Everyone always wants to see the instrument of healing. One would think that just healing them would be sufficient, but, sense-bound as the human is, they need to see and then feel or taste or smell it. Strangely, as dependent as they are on hearing, sound really never works. This feature of the funny little animals has provided Raphael with marvelous scope for creativity over the years. Back at the beginning, he’d rather assumed that his was not a terribly creative assignment. To heal is simply to put back together the broken which doesn’t seem to offer much scope for creativity. But he almost immediately began to see the possibilities. Most of creation can be healed almost invisibly: a time-lapse of a restored forest seems completely instrument-less and many an injured mouse has been restored without any obvious agent. Ah! but, people! There is an epic canvas for inventing a plausible cover for his work. They cannot be healed if they won’t accept it and they rarely accept healing without being able to identify a physical cure.
Some among the healed imagined that he was involved only in what they termed “miraculous” healings: the dramatic and sudden recoveries. Actually, he was there for all of them. Every cut. Every bruise. Every hacking cough stopped. All the bouts of indigestion and headache and despair and ill humors.
Others among his kin thought this work humiliating and, yes, honored him for it but never understood its true nature. There was a lot of blood and piss and filth and he had to be right down in it. Azrael had his sword. Gabriel came close to his subjects but never touched them with anything but his voice. Fortunate for Raphael his angelic intellection!
It has been millenia of invention. The instruments of healing vary wildly and Raphael dearly loves the ways that people puzzle over them. Different ages need different instruments and the variety is endless. This variation has caused them all to keep puzzling and studying and researching through the centuries but this is probably good for them and the development of the virtues. Raphael has never figured out how to keep these necessary changes from causing the new humans to despise the old. They haven’t figured out — and probably never will — that cow dung or saline or leeches or sulfides it’s not the instrument but him. And so, they think all historic healings were false or inadvertent or lucky and theirs are concrete and “natural:” truly a word to conjure with, for what could be more natural than dominion over his own sphere.
There is a necessary correspondence between the cardinal things: the event of the injury, the personality of the cure, the frame of the patient, and the temper of the age. The ancients had been content with stirred waters. In 1200 Anno Domini the temper of the age was toward humility and so the earthier the invented instrument the more likely the patient could believe. In the Enlightenment a posture of skepticism concealed the most gullible of cultural climates and thus the cure must be as paradoxical and punishing as he could contrive. Red-hot irons for syphilis had been a stroke of brilliance even by his standards. Of course bitterness had been the necessary ingredient to cure a flu during Romanticism, and for the 21st century new levels of absurdity and unreality must be contrived for the grubby little materialists – he’d probably never top the sugar pill or laser light therapy for treatment of gluten intolerance and cancer. When the current age completed its turn toward renewed religious devotion, relics would be effective again.
Historical ages change, yes, and also stay the same. Some moderns had lately been arguing that a mother’s saliva contained a healing enzyme, utterly oblivious to his actual work in repairing wounded child’s skin and to his artistry in perfectly balancing a playground cut with affirmation of love, minimal understanding in the patient, and the warmth of a close family. Did they think that neglected children’s cuts didn’t heal? He loved them without enzymatic saliva.
Like a sculptor working at the top of a cathedral column shaping a never to be seen gargoyle Raphael has accepted his invisible role. If people had learned nothing from the balancing act of healing Tobit’s blindness, they would likely never see. Fish bile repairing the damage of bird dung was a rare revelatory moment that none had yet seen. Flannery had nearly tipped his hand too. The Pantocrator tattoo had healed Obadiah Elihue driving out the Adamic infection and restoring the Imago. Metaphor and paradox abounded though, and Raphael rather thought that all would be revealed in the end and like a lightning bolt they would all see and laugh at the dance of diagnosis and treatment they’d choreographed over the long centuries. See it truly for the combined service and jest it had always been.