“From time to time an angel came down into the pool and stirred up the water. The first to plunge in after this disturbance recovered from whatever disease had afflicted him.”
(John 5:4)

Now I know why water heals. I know why I love swimming in open seas or in inland lakes. Why I have swum with zest on the shores of Mauritius and in the depths of Dal Lake in Shrinagar. Why I have felt the pleasure of plunging into huge waves at high tide in the Atlantic, and of floating motionless on the smooth endless ripples of the Pacific. Why water refreshes, relaxes, vivifies, renews us as no other element does. Why in my showers I enjoy my daily vertical baptism, and in the bathtub I lower myself into the humid pleasure of the horizontal hamam designed by pagan architects of Turkish Baths and Roman Thermae in times when the body was a god and water was a cult. Now I know the secret of water and the mystery of its healing.

The water heals because it is stirred by an angel. The angel of the waters. The angel that waits and watches by the side of the five-porticoed pool (are our bodily senses also not five?), observing the faith and the readiness of those that plunge into it to heal their bodies and their souls from the paralysis of lassitude and laziness and despondency and depression that chains them as they chain every mortal under the long infirmity of boredom and weariness.

The angel stirs the water and makes it come alive in its whirlpools. But we have to jump into it at once, with faith, with promptitude, with alacrity to catch the wave and to let us be carried and to come out healed. We have to be determined in order to revive. Doubts and hesitation and distractions and delays keep the angel away. For the daily water to cleanse my body and my soul, to purify my skin and lighten my mind, to refresh my members and strengthen my soul I must have faith in God and in his whole creation, must see God in all things and his angel in the waters, must live out his redemption in each moment of time and his sacrament in each drop of water. I must realise that nature is sacred and all creatures are God’s handicraft. I must perceive that there are angels in heaven and on earth, in the valley and on the mountains, on trees and birds, in the sky and the clouds, in the winds that greet my body and in the waters that kiss my skin. The presence of the angels in the elements of creation is the touch of God that heals and enlivens all that he has made. That is why water heals. And so do the winds and the air and the land and the sun. Nature returns us to life at the hands of the angels that wait for us in it. Let us not wait thirty-eight years as the paralytic of the gospel waited by the side of the pool till he was healed by Jesus.

Number 38 has its own mystery according to St Augustine. Shall I tell it? Agustin was a master of numerology and found reasons for every number in Holy Scripture. It’s not for nothing that the number is 38, and it could not be 39 or 37 (although I respectfully suspect that Agustin could have found a meaning to any figure to judge from what he did with this). But let me not run ahead of my tale.

What is thirty-eight? asks the sage. Forty minus two, is his own answer. Right, and what is forty? Forty is the number of perfection, of totality, of completion as in the forty years of Israel in the desert, forty days and forty nights for the prophet Elijah to reach Mount Horeb, forty days for the fall of Nineveh as foretold by the prophet Jonah, forty days of rain for the deluge on earth, forty days for Moses to spend on Mount Sinai waiting for God, forty days for Jesus in the desert fasting and praying, forty days between his resurrection and his ascension. Always forty. Always the fullness of things in the measure of history.

Fine. And, now, what about 2? That’s plain too. Two are the two commandments to which Jesus reduces the law and the prophets, that is, love God above all things, and your neighbour as yourself.

Now then, if from 40, which is perfection, we subtract 2, which is totality, nothing is left, as we remove the whole from the whole, and consequently the result of that subtraction - which is 38 - is a symbol of that which seems to be something when in fact it is nothing, seems to have strength when in fact is weak, is a paralytic who, in spite of waiting on his pallet by the pool, had not even strength to throw himself into it. In consequence, always according to Augustine in his chaste classical Latin, the paralytic at the pool had to be aged exactly 38, not one year more or one year less.

I’m eighty-three at this writing. I don’t know which future Augustine would draw for me. But I don’t want to lose the freshness of my senses, the energy of my body, the liveliness of my reactions, the electricity of my skin, the readiness of my members, the friendship of the environment. And for that I want to befriend more and more the angels that live in that environment and play in its waters. They renew my youth, they care for my body, they heal my weaknesses. They are always ready to renew my worn-out tissues when I have recourse to them in faith therapy. Angels who heal and strengthen, who cleanse and straighten, who adjust and enliven mind and body with their therapeutic knowledge and their tender love. Angels of the clouds and the winds, of the lands and the waters, of the rivers and the seas, friends of creation and custodians of men and women. Enter into my life to make it whole, to make it holy, to make it come alive.

Thank you, dear angel of the waters.