Jesus passed the Pool of Bethzatha. Crowds of sick people — blind, lame, paralyzed — sat waiting for the waters to be stirred. At intervals, the angel of the Lord came down to the pool and stirred the waters. The first person to enter the water after it was stirred was cured of any ailment or suffering. One man waiting there had an illness that had lasted for thrity-eight years. Jesus saw him and said, “Do you want to be well?” “Sir,” replied the sick man. “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get there, someone else gets there before me.”   (John 5: 1-7)
The man in this parable is not unlike many of my male clients who climb the corporate ladder. This man, in any modern parable or myth, has been climbing the corporate ladder for thirty-eight years, with every one getting to the top before he does. Just when he works hard, has all his numbers, some one else sneaks in just ahead of him and gets the promotion. He’s devastated.

“I grabbed on to the rope and all I could think about was getting to the top,” John said in contemporary metaphor. John, a client who is up there in the corporate world, knows only too well the exhaustion of that lame man from Bethzatha. “The pace is killing me,” he says, “but the only way I know how to fix it is to just go faster. No matter how hard I work, no matter how many butts I kiss, I’ve discovered it’s not the ladder to success and security I’m climbing, but Jacob’s Ladder — the ladder between heaven and hell.”    

The corporate world honors ego, not soul. Ego is outer-directed, goal-oriented, efficient. Soul is inner-directed, process-oriented, diffuse. Our friend in the gospel parable has lost all feeling in his legs — in his foundation, in his vitality. He has lost touch with his life force. Jesus, in modern reframe, is a metaphor for soul. Soul comes along and confronts the exhausted ego: “Do you want to heal? Do you want to be whole?”

The paralyzed man’s feelings of defeat, depression, loss of identity pull him down, enable him to get in touch with a deeper need for meaning in his life. He first complains of his situation, defends, then becomes despondent. His emotions pull him in, within, which allows him to shut out the noise and demands of the outside world so he can hear an inner spiritual noise –his own inner voice, his soul.

The angel came down and stirred the waters of his emotions. This allowed him to move within, where real healing begins. He knew what he had been doing outside — fighting to get to the pool, fighting to get to the top — hadn’t worked. He looked to the inside, to his soul, for direction.

Our contemporary corporate climber, in a similiar existential crisis, may, at this point, enter therapy. As a therapist, it is my job to sit with this person long enough until he or she can hear that inner voice and respond to the crisis from within his or her own person. Jesus, in the parable, shows the cripple how he was looking to the outside for what was already within himself. Towards the end of the gospel story, Jesus tells him: The pool is within you. The strength, the wisdom, the answers are all within you. Get up and walk.

Once our cripple could experience this spiritual pool within and not look for healing outside himself, he could feel the stirring. It stirred within. He could move into the pool of his own vitality. He could stand on his own foundation, find his legs and walk. His emotions helped him to move within, to find his new meaning, his new direction. The river within began to flow.

Vern Harper said it a different way: “The faster you go, the less you know.” The more we take on, the more we attempt to juggle without first balancing what we have, the less conscious we will be of what we do. Without grounding ourselves (finding or identifying our legs) in a conscious way, about how we use our energy, how our choices color our outcomes, we find ourselves at the mercy of our unconscious demons. We lose touch with our own vitality.

Our cripple felt his angel, his emotions, stir him from within. He began to feel — to feel life in his legs again. He found the strength he needed to do what he needed. Our soul, likewise, asks us, when we lose touch with our interior world, when we dry out, shut down, “Do you want to be well? Do you want to get in touch with your true vitality?”

Healing and energy and power, all within.