Man as he came from God, and was by especial favor formed in his image, so it pleased God to place in him a principle of his own life to govern him. . . . [Man] must know what of himself is ready to betray him, that he may watch against it, and turn from it; and what in himself is given him of God . . . that he may hearken thereto, and be made happy thereby.—Isaac Penington
For three generations, the women in the Murphy family—daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters—had agreed that Grandma Bessie’s home was as close to earthly paradise as could be asked. Abounding with flower beds; herb and vegetable gardens, for summer bounty and winter storage; a grape arbor; raspberries; and an apple orchard, her home offered with each visit new growth, beauty, and good things to eat. Beatrice Elizabeth Murphy (Grandma Bessie to us) had filled her home and life with a wealth that was uniquely hers, such as the 18-inch in diameter geode that leaned against the step to the entry porch and announced her fascination with rocks and gems, a topic that filled the bookcase just inside the door. The wealth the geode intimated was not the kind recorded in bank statements but was instead the inner wealth of largesse, wisdom, and beauty, and this the geode’s crystalline center aptly symbolized.
It was the abundance of the place that made it a paradise for us all. In the kitchen, the largest room in the house, was a massive wood-burning oven where all the baking had been done for decades. A hand pump stood just outside the back door ready to bring up a cool drink of water from deep in the earth. Alongside the east-facing wall was an outdoor shower enclosed by a screen of morning glories that protected our modesty early each day. A rain barrel stood at one corner of the house, and a privy was a ways down the path past the hollyhocks. Summer mornings, there was sparkling dew on the grass and always the Zen-flute call of a mourning dove that drew forth our stillness and wonder. Throughout our childhood, my sister (three years my junior) and my aunt (two years my senior) had long summer days outside playing endless games of imagination and croquet and taking turns on the tire swing. When twilight came with the glow of lightening bugs and the rise of the moon, there was hide-and-seek until the sky turned dark, the air cool, the stars sharp and clear, and the call was heard to come inside.
Some afternoons, though, when the heat of the Iowa summer became too much for us, we chose the indoors and would entertain ourselves with board games on the living room floor. It is here that I will introduce my great-grandfather T. Edward Murphy, Grandma Bessie’s husband. My memory of him is just one thing: he sat in a rocking chair—not three feet from our game on the floor—and said nothing: not a word to us children, ever. I was but four years old when he died in 1955, but even at four, I realized his total silence was strange, and so privately in the kitchen, I asked my grandmother why he never spoke. Her answer implanted itself in my memory when she said, “He was betrayed by a friend.” I don’t remember her explaining more than that, but I do recall the sorrow I felt as I heard her words and realized that my grandfather had been hurt so deeply by another that he had stopped talking altogether.
I am surprised but very grateful that my grandmother answered my question honestly. I am also surprised and grateful that at an early age I was given the intimation that the condition of one’s soul dramatically affects one’s life and that there was an invisible vulnerability in everyone, even grown-ups.
One sick of the palsy
Like the man “sick of the palsy” in the second chapter of Mark, my grandfather was unable to move forward with his life; he was paralyzed into silence and a rocking chair. With my grandfather, the cause of the debility was attributed directly to another: a betraying friend. While no such direct correlation is made to an offending party in the Mark 2 story, there are subtle indications that the man’s suffering was precipitated by another.
Four of the man’s friends bear him and his bed to Jesus, and they go to great lengths to see that he receives attention: they break up the roof and lower his bed (4). It is the friends’ faith that Jesus sees, and as a result of that faith, he pronounces the debilitated man’s sins forgiven (5). In bringing the friends and their faith into this story (singular for a gospel healing story) and making them the precipitating factor in the healing, the point is made that we humans are social beings: sin in one can spread to sin in another; the betrayal of one can lead to the paralysis or diminishment of life in another. We are being told that fact in this story when we see the social dynamic in reverse: the faith of these four friends leads to the forgiveness of, or absence of, sin in another.
Please note that I did not say that the care and concern of these friends effected the man’s recovery. In this Bible story, it is Jesus’s work to discern—i.e., to judge—faith to be present and sin to be past. And the outward events of the story, as always, parallel the inward event: Jesus Christ appears within to announce faith is present and sin is past and forgiven.
