.
“I don’t know about you, James, but the people I see these days doing healing on TV seem anything but normal.” He chuckled.
I joined his laughter, but I was struggling with my own inconsistencies. The cinematic detail of these dreams seemed to me a serious challenge to the flaccid faith I had evolved. He seemed to sense my preoccupation with this internal guilt-fest.
“What are you thinking, young man?”
I smiled, not feeling so young as when he first called me that twenty-some years before. “I’ve strayed a long way from the faith my parents taught me,” I said.
The steady gaze and warm smile that Walter beamed my way made me feel like he was proud of me for finally addressing that particular elephant in the room.
“I’m glad you’re thinking about that. And I think there are more of these dreams to come, so you’ll have plenty of time to keeping thinking about it.”
Chapter Four
New Mercies
When I left Walter that Wednesday night, I drove directly to a store where I had seen a display of digital recorders designed for dictation. In part, I intended this to relieve Walter from having to remember so much detail, but I was also feeling an obligation to help him get these stories onto paper as soon as possible. Fulfilling my promise gave me the excuse to head back to Walter’s place Friday evening.
I made arrangements over the phone for a wheelchair and planned to take him out to dinner as I did occasionally. This time would be special, however, because Jillian was going to join us. At this point in our relationship I was still dumbfounded that she was available to go out with us on a weekend, instead of weeding through a long queue of romantic options. Which is to say that I wasn’t seeing her very objectively or thinking of her anymore as just Walter’s psychiatrist.
Helping Walter to put on his coat and hat that evening in his room, I noticed that he had some limited use of his right hand. Looking back now, it was apparent by then that, against all expectations, he had improved. Why I didn’t say something at the time probably had to do with my struggle to keep the story of Jesus and his healing at a safe distance, locked in the pages of the Bible. Then again, I wasn’t used to the nursing functions that had intruded into our relationship, like getting Walter dressed, the nursing staff typically did that sort of thing.
In the midst of my awkward efforts, Walter provoked me with a teasing bit of news.
“I had the fourth dream last night.”
I finished tugging his weaker arm into the sleeve of his tan and brown winter coat, testing a half-baked hypothesis that had occurred to me. “Is it possible that these keep coming because you want them to? Is this some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy?”
He waved his left hand as if shooing away a pesky fly. “When did you ever hear of someone controlling their own dreams? In fact, isn’t that the point of a message delivered in a dream? It comes when we’re off guard, when the subconscious mind has sway over the conscious.”
I laughed in acknowledgement of my dubious question, revisiting my discomfort with the way Walter had so firmly concluded that these dreams were a divine message to him. If a stranger in another room of the convalescent home were reporting these dreams, I would have doubted their authenticity. But this was Walter, the most stable and trustworthy person I had ever known.
Jillian arrived in Walter’s room just then, diverting the conversation and leaving me with a head full of questions, questions fired at me from some unseen attacker, or maybe just a playful friend.
The logistics of getting Walter into and out of my car added another reason I could be thankful for Jillian’s presence. Walter’s use of his one good leg helped, and he didn’t weigh over a hundred fifty pounds by then, but that all didn’t add up to easy and intuitive transitions.
It was nice to have a professional to consult when Walter halted my clumsy efforts with a bellowing plea. “Hey, you’re gonna brain me while you’re messing with my bum leg there.” I could just barely detect the musical tone of a good-natured tease in this complaint, and that only because I knew that Walter had reverted to his playful and vocal self. A stranger might have taken him seriously and reported me for abusing the elderly.
“Sorry, about that Walter,” I said.
Jillian stepped quickly to the other side of the car and reached through to give Walter a hand to grasp in his effort to slide onto the seat. Meanwhile, I made sure to avoid knocking him unconscious. I knew we had done okay and he was in good spirits when he tried to talk Jillian into staying in the backseat with him. Trying to steal my date.
“Okay, old man. One miracle at a time, how about?”
We all laughed as we assumed our expected seats and got on our way to the restaurant.
Arriving at Walter’s favorite steakhouse, I realized for the first time that I would have to cut his porterhouse for him and wondered if my caregiver skills
were up to that challenge. After drinks and salads, I still harbored these concerns until Walter stopped the waitress who brought the steaks.
“Young lady,” he said with a twinkling squint up at her. “How would you like to cut my steak for me? There’ll be a big tip in it for you, I assure you.” He gave me a wink. I was paying for dinner.
Finally, after the rich, salty meat and potatoes had been dispatched, we sat with half-eaten desserts and cups of hot coffee, while Walter told us part of the latest dream.
“The crowd continued to press toward the teacher, filling in after each person who received healing and then walking or running to wherever friends or family were waiting. I noticed one small boy getting pushed back repeatedly, being shoved aside as others tried to reach the healer. The slim boy with large dark eyes looked to be about nine years old. His skin seemed tanned by the sun, and his curly black hair was brown from the dust stirred by the crowd.
“When people gasped and cheered as the teacher restored sight to a blind man, the boy tried to push into the brief void the blind man and his son left, great smiles on their faces and tears on their cheeks. But an old man with a grotesque lump on his neck pushed through ahead of him. The teacher touched the lump without a word and it disappeared.
“When that man left, his hands raised to the sky, shouting praise, the little boy tried again, only to be cut off by a woman and the man with her. However, the teacher seemed to look right through that couple. He spoke directly to the little boy, even though I was sure the couple hid the boy from the teacher’s view.
“‘Little boy, come around here so I can see you.’
“The boy turned his head and looked to either side of him then back toward the teacher’s voice. A tall man standing by the boy evidently understood. He tapped the shoulder of the woman ahead of him while guiding the boy forward.
“The teacher squatted before the boy so that they were eye-to-eye. ‘What do you want me to do for you?’
And He Healed Them All: Second Edition Page 5
