Yes! Hands! How could I have missed this?
You were a great believer in the “laying on of hands”—that hands had the capacity to heal disorders of all kinds, imply by being laid by the practitioner on the head of the person suffering, along with a prayer for recovery.
You were yourself a healer, saw that as a part of your function as a minister of the gospel. The practice derives, surely, from the New Testament, with its numerous examples of Christ healing the sick.
You believed in miracles.
You believed, certainly, in non-traditional forms of healing, witness the story of the warts on my left hand. I was perhaps seven or eight years old. The first one, and eventually the largest, appeared on the heel of my thumb. Then others started growing up the thumb, in descending order of size, towards the tip. Eventually there were, as I recall, about twelve or thirteen of them.
So you took me to a wart charmer.
He was the local blacksmith. The man had already managed to charm away a wart that was growing on the head of Hank, our border collie (we’ll need to talk about him more, one day). My father drove me over to the smithy and we found him in a scorched leather apron, busy at the bellows and the furnace, a red hot horseshoe grasped in his long tongs. You gave him a shilling, and he paused for long enough to look at my thumb and run his finger over the hard little knots of growth.
“How many are there?” he asked. (Do you remember this?) I told him there were twelve. “Well, then,” he said, “I expect they’ll be gone in a couple of weeks.”
They weren’t. They were still there.
And you, always one to get your money’s worth, took me back to the smithy to complain. The blacksmith was puzzled, too. “How many, did you say?” I recounted. There were thirteen, not twelve. Perhaps one had been hiding under the skin. “Ah, well,” he said. “That’s better. Now they’ll be gone. You’ll see.”
And two weeks later, they were gone.
As miracles go, this was a minor one. The cures that you performed for your parishioners were long-termed, and much less dramatic. They involved not just the hands—though these were always somehow instrumental—but your deep and always growing understanding of human nature, backed up by what you had learned from Dr. Freud. You were fond of the term “psychosomatic,” and used it as an explanation for every ailment we had as children. You even had associative meanings for each finger and each toe. An injury to the thumb, I remember, implied some conflict with a person in authority…
And so on.
You did help people with their ailments, physical and psychological, that I know. The exception, if the distant echo of a memory serves me well, was a strange young woman named Winnie, who was extraordinarily deft with her fingers and made marvelous little dioramas for myself and Flora, with elfin figures fashioned out of tissue paper. You befriended her, became her spiritual guide, but were unable to save her from the disease that left her thinner and thinner, more and more emaciated, until she simply passed away. I don’t know whether there was a name for the disease back then, or if you knew it. Today we call it anorexia.
And, Harry, there is this to be said: for all your empathy for those who suffered from illness or disease, for all your desire and ability to heal the sick, you were never able to turn those skills and address them to your own debility, the stomach pains from which you suffered so terribly throughout my childhood years. That old adage, “physician, heal thyself” could not have been more appropriate. To my knowledge—and it could surely be deficient—you never saw that inner turmoil in the terms you applied so readily to others.
And yet, as I see it now—I only came to understand this much later—it seems so clear that the physical turmoil in you belly, the “ulcer,” reflected your struggle with God, with faith, and the conflict between your intellectual doubt and the religious certainty your profession required you to preach and practice for those who placed their trust in you…
More on this later. Enough for this one day.
With love, Peter
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