Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [3]
As the years unfolded, I stockpiled more questions and more stories—strange stories that demanded an explanation. I wondered about my friend John, who was a slave to painkillers and scotch. Day in and day out, the cravings drove him away from his wife and to bars and Internet pharmacies. One day he felt the touch of something supernatural, and the cravings vanished. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, and while he never really bought into the tenets of his Catholic Church, he subscribed to the mysterious power that pulled him from the pit.
I wondered about my grandmother, a Christian Science “practitioner” or healer, who prayed for people and saw them recover. I thought about one patient in particular, a teenager in San Francisco who, tripping on LSD, jumped from an eighth-story window onto the street. The doctors declared him brain-dead and left him to Granny’s prayers. Two weeks later, he walked out of the hospital.
I wondered about my own brief brushes with something numinous, and the gnawing suspicion that there might be a reality that hides itself except in rare moments, or to rare people. I have stumbled a few times into a mystical presence—once, as a blinding light in my bedroom, another time as a voice, several times as an undeniably physical presence. Few people know about those times; they are intensely private and, to be honest, a little bizarre.Which is why, I suppose, it took me more than a decade to write this book.
MARCH 6, 2004, exploded with promises of spring. I had spent the past two days moderating a forum on the history of faith and law in a hotel conference room in Walland, Tennessee. It had been heavy intellectual lifting, and when we finished the last session late in the afternoon, I burst outside like a kid at recess, sprinting to my hotel room and throwing on shorts and a sweatshirt. The hotel sat at the base of the Smoky Mountains, and my forty-four-year-old heart raced as I made a dash for the trail that led me into the nearest set of hills.
The sun was already hovering just over the horizon. But I only planned to hike a three-mile loop. Plenty of time. As I left the road and started up the trail, a longing swept over me, a memory of what it felt like to be young. Perhaps it was the smell of the spring moss, or the way the shadows dappled the path, but my mind’s eye scanned back twenty-five years to those summers I had spent backpacking in the Colorado Rockies, in that pink dawn of life when your future fans out before you and you instinctively know that now is the time to risk everything because you may never have another chance.
The exhilaration did not serve me well. It blinded me to my surroundings and the stealthily setting sun. Only after I had hiked up and down one of the foothills did I notice it was growing quite dark. In the mountains, night dims gradually for a while—and then instantly, like a towel dropped over a birdcage, it is black. I started to run along the path that I knew would lead me back to the main road, when the trail simply ended. Curving from the left roared a small churning river, swollen from melted snow. On the right, the hill swept up vertically, thick with trees and prickly bushes. There was no path forward.
Perhaps, in retrospect, I should have waded into the ice-cold river and followed it to the main road. But doubts crowded in. Maybe I took a wrong turn. Maybe I misread the map and this stream doesn’t return to the road. I decided that the only way back to safety was to retrace my steps.
For the next three hours I raced