We might ask, however, wasn’t it another’s sin and not the paralytic’s—or my grandfather’s? Why is it the victim is specified as having sin? For that is what Jesus does when he says: “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee” (5). In this world, there is and will be endless provocation and victimization,1 but it is we ourselves who allow the sinful behavior of others to diminish our own souls. In allowing that, we take on sin ourselves, for the soul’s death or diminishment is an affront to God from whom our souls are descended and by whom they are to be sustained. I say this not to shame victims but to outline the process by which we become entangled in life-diminishing social stumblings and to strengthen the soul that it not fall into fatal injury but find its way clear to health and wholeness.
The paralyzed man in chapter 2 is a figure for the immobilized condition of the soul suffering the sickness of despair, and the friends who bear the man to Jesus are likewise a figurative allusion to the foursquare honoring of the virtue of life itself when the soul is sick. It is not any particular quality in the paralytic’s life that the friends honor, for no such quality is mentioned, and the man is completely inactive and silent. Rather the friends honor and respect the man’s life for itself alone, devoid as it is of utility or advantage.
In like manner, a person must retain faith in life itself when his soul is under such extreme duress that he finds no ability to function or move forward in life. At this low, seemingly forsaken state, when there appears no way forward and no incentive in the world to carry on, it is too often the case that faith in the virtue of life is set aside, and the self yields to the demonic. That is to say, faith in life is replaced by faith in death: honoring truth and life is replaced by succumbing to death and deceit.
In refusing the demonic entry to occupy and sinfully energize or “enliven” the soul, however, the lifeless, depleted self nobly endures without expectation or hope. Enduring unto the end is the faith required and seen by God in his Son on the cross; it is likewise required and seen by God in us as we undergo the inward cross. It is that faith—called in Quaker tradition “dying to the self”—that allows the Son of God, the Son of man, to say to us, his new brethren, “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee” (5). Risen and again moving forward, newly restored and resurrected to life from death-like despair, we are thus empowered to go our way to our true home as sons of God: “Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house” (11).
The skillful Physician2
It is appropriate that this presentation of Christ’s healing of the soul should open the second chapter of Mark’s Gospel. We learned in the first chapter that Jesus heals both the possessed and the diseased (1:32), and immediately following in this second chapter, we’ve been given more detailed information on the particulars of the diseased soul and the steps needed for its restoration to health.
Just as the scribes assert their shallow apprehension of religion in the segment following Jesus’s healing pronouncement, there will be those today who cling to their idea that this story should be taken at face value as the healing of a physical ailment. Jesus, according to this perspective, is one who differs from us and wields magical, divine, healing power bestowed by God upon him alone (just as the scribes attributed the power to forgive sins to God alone [7]). Both of these faulty interpretations mistakenly presume to revere God and Jesus but instead exhibit a failure to know and understand the inward movement toward salvation that God has ordained and Jesus taught and exemplified. This false faith rests upon doctrines that have been taught, learned, and taught again, as surely was the “faith” of the scribes: “Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God only?” (7)
Life Itself
My family offered beauty, opportunity, and strong values to us children growing up, but it offered little guidance on the true path of salvation. There was no mention of my great-grandfather Murphy after he was gone—at least that I ever heard—and I assume the reason was the adults had an unspoken understanding that life had pitfalls and tragedies that were best kept hidden, ignored, and forgotten. Getting on and moving forward with life was the goal, as well as the means.
Perhaps there will be more of us in the future who, while recognizing the goodness of a plentiful life, will yet hold to the belief in the virtue of life itself when despondency arrives to strip away our capacity to move forward. We will let faith in life itself carry us for a time, which, like the four friends in the story, will go to great lengths to bring us into the presence of Christ Within. It is there in Christ’s presence that we will come to know his healing, and to have bestowed upon us—at last—the gift of Life Itself.
Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy (1 Peter 4:12-13).
- Epigraph. Penington, Works, 3:190. “Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!” (Luke 17:1) The King James Version was used throughout this essay.
- “Christ is the skillful Physician; he cures the disease, by removing the cause” (Penington, Works, 1:128).
June 1955
Abiding Quaker 