by Robert Feinstein
(Author’s Note: The story I am about to relate is a true one. I tell it not to disparage anyone’s faith or personal religious experience, but just to share my own personal experience and to bring attention to a topic which may be important to those of us who are blind.)
Introduction
I was about 15 years old, and I was attending a summer program for the blind, where I was learning how to use a long, white mobility cane and some basic skills of daily living, such as simple cooking, cutting up food, etc. I was one of a handful of students. Some were older than I was and had partial sight. There were even a few quite elderly students who were deaf and blind.
I became friendly with a deaf-blind woman named Maria. Often, when we had free time, I would painstakingly spell into her hand, using the manual alphabet. She would respond by talking to me with her voice. Because her deafness had occurred later in life, her speech was quite good.
“I am going to Lourdes to ask God to heal me,” she confided to me one day.
I was quite surprised. “How do you know God will heal you?” I asked her.
She began explaining about Jesus and how he had healed the sick. She was so sure of getting what she wanted that her voice rang with authority.
When I met her again after her return from Lourdes, I learned that she had gone through thousands of dollars to make the trip, because she had had to travel with a companion. She was, as far as I could tell, as deaf and as blind as she had been before the trip.
When I asked her what had happened she said, “Well, I didn’t get my hearing or sight, but I did get a miracle. My son contacted me. I got a letter from him and I haven’t heard from him in a long time.”
This seemed to me to have been a very high price to pay for a letter, but even at my young age, I knew it was best to keep my opinions to myself.
The Seeds of an Idea
I was having a hard time in school. I was 15, and I was blind and overweight. I had few friends, and felt desperately lonely. I found myself daydreaming about what life would be like if I could see.
If only I hadn’t been born prematurely... I wondered if I would have lots of friends. I wondered what it would be like to walk about unassisted. What would it be like to read my favorite books, or to choose books from the shelves of a library or bookstore?
The next summer, I went to a music camp, and one of the campers, Jean, became a good friend. She told me that her mother was “into the supernatural,” and when I visited Jean after camp was over, her mother read to me from a magazine that contained articles about people who communicated with the dead, and who saw ghosts in their bedrooms. I loved these articles. One day, she read me a story about a famous faith healer. It said that this person had cured many people, and had helped the blind to see and the lame to walk. Something about this article made an impression on me, and I wondered if it would be worthwhile to go see this famous person who could actually “heal” a disability like blindness.
Jean’s mother made a copy of the magazine article, and I gave it to my mother.
Soon I forgot about the article, and went about my daily routine of school, homework, and listening to recorded books. Once in a while, I would turn on the radio and hear a sermon about healing. One radio evangelist would scream at the top of his lungs and make weird sounds. He told people to put their hands on the radio, so that God’s power could reach through the airwaves to touch their bodies and heal them.
It certainly wasn’t difficult to place my hand on the radio. Sometimes, I thought I even felt some heat, but nothing of earth-shaking importance ever occurred.
Secret Plans
About two months before the end of the school year, my mother asked me to take a walk with her. She told me she had gotten in touch with the faith healer, and that we would be going there for a personal consultation. This would involve taking a plane, and my mother was particularly worried that my father would find out and forbid us from going.
"This is against everything I have been taught to believe," she said. “I don’t believe in Jesus, I don’t believe he was the messiah, and Jews never talk about healing the sick through a person’s intercession with God. But I would give you one of my own eyes if it would help you see, and I feel we must try this. If it doesn’t work, we have lost nothing except time and money.”
The next weeks were kind of like planning for a surprise gathering, where you are trying to keep from others what is going to be happening. My mother told my father that we were going to look at a college for me, and she did make plans for us to visit a college where we were going. I had been told not to discuss this trip with anyone, but I did ask some of my schoolmates if they had ever heard of this particular faith healer.
None had, and this heightened my excitement. My mother reread me the article from the magazine, and I knew it practically by heart. What would this person be like?
The plane trip was uneventful. My mother was very quiet, and I was very bored. We spent the night at a hotel and my mother’s snoring kept me up.
The Consultation
The next morning, we went to meet the faith healer. She welcomed us warmly.
I can remember that meeting as if it were yesterday. Her voice was beautiful to my ears, and she had a way of pronouncing her words that entranced me. There was almost a sing-song quality to her voice, which added a magical sound to it, and made me pay attention to each word, to each breath she took. I was absolutely seduced by that voice, and paid attention to every word she spoke.
