Reynolds Price (1933–2011)

In brief, in a single full moment, I was allowed to see how intricately the vast contraption of nature all round me - and nature included me, my parents a few yards away in the house, all the animal life in the dense surroundings, and every other creature alive on Earth - was bound into a single vast ongoing wheel by one immense power that had willed us into being and intended our futures, wherever they might lead through the pattern, the enormous intricately woven pattern somehow bound at the rim and cohering for as long as the Creator willed it... At my age then, of course, I couldn't have conceived a thing of such perfect complexity on my own; nor could I have described the gift I'd received in any such words. But memory tells me that the description is honest.

It's enough to say here that I was half-upright in my bed; then suddenly without apparent transport - and I was certainly not dreaming - I was lying on the stony shore of a huge lake. I knew at once that I was by the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinnereth, as it's called in modern Israel) and in a moment, a man whom I knew to be Jesus had silently beckoned me into the water with him.

In another moment - still silent - he was washing the foot-long wound from the failed surgery that had gouged for hours deep into my spinal cord; that wound was also the proposed site of my weeks of radiation. At last Jesus spoke, only a four-word sentence - "Your sins are forgiven." But nearly overwhelmed as I'd been by a month of surgery and the discouraging aftermath, I pushed onward for the answer I most wanted - "Am I also healed?" As if I'd forced it from him, he said only "That too."... The experience ended there as inexplicably as it came. It had been nonetheless a long moment as vivid as any other in my life - and as undeniable in its force.

My conviction, more than twenty years after that second vision, is that the experience was in some crucial sense real. In a human action that apparently lasted no longer than two minutes, I was essentially healed. By healed I mean that I was repaired in the sense that a man I had every reason to trust had guaranteed me a long stretch of ongoing vigorous existence. The fact that my legs were subsequently paralyzed by twenty-five X-ray treatments... was a mere complexity in the ongoing narrative which God intended me to make of my life.