Richard Cole

One of the stories in the Bible that means the most to me is John 5: 1-6, the healing at Bethesda.

There is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to be healed?”

We don’t always want to be healed. Sometimes being sick is a kind of solution, a retreat from issues we’d rather not confront. Ask any person familiar with self-destruction. Ask me. Of course, asking if we want to be healed sounds like asking if we want to be happy — but even that question is not always a simple one with an obvious answer.

Then there’s the other question: how exactly do we want to be healed? That also can be complicated.  A relative of mine is currently finishing six months of radiation treatments. Recently he wrote to me:

I once visited a group of disabled Mexicans in Calexico. Some had congenital conditions. They had a small faith community of their own and while I was there they prayed for healing. I asked one of them, “How can you pray for healing when your condition will always be the same?” He said,” Christ heals us but in other ways.” In that sense I do believe in faith healing.  As we know, many times we have to adjust ourselves inwardly to the Divine intent.

So do we want to be healed? If so, our way or God’s way? Sometimes the two ways might not be the same. As Richard Rohr once said, God always answers our prayers. He answers our prayers with more God.

That’s the elephant-in-the-room question. Huge. Invisible. Usually ignored but too big to be ushered out the door.

As for me, I have three answers to this question.

First, something happened to me at the middle of my life that I can’t explain except in divine terms. I was an unbeliever, but I went to a monastery, found God and joined the Catholic church. I can’t reduce that change to some psychological flip-flop or a mid-life crisis or whatever. It was a radical change unlike anything I’d experienced, and I’d experienced more than a few changes in my life by that point.

Second, the world is more than higgledy-piggledy, to use a term from debates between believers and non-believers. I think I understand the value of that term. In nature, we see complex and organically ordered patterns that seem to emerge from purely random forces, like a river delta that resembles fractal-generated patterns.  But to say that we and the universe are just clusters of molecules bundled together higgledy-piggledy seems a stretch. I believe in evolution. I think of evolution as how God thinks. But in strictly evolutionary terms, we’re wildly over-engineered for mere survival. Higgledy-piggledy can’t explain a Mozart, an Einstein, you, me or a new-born infant. The world is far, far more than it has to be.

Third, lots of other people believe in God, millions and billions of people down through the centuries. This is called the argument by consensus. For me, it’s the strongest argument, even as for certain non-believers it’s the weakest. I don’t think people are stupid. We’re all intellectuals, more or less. Sure, some of us have knacks and talents. A mathematical knack, an intuitive talent. Some of us read more books than others. But I’ve spent too much time sitting in a circle in a church basement somewhere listening to others not to understand that when it comes to the really big questions — Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? — all human beings are pretty much on a level playing field. Millions and billions of us, trying to puzzle things out.

I think of human history, including the history of religion, faith and doubt, as a kind of parallel processing, a vast population of servers added down through time that are all working on the same problem. The sheer size of this server farm can’t be ignored. Yes, we have all collectively come up with an almost infinite number of wrong answers, but I also think we have a collective intelligence greater than any individual insight. 

So that’s what I think about the Big Question. Does it care? It puts another trunkful of hay in its mouth, steadily chewing as it looks at me with those ancient elephant eyes. It still doesn’t leave the room. Maybe it’s waiting for better answers. What do you think?