Can healing be bought?

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SIMON Can healing be bought?

He waits. Birch leaves come down into the ravine. Nothing else happens.

SIMON I know. Socrates warned me. I read the Phaedrus in college, the one where he finally walks outside the city walls and sits under a tree. He says books are like paintings. Let me find it. Here. "If you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence." And if you push them, "the speaker always gives one unvarying answer."

So that's the experiment, Count. I flew nine hours to ask a dead man a question, and I brought eleven of your books, because I'm an engineer and I don't trust a sample size of one. I'll ask. I'll open a book. We'll see whether you really only say one thing.

The woman at the museum told me why you're buried in this exact spot. Your brother Nikolai was twelve. He told the little ones he'd found the secret that would make everyone happy, so that no one would die and there'd be no more wars, and he'd written it on a green stick and buried it at the edge of this ravine. You spent your childhood digging for it. You played a game called the Ant Brothers, all of you crowded under armchairs with shawls thrown over them, holding on to each other in the dark. And at the end you asked to be put in the ground right here. No ceremony. A wooden coffin. Whoever wanted to could carry it.

I spent thirty years assuming the secret was written in code. I was very good at code.

Here's why I came. Last spring I sat in a clinic we fund. Good clinic. Clean numbers. The woman who runs it walked me to the car afterward and said, very politely, the way you'd tell a man his fly was open, that our money arrives everywhere except where the work is. I haven't slept well since. So. First book. What to Do? Your account of the Moscow census of 1882.

TOLSTOY

"Perish the whole census if we may but feed an old woman."

"Article on the Census in Moscow" (1882), trans. Isabel Hapgood

SIMON That's a beautiful sentence from a man who never had to run a budget. You know what a census is for? It's for knowing where the old women are. You can't feed a city on feeling.

He turns pages.

SIMON But you went anyway, didn't you. You volunteered to count the worst block in Moscow.

Part II: Getting Off His Back

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SIMON The Rzhanoff house. A tenement the locals called the Rzhanoff fortress. You asked to be assigned there. You walked in with your pockets full of rubles, a count in a good coat, ready to fix it. You gave money to the ones who cried. You made lists of who deserved help. And none of it worked. The money disappeared and the people stayed exactly where they were, and you went home ashamed and couldn't figure out why.

I know that walk home. I've had it in four countries.

Then chapter sixteen. This is the one everybody quotes. Let's hear it in full.

TOLSTOY

"I sit on a man's neck, I weigh him down, and I demand that he shall carry me; and without descending from his shoulders I assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him, and that I desire to ameliorate his condition by all possible means, only not by getting off of him."

What to Do? (1887), chapter XVI, trans. Isabel Hapgood

SIMON All right. That's the line. I've had it thrown at me at two conferences and one Thanksgiving.

Here is my answer, and I'd like you to take it seriously, because you never had to. Our money paid for ninety thousand cataract surgeries. Ninety thousand people who were going blind can see. A grandmother in a village I couldn't find on a map saw her grandson's face. You can call that sitting on someone's neck. I call it a grandmother who can see.

He waits, as if the mound might argue. Then he turns back a page.

TOLSTOY

"It was hard for me to come to this confession, but when I had come to it I was shocked at the error in which I had been living. I stood up to my ears in the mud, and yet I wanted to drag others out of this mud."

What to Do?, chapter XVI

SIMON I didn't make the mud.

That's what every man in my position says, isn't it. I didn't make it. I just happened to be standing at the top of the hill when it all slid down.

I wrote software that tells a hospital which surgeon goes into which room at seven in the morning. It's good software. It also tells the hospital how few nurses it can get away with. I sold it for an amount of money I still can't say out loud without lowering my voice. So, fine. Ears in the mud. Let's keep going.

He reads further down the same page, and stops.

TOLSTOY

"The woman who served the sick old man, helped him; the mistress of the house, who cut a slice from the bread which she had won from the soil, helped the beggar; Semyon, who gave three kopecks which he had earned, helped the beggar, because those three kopecks actually represented his labor: but I served no one, I toiled for no one, and I was well aware that my money did not represent my labor."

What to Do?, chapter XVI

SIMON Oh.

You saw them. In the middle of hating yourself, you noticed who was actually helping in that building. A woman nursing an old man. A woman cutting bread she'd grown. A man with three kopecks. You had a coat full of rubles and they had a slice of bread, and you knew which one was healing.

You took the title of this book from Luke. It's printed right at the front. The crowd asks John the Baptist, "What shall we do then?" And John says, "He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none."

I have, conservatively, four thousand coats.

But I want to give you another verse from Luke. You knew the book better than I do. I wonder if you ever sat with this one.

