Being healed

. . . You know from my memoir that in the first weeks of my return from radical surgery and ensuing depression, I experienced what I can only call a vision. It came on a morning just before my five weeks of scalding radiation began, and it took the shape of an utterly real dawn encounter with Jesus on the shore of the Lake of Galilee and then waist-deep in its water.

As his disciples lay sleeping around us on the shore, Jesus silently beckoned me into the lake and, with handfuls of water, washed my ugly spinal wound and said, "Your sins are forgiven." My own immediate silent response was characteristic of my managerial impatience - "forgiveness is the last thing I need."

. . . I wanted my ten-inch tumor out of me and gone (surgery had removed only ten percent of its gray entangled mass . . .). So I dared to push past forgiveness and to ask Jesus if I were healed - "Am I also cured?" Plainly it hadn't occurred to me to wonder why the Son of God would have chosen to wash my particular wound in a teeming world of dire sickness. But after a pause that signaled reluctance, Jesus said, "That too" and walked away from me as the encounter ended.

These many months later, after an initial prognosis of eighteen months, I'm alive and appear to be strong. So I have no hesitation in believing that - at that moment in midlife burdened with decades of error from small to huge - I needed forgiveness more than I needed healing. For all the years since, though, the fact has remained that I was healed - or that my eventual healing was guaranteed in the wash of that forgiveness - on one clear alternate dawn in Galilee. Yet with all that, I've grown no better at reading my personal failings as a forecast of my fate. I expect I never shall.

- Letter to a Man in the Fire, by Reynolds Price
Scribner 1999