Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [2]
“Do you think the prayer group in the church will heal the cancer?” I asked Kathy that night, scribbling notes in the fading light.
“No. Healing comes from God,” she said.“The church is here to be your family. They’re really your support team down here because we don’t have Jesus around to touch and talk to us. The church is God with skin on.”
That was the quote that appeared in my Times article. What happened next did not.
“Kathy, how can you possibly be so cheerful when you’ve got this awful disease?” I asked.
“It’s Jesus,” she said. “Jesus gives me peace.”
“A guy who lived two thousand years ago?” I asked, incredulous. “How can that be?”
“Jesus is as real to me as you are,” she explained. “He’s right here, right now.”
Right, I thought. Yet there was something wondrous about Kathy’s confidence as she struggled through this disease that could kill her. She told me then how she had been diagnosed with melanoma in her twenties, how her fear and loneliness had led her to Saddleback on a random Sunday, how she had come to believe that God had placed cancer in her life not to snuff it out but to give it a transcendent purpose.
As we talked, the night darkened. The streetlamp next to our bench cast a circle around us, creating the eerie sense that we were actors in a spotlight on a stage. The temperature had dropped into the fifties. I was shivering but pinned to the spot, riveted by Kathy and her serene faith.
My body responded before my mind, alerting me to some unseen change, a danger perhaps. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, and my heart start beating a little faster—as it is now, recalling the moment. Imperceptibly at first, the air around us thickened, and I wondered whether a clear, dense mist had rolled in from the ocean. The air grew warmer and heavier, as if someone had moved into the circle and was breathing on us. I glanced at Kathy. She had fallen silent in mid-sentence. Neither of us spoke. Gradually, and ever so gently, I was engulfed by a presence I could feel but not touch. I was paralyzed. I could manage only shallow breaths. After a minute, although it seemed longer, the presence melted away.We sat quietly, while I waited for the earth to steady itself. I was too spooked to speak, and yet I was exhilarated, as the first time I skied down an expert slope, terrified and oddly happy that I could not turn back. Those few moments, the time it takes to boil water for tea, reoriented my life. The episode left a mark on my psyche that I bear to this day.
EVER SINCE THAT NIGHT, I have wanted to write a book that answers the questions that I never voice in the two worlds I inhabit. The golden rule of journalism decrees that you take nothing on faith, that you back up every line of every story you write with hard evidence.You question everything. The unspoken ethos of organized religion is that you leave the uncomfortable questions alone, you accept them as unsolved mysteries or previously answered by religious minds greater than yours.You rely on the wisdom of sacred texts and your minister, and you swallow your doubts.
And yet I could not keep the questions at bay. Is there another reality that occasionally breaks