Part III: Who Paid for Jesus

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SIMON Luke, chapter eight. Here's a question nobody asked me in Sunday school. Three years on the road, twelve men who'd quit their jobs. Who bought the bread on the days there wasn't a miracle?

Luke 8:1–3 (KJV)

"And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him, and certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance."

The donors were women he'd healed. That's the whole funding model. Former patients.

And look at the second name. Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod's steward. Chuza ran the household of Herod Antipas, who ruled Galilee for Rome. And what did that household do? It cut off the head of John the Baptist. Your John. The one who answered your question about two coats. So the money that fed Jesus came, at least partly, out of the house that killed the man who told the crowd to give their coats away.

You'd have loved that. You'd have written forty pages on it.

Here's what I can't stop turning over. Joanna was rich, and she was outside. She had the steward's money and the palace manners, and she couldn't sit on any council, couldn't study at a rabbi's feet in the ordinary way, couldn't testify in a court. Substance and no standing. She could pay for anything and decide nothing.

There's a sociologist, Rodney Stark, who spent a whole book on why the early church grew. He found it drew far more women than men, and more of the comfortable than people like to admit. People with something to give, shut out of the rooms that mattered. And there's Plato again. In the Symposium, Socrates says everything he knows about love he learned from a woman, Diotima, who isn't even at the party. She tells him Love has a father named Resource and a mother named Poverty.

Joanna is both parents in one body. Resource in her purse. Poverty in her standing.

He sits down on the leaves beside the mound.

I've read the gospels the wrong way my whole life, Count. I always thought the rich man in the story was the young ruler, the one who asks what to do and goes away sad because he had great possessions. I've identified with him for decades. Very flattering, in a tragic way.

But maybe the rich person in the story is Joanna. And Joanna didn't run anything. She didn't sit on the board. She paid, and she followed, and when the men scattered she was at the cross, and when the women went to the tomb she was there too. Luke names her again in chapter twenty-four.

And I'll tell you something worse. Look at the page right before chapter eight. Luke seven. Jesus is at a dinner hosted by a respectable man. A woman with a bad reputation comes in and washes his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair, and the host is appalled. Jesus turns toward the woman and says to the host, "Seest thou this woman?"

The host's name is Simon.

There's a third one, in Acts. Simon the magician, who watches the apostles heal people and offers them money for the power. Peter says, "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money."

My mother named me after a fisherman. Luke had two other Simons waiting for me.

So here's the closest thing to an answer I've found, and I found it in Luke, not in you. Joanna paid for healing. Simon the magician tried to buy it. Same money, both times. One of them put it under someone else's feet. The other wanted the controls.

Part IV: Two Kinds of Knowing

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SIMON Why did those women trust him with everything? John has a line about it, early on. The crowds are following him for the miracles, and John says Jesus wouldn't hand himself over to them, "because he knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man."

He knew what was in people. So did my company. We knew the blood type, surgical history, and insurance status of more than eleven million patients. I could tell you which hospital in Ohio would run out of anesthesiologists on a Tuesday in February. I knew what was in people the way a ledger knows.

There's another way to know what's in someone. A pickpocket knows which pocket you keep your wallet in. So does your mother. Same knowledge. The difference is where the knowing ends up. The pickpocket's ends in his own pocket.

My wife was the other kind. Anne was a hospice nurse for twenty-two years before I sold the company. The foundation started at her kitchen table, with a list of twelve women in our county who were already doing home visits on their own gas money. When she got sick, she gave me a book by a Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön. She'd underlined one passage so hard the pen went through. It's about compassion. Chödrön writes that compassion is never the healer bending down over the wounded. Then:

PEMA CHÖDRÖN

"It's a relationship between equals."

The Places That Scare You (2001)

SIMON I have spent eleven years as the healer. I have a title for it. Founder.

All right. You wrote stories when the arguments ran out. Plato does the same thing. Let's have one.

He takes out a thin book and reads to himself for a while before he reads aloud.

SIMON Master and Man. 1895. A merchant named Vasili Andreevich drives out in a snowstorm to buy a forest cheap before anyone else can. He takes his workman, Nikita, whom he's been cheating for years. You're very precise about it: he "did not pay Nikita the eighty rubles a year such a man was worth." They get lost. Night comes. Nikita isn't dressed for it and starts to freeze. And the merchant does the efficient thing. He takes the horse and leaves.

And he rides in a circle, all night, and the horse brings him right back to the sledge. And something breaks open in him. He opens his fur coat and lies down on top of Nikita, to keep him warm with his own body.

TOLSTOY

"He remembered that Nikita was lying under him and that he had got warm and was alive, and it seemed to him that he was Nikita and Nikita was he, and that his life was not in himself but in Nikita. 'Nikita is alive, so I too am alive!' he said to himself triumphantly."

