The deputy, and the sound of her own cry, had jolted Margaret out of her ecstasy, and she stared, fearful again as she waited. Ngunda’s grin softened to a smile, and reaching the rope, he stepped over it. Her eyes were fixed on him; she could feel herself trembling, vibrating. A long black hand reached toward her as if in blessing.
His words did not seem loud, but they were firm, and somehow they carried. “Stand up and walk,” he said.
Again she was swept with rapture; her body almost burning with it. Unwrapping the blanket from her wasted legs, she threw it off with such strength that Elyse, who’d bent to help, backed away. Then, with hands on the arms of the chair, Margaret Colletti raised herself to her feet for the first time in half a year. For just an instant she wavered, but before Elyse could help her, she took a tottering step, then another and another toward Ngunda Aran, each step stronger. He was backing away, pushing the rope back, not retreating but encouraging, making her walk. At the same time holding out his hands, inviting her to follow. She kept coming, then screaming clutched his wrists, and he embraced her.
“It was you and God who did it,” he said quietly. “I was simply the instrument.”
After a moment she found herself turning, and no longer tottering, walked back to her wheelchair, lowering herself onto it unaided. I can walk! she told herself, I can walk! But I won’t overdo it. My legs are still weak.
* * *
It was Elyse who pushed the wheelchair back to the terminal. Her husband was weeping too hard to steer. Meanwhile the crowd, which had watched silently, began to cheer.
A TV camera followed, recording it all: the woman, the wheelchair, the guru, and her brother’s face, tears streaming. It would be on the news all over the country, the world.
* * *
The Mescalero’s crowded cabin was loud with the sound of engine and rotors. Thoughts, images, memories filled Cochran’s mind. Briefly he’d felt certain that the wheelchair was an assassin’s ploy. When it became clear that it wasn’t, he’d jumped to another assumption, that the healing was faked, a Millennium setup.
Either that or a phenomenon he’d learned about in elementary psychology—hysterical “healing,” in which a disabled person, gripped by religious fervor, could sometimes briefly rise above their condition.
Cochran watched it again later, on the television in his room, while stripping off his clothes. After a shower, he collapsed for an unbroken twelve hours of sleep.
20
Arlie Ross: You spoke of loving our enemies. That’s a lot easier said than done. How would you propose we go about it?
Aran: First let me say that the Tao does not insist on anyone’s concept of perfection. It is infinitely understanding, infinitely accepting, infinitely loving.
As for your question . . . By the word “loving,” I refer to a spectrum of emotions, a gradient scale of relating to things. At the upper end is what the ancient Greeks called agapé: loving without imposing conditions of eligibility, and without expecting anything in return. Hope, yes, but not expectations. Requiring performance of any sort falls well short of agapé.
At the lower end is violent hostility, and equally low, the hypocrisy of saying, “I love them, I love them,” while despising them or treating them as inferior, usually accompanied by demands that they change. Some clergy have been at that end.
And how can we get from the lower end to the upper? The first step, should you choose to take it, is to abstain from physically assaulting people you disagree with. The next is to abstain from assaulting them verbally. Then putting up with them grudgingly, though perhaps avoiding them so far as possible. Then learning to tolerate them philosophically. And next, respecting and even admiring them, except perhaps for some who are just too much, and whom, for the time being, you can at best tolerate. That is a major accomplishment, one you can be proud of.
Loving, truly loving one’s enemies is the final step. Don’t think of yourself as evil if you fall short of it. But you might want to choose agapé as an eventual goal and make progress toward it.