Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [130]
But there was a twist to Mr. Richards’s story that emerged later, as Sartori interviewed him about his near-death experience.
“I said to him,‘While you were in your out-of-body state, was there something you could do that you couldn’t do in your body?’ ” she told the audience. Usually, she explained, patients recalled being able to see without their glasses, or being transported to another location.
“But he misunderstood me and said, ‘Oh yeah, look at my hand. I can open my hand.’ ”
She flashed a photograph onto the screen. The audience gasped. Michael Richards was holding up his right hand for the camera. No longer palsied, his fingers were now straight and he was splaying them like a starfish. A wide grin beamed from his face.
“I discussed this with the physiotherapists, the ones who looked after him, and also independent ones,” Sartori told me later. “And they all said this shouldn’t be possible, because his hand should be in a permanently contracted position. The tendons were shortened, so in order for him to open his hand, he would have to have an operation to release the tendons. And no such operation was performed. So it’s quite remarkable that this happened.”
It seemed, at least to the puzzled doctors, that Mr. Richards’s contact with death somehow broke the physical laws that held him in bondage. But what if no laws of nature were in fact broken? What if he came in line with spiritual laws that we do not yet understand, in the same way that scientists a millennium ago did not understand the laws of aerodynamics even as they watched birds take flight?
Michael Richards’s story persuaded me to open the box I had shelved for more than a decade and reexamine my original faith. It prompted me to reflect on the moment of my most dramatic “healing.” I was fourteen years old and suffering from scarlet fever. I remember lying on the bathroom floor, pressing my feverish forehead on the cool tiles. Suddenly, my perspective shifted, and I seemed to be outside my body, viewing it as separate from my conscious identity. (Now I realize it was an out-of-body experience.) I marveled that “I” could be teased apart from that miserable being on the bathroom floor. For a few seconds, I felt no pain and no fever. Then I returned to the prison of my body. But a few minutes later, the fever left me for good and the rash on my face disappeared.
By the end of my year of research about God and science, I was persuaded that these recoveries were not mere coincidence. I was a little closer to understanding the mechanics of how these perplexing healings might work: psychoneuroimmunology, for example, or the power of thought to affect my body, was probably at work. It struck me that these events occur when people who are hurtling along in life suddenly ricochet off of some kind of spiritual truth, and their condition suddenly changes. Not always because of their prayers and theology—Michael Richards was not deep in prayer before his heart stopped; he was chatting with his nurse—but because of, well, location. They walked into grace, like wandering into a patch of sunshine on a gloomy winter day, and were changed by the encounter. Christian Scientists are more deliberate. They don’t wander about aimlessly; they set out to find that spiritual law, like a New Yorker who marches out to Broadway to hail a cab. Somehow, it seems, the daily mental practice of Christian Science prayer places a person in the path of spiritual power.
Maybe that is what happened to Michael Richards. Maybe that is what happened to me on the cold tile floor.
Rethinking My Beliefs
When I began my search to understand the spiritual, I was figuratively and literally on a dark mountain in