Master and Man (1895), trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude

SIMON In the morning the peasants dig them out. They're seventy yards from the road. Less than half a mile from the village. The whole night, they were almost home. The merchant is frozen solid. Nikita lives.

He closes the book on his finger.

SIMON You always kill the rich man. Ivan Ilyich, the judge in your other story, dying in his fine apartment. Vasili. Is that the only door out for my kind?

No. Look at it again. In 1886 you wrote that you were sitting on a man's neck. In 1895 you wrote a man lying on top of another man in the snow. Same position. Nine years apart. One is weight and one is warmth.

The difference is he had to get down off the horse first. Paul says Jesus "made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant." The merchant got down into the snow. That was the whole conversion. The money didn't move at all. The body did.

Part V: The Genealogy

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SIMON You know what you started, don't you? I'll do it the way Matthew does, with begats.

In 1894 you published The Kingdom of God Is Within You. A young lawyer in South Africa named Gandhi read it, and wrote years later that it overwhelmed him and left an abiding impression. In 1908 you wrote a letter to an Indian editor, and Gandhi got hold of it and printed it. I marked the line that stopped me.

TOLSTOY

"A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions."

A Letter to a Hindu (1908)

SIMON A commercial company. I ran one of those. Mine was nicer.

Gandhi wrote to you. You wrote back. In 1910 his rich friend Hermann Kallenbach, an architect, bought eleven hundred acres outside Johannesburg and gave them to the movement, and Gandhi named the place Tolstoy Farm. You were still writing to him in the last months of your life. And Gandhi begat King, who studied him in seminary. And King met a Vietnamese monk named Thich Nhat Hanh in 1966 and nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize the next year. So: Jesus, Tolstoy, Gandhi, King, Thich Nhat Hanh. A genealogy of great men.

Except Matthew couldn't keep his genealogy clean either. In a list of forty-odd fathers he breaks his own pattern five times to name women. Tamar. Rahab. Ruth. The wife of Uriah. Mary. If Matthew couldn't leave them out, I'm not going to. Let me do mine honestly.

When Gandhi set out on the Salt March in 1930, he picked seventy-eight marchers. No women. He said marching with women would be cowardly, as if the men were hiding behind them. Sarojini Naidu, a poet who'd been president of the entire Indian National Congress, came to the sea at Dandi anyway, by car, and stood next to him when he picked up the salt. When they arrested him, she led the march on the salt works.

In Montgomery, the night Rosa Parks was arrested, an English professor named Jo Ann Robinson ran off about fifty-two thousand leaflets on her college's mimeograph. The Women's Political Council had been waiting years for the right arrest. All four paid staff jobs in the boycott's organization went to women from that council. And the boycott itself was carried for thirteen months by maids and cooks who walked to work.

Rosa Parks wasn't an accident either. She'd been secretary of the local NAACP, the civil rights group, for years. The summer before, a white woman she sewed for, Virginia Durr, got a call about a scholarship to a workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Durr thought of Rosa immediately and rode with her part of the way, because Rosa was afraid of being seen going. Durr was a Joanna, if I've ever heard of one. Access, connections, and a phone that rang when a scholarship came up, which she handed straight to the person who'd use it. And Rosa, for her part, had to spend the rest of her life correcting the story that she was just a tired seamstress.

ROSA PARKS

"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Rosa Parks: My Story (1992)

SIMON And Thich Nhat Hanh had Sister Chan Khong. She was already handing out food and teaching children in the slums of Saigon before she ever met him. Together they started a school that sent more than ten thousand young people out to rebuild villages the war had bombed. When he was exiled, she was left running it. They called her a communist. She went to jail twice. She was already in the garden when he got there.

He said something in California, in 1993, that I think is the truest line in this whole genealogy. He was talking about the next Buddha.

THICH NHAT HANH

"The next Buddha may take the form of a community."

Spirit Rock Meditation Center, October 1993

SIMON A community. A crowd of women at a tomb. Twelve women on their own gas money.

I've spent eleven years looking for the next great leader to fund. I have a whole team for it. We call it identifying exceptional talent. And the healing in every one of these stories happened in the people around the famous name, the ones who paid, and walked, and ran the mimeograph, and came by car when they weren't invited.

The great men mattered. I'm not a fool. You mattered. But they were the place where the community became visible, and I've been funding the visible part.

Part VI: The Woman at Yasnaya Polyana

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SIMON Now I'm going to say the hard part, Count, because you can't stop me.