“Robert, your mother has told me what a smart boy you are and how much she would like for you to have physical sight. But you know, Robert, you see things we don’t see. You feel things we don’t feel. You hear things we don’t hear. You smell things we don’t smell.” I listened as if seduced by magic. What a brilliant woman!
She put her hand on my arm and I felt like fire had touched me and I jumped. She then began talking about another world to come. “The lion will lie down with the lamb, Robert. There will be peace and harmony among all God’s creatures. We will all have perfect bodies.”
“I do not have the power to heal you; only Jesus has this power.” She made the word Jesus into a long word, which lasted about three seconds. “Yes, Robert,” she said, “Jesus can heal you if He chooses to do so. But, Mrs. Feinstein, ‘no’ is also an answer. And whatever God wills we must accept.”
Then she put some oil on my head, and began to pray that I would be healed. She asked that the darkness be lifted from my eyes. She asked that I see God’s beautiful creation, especially the rising and the setting of the sun. She asked that God’s will be done, and that whatever the outcome, my mother would find peace.
Then she said, "Remember, I have documents from the original time of Jeeeeeeeeeesssssssssuuuuuuuuuuuuuusssssssss!!" Something in this statement made me shiver uncontrollably. I was filled with awe and absolute terror. I scarcely dared to breathe.
My mother thanked her, and we left the room. We took a cab to the airport and took the plane home. I tried to talk about the events of that day, but my mother told me not to discuss them, even with her, and we’d have to see what would happen.
The Benefit of Hindsight
I am now 51 years old. My parents are both dead. I am still blind, but now I can evaluate what happened on that day with a bit more clarity than I could as a young boy.
Now I know the despair my mother must have felt to have a blind child, not so much because of my blindness, but because of the lack of acceptance I faced in school. I kept telling her how I wanted friends like the other kids, and I wanted to be able to go places with friends and do things with friends. My mother realized that her company was no longer enough for her blind child, and she ached like only a mother can for the loneliness I felt and the need I had to be a part of a group of kids my own age. Because my mother did not know what to do to help me, she did the unthinkable — she went to a faith healer. I firmly believe, as evidenced by her reaction to the whole ordeal, that she knew it was a waste of time and money. Yet, she felt she did not know what else to offer her son, and so she decided to give this a try, just in case ... just to see if, possibly, there was a remote chance her blind son could be helped.
Now I feel that it is very wrong for people to promise healing, or even claim that they will try to heal someone. What the clergy should do is help people accept what they have been given rather than give people false hopes. I cannot speak for what this particular faith healer really believed, but I can say that in my case, a lot of money, and more important, a lot of hopes were wasted.
If people choose to attend a church or synagogue to be uplifted, that is one thing, but false promises should not be made by clergy. There are people who have psychological illnesses, and these people may be helped by believing they were healed, but this is very different from a real physical healing.
It is quite interesting that documentation concerning so-called “faith” healings, as far as I know, is vague at best. Had I been given my sight back, it truly would have been a miracle, since my retinas are no longer attached, and my optic nerve is probably dead. Someone like me will never be healed in a church or anywhere else by the laying on of hands.
These so-called “faith healers” can put people in dangerous situations. What if a diabetic person believes he has been healed and refuses to take his insulin? Who is liable when he dies? In my opinion, religious leaders should not play with people’s lives in such a haphazard way, and false promises of healing should be dealt with skeptically at best.
The healer who saw me and my mother did one thing that I must respect. She said from the beginning that she could not promise I would be healed. I give her credit for this, but I wish that my mother had had the insight to forgo the whole experience.
Still, I will never forget that voice, with its incredible highs and lows, for as long as I live.
Epilogue
I would like to add one important point to my account of the experience of meeting the faith healer. As I mentioned, her comment that she had original documents from the time of Jesus filled me with awe, wonder and a bit of fear. When I was in college, I became friendly with a student whose father was a minister. This student knew of the faith healer I had visited. When I talked to him about the experience of meeting her, he told me that it was impossible for her to have possessed documents from the original time of Jesus, because such documents did not exist. This really surprised me and showed me the importance of listening to words and not just to how words are spoken.
Today I am a happy man in middle age. I travel with a yellow lab named Harley. I have friends and goals, and I have come to terms with my blindness and the impact it has on my life. I am grateful to have had a mother who was so willing to go to such lengths to make me happy, and although our trip to the faith healer did not work out as she and I had hoped it might, the love upon which that sacrifice was founded still sustains me today.