Church news – May

“Miracles aren’t contrary to nature; they are contrary to what we know about nature.”

— Saint Augustine

“These are the days of miracle and wonder. . .”—Paul Simon

I wish we could see more of the sun; that the air was warmer for May Day. I wish there were no pandemics, that we could reverse climate change tomorrow, and I wish Vladimir Putin would just go to his room and never come out.

It’s no wonder that Paul Simon is my current earworm. I find myself constantly singing this song in my head. I finally pulled the CD out of storage to listen to in my car. I guess I need Paul Simon to remind me that days of chill and darkness, of war and devastation, of extreme weather and lingering pandemic disease could actually be something else.

On top of  the previously mentioned stressors, my spouse fell in the kitchen late in January and fractured his hip. For the third time. He acquired an infection while in hospital, and an anticipated one-week stay expanded to two months.

Perhaps part of any miracle here is that, in timely fashion, a friend returned a book she’d borrowed. I hadn’t read it in years and was inspired to read it again. It is The Hidden Messages in Water by Dr. Masaru Emoto, a naturopathic practitioner. Fascinated by the practice of Homeopathy, he was inspired to explore the transference properties of water. As he tried to figure out how to exactly study this property, he remembered an obvious statement we all heard as children: that no two snowflakes are alike. He would have to freeze water in order to study it. And he would somehow have to stimulate it, as it were, in order to observe changes in its structure. Freezing results in a crystalline structure, which gave him a tiny window of opportunity to photo-document structural changes before it melted, and his book is full of photos of ice crystals. The crystalline changes were induced by exposure to external stimuli. The first was music: Comparing the response of water to music, he discovered that classical music (Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin) produced crystals of unified form and patterns of beauty. Conversely, heavy metal rock created malformed and disjointed crystalline structure.

The next experiments were conducted with words. Really. Words were written on pieces of paper that were then wrapped around containers of water so the words were “looking into” the water. And miraculously enough, the water changed. Upon freezing, the ice crystals formed according to the stimulus received; words of love, peace, gratitude formed beautifully, orderly patterned crystals of ice, while words of derision or insult formed crystalline shapes like those formed by heavy metal rock. Turns out you can actually insult water by calling it stupid.

The human body is roughly 70 percent water. It takes little imagination to pursue a line of thought regarding the impact of environment on one’s physical condition. Is it possible that the negative impacts of environment on a physical body would be partly transferred through water? While I am no scientist, I’m up for a little experimentation, and I’m a big fan of healing. So I wrote the word “Healing” on a piece of paper and taped it to Dave’s water bottle. While I am not overly skeptical, I tend to be pretty objective. Within 2-3 days, I observed significant changes that indicated Dave’s healing had accelerated. The pace slowed a bit after that, but not significantly. He’s acquired a second water bottle (unlabeled), and the first bottle, having gotten occasionally wet, is losing its label. I was writing a new label when my daughter suggested we “up the ante” a bit; instead of writing ‘healing’ on the bottle, write the word ‘healed.’ Hmm. . .

This experiment is ongoing. Dave has also suffered with neuropathy for about 20 years. So he is also getting the label “pain free” attached to his water bottle. And we will see how that goes, so stay tuned. Maybe these are the days of miracle and wonder, and I can start singing with George Harrison, “Here Comes The Sun.”