Your Joanna lived in your own house, back up the path. Sofia was eighteen when she married you. You were thirty-four. She bore you thirteen children. While you wrote War and Peace, she copied it out by hand, the whole enormous thing, again and again, at night by candlelight after the children were asleep. The usual count is seven times. She squinted at your handwriting with a magnifying glass. She ran this estate. She handled your publishers. She kept the money coming that kept the house standing that kept you free to write that money was a sin.

Then you got up from your seat. You gave away the copyrights to everything you wrote after 1881. You wore a peasant blouse and made your own boots while servants still cooked your dinner. And Sofia fought you for the rights to the earlier books, because thirteen children don't eat a renunciation.

I'll give you this. In 1899 you broke your own rule. You took royalties one more time, for Resurrection, and you sent the money to the Doukhobors, pacifist peasants the Tsar was persecuting for burning their guns. With the Quakers, you got about seventy-five hundred of them to Canada. Even you had to take the money once, for the movement. I find that very comforting.

And then, one night at the end of October 1910, you got up and left her. You went out in the dark with your doctor, and left her a letter asking her not to follow. You were eighty-two. You caught pneumonia on the train and died ten days later in the stationmaster's house at Astapovo. She came. They kept her out of the room until you were past knowing her. Your disciples had already gotten you to sign a secret will that put your writings in the public's hands and out of hers. And history, which mostly read your side, made her the hysterical wife.

He is quiet a long time.

SIMON I'm not saying you were wrong to give it up. I honestly don't know. I'm saying someone always holds the house when a man stands up from his seat. Clare of Assisi, Saint Francis's friend, who founded an order of poor nuns, had to fight popes for forty years for the right to stay poor. Mary Magdalene, the first witness to the resurrection, spent fourteen hundred years being preached as a prostitute because of one pope's sermon in 591. And Joanna, there's a scholar who thinks she may be the Junia that Paul calls "of note among the apostles," and for much of the last century some English Bibles turned Junia into a man.

That's what happens when a movement wins. It inherits a house. And the house gets a front room where the men are photographed, and a kitchen where the women who paid for it do the dishes.

I know because I built one. The foundation started at Anne's kitchen table with twelve names. It has nine hundred employees now. The building has my name on it. Anne's list is in a drawer.

So here's the only test I can come up with, and I'm going to apply it to myself on the plane home. Once a year, ask whether Joanna could still walk in off the street and change your mind. If she could, the movement is alive. If she'd need an appointment, it's already a building.

Part VII: The Green Stick

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The light is going. The birches across the ravine have turned the color of paper. Simon pours the last of the thermos and doesn't drink it.

SIMON One more. Your own question, the one on the cover of the book. What then must we do?

You answered it a hundred ways. Make your own boots. Plow your own field. Stop living off other people's work. I can't do most of that, and you couldn't either, honestly. So give me the short one. The children's one.

He takes out the smallest book in the bag. A king wants to know three things: the right time to act, the right people to listen to, and the most important thing to do. Learned men give him a dozen answers. So he goes to a hermit, alone, dressed as a commoner, and finds the old man digging flower beds. The hermit won't answer. The king takes the spade and digs for him, hour after hour. A wounded man stumbles out of the woods, and the king spends the night binding his wounds. In the morning the king asks one last time.

TOLSTOY

"Remember then: there is only one time that is important—Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with any one else: and the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!"

"Three Questions" (written 1903), trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude

SIMON You wrote that one in 1903 and gave the profits to the families of Jews massacred in Russia. Even your short answer paid for something.

And he had to dig the beds first. The king. He had to put down the questions and pick up the spade before anybody told him anything.

Socrates was right, Count. You said one thing all afternoon. You said it eleven ways. Get down off the man. Pay for healing, and don't try to buy it. Look at the woman. Go to the one you're with.

The one I'm with.

I'm with a grave. I flew nine hours to be with a grave, because a dead man can't ask me for anything.

He stands, and brushes the leaves off his coat, and looks back up the path toward the gate.

SIMON I'm going to say the rest to the ravine, the way you'd say it to a green stick, because I don't have answers. I have questions I owe somebody.

Whose neck am I sitting on, and would I know it if I were?

Am I paying for healing, or trying to buy it?

Who is already doing the work, out of her own substance, and what does she need from me that isn't my judgment?

When it works, whose name goes on the building, and whose was on the first list?

What would it cost me to lie down in the snow instead of riding off on the horse?

He knew what was in us. He let Judas carry the bag and let Joanna fill it. He looked at a woman with seven devils in her past and a steward's wife with blood money in her purse, and he trusted them with the bread and with the news. What did he see?

And who has ever looked at me like that? And what did I do next?

He picks up the bag. At the gate, the driver has been waiting since two. She has the heater running and a paperback face down on the dashboard. He has ridden with her for three days.

He knocks on the window and asks her name.

It is the first question all day that gets an answer.