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“Wilt thou be made whole?”
Those words thudded in my chest as I sat next to the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park in the summer of 2014. The fountain was named, I was reading, after a passage of the Book of John in which Jesus makes this inquiry of a man with a severe disability, who is lingering by a pool with a reputation for miraculous healing. I was in the park that day with a Nikon I’d just bought for a coming trip to Prague, which would turn out to surface another biblical theme—resurrection.
Even though walking was painful—the effect of my latest and most consequential bike crash—I’d found that taking pictures had a curious temporary power to cancel out the anxiety in which, outside the hyperfocus of work, I was otherwise wading. I memorized Jesus’ question right away because the phrasing struck me: Not, would you like me to fix you. Not, are we doing cash or card today. Not, would you like the number of a great physical therapist—or, in the mode my people back in Utah have come to embrace, some essential oils.
The question was, wilt thou. Do you possess the will?
Will is a limited force, and I don’t generalize its power. When I broke my femurs in 2007 and 2008, I couldn’t wish them back together. I needed surgery; and, an ambulance ride to the hospital, and a bed with a traction device, and nurses, and mountains of narcotic painkillers, and an anesthesiologist, and a friend who would cross all of Los Angeles every day to make sure I was OK, and months of follow-up care. The absence of any of this would have altered the outcome, which, in the case of those injuries, was that I was fine. Graver and more complex medical issues than mine benefit all the more from the state of the art, whatever its limitations.
Yet somehow this later and nominally less severe accident had refused the same genre of treatment, and would not free me from its agonous grasp. Given my experiences, I had every reason to think it was the will and expertise of the doctors that mattered; that the fact of my wanting to get better was secondary. Think about how obvious this sounds to us, that the repair of the body requires something external. The practitioner, the therapy, the drug: They are the agents of healing. Right?
In the Bethesda episode, Jesus gets in trouble for healing on the sabbath. But in reading the text what’s most striking to me is that no act of healing is really attributed to Jesus at all; after their brief exchange, he commands the man: “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.” There’s no mention of touch; of prayer; of holy oil or lights from the sky; even of that magical water. I think you’d strain to say which part of the text here depicts the force of divinity. Jesus doesn’t repair the man, or comfort him; read a certain way, his words are almost bullying. The healing act is located within the man himself.
I’ve written before about the weird little pocket of almost-mainstream medicine in which I finally found a cure for my pain. That way of thinking, whose renunciatory founding physician placed his power in the hands of his patients, continues to be a pillar of my health. I embrace institutionalized medicine for what it can do—I marvel at mRNA vaccines and prosthetics and antibiotics and PrEP and didn’t-see-that-coming treatments for those of us with leaky tricuspid valves. But on Sunday I crossed the finish line of a four-mile race just a stone’s throw from Bethesda Fountain, pacing 6:49, and felt my eyes fill up with tears. When most of those well-meaning doctors failed me, I would be made whole. And now I knew it.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.