She can't hide her light under a bushel

Although three-fourths of Americans believe prayer can cure the terminally ill, the subject is still treated in the popular press as a kind of curiosity, a good cover story on slow news weeks. These stories - you've seen them in Time, Reader's Digest, Newsweek, and any number of women's magazines - suffer from redundancy that would test the patience of Job. They always begin with an anecdote of some remarkable recovery that stumped the doctors. Then we get a few quotations from mind-body specialists at the Harvard Medical School and references to studies which have shown that religious people have shorter and more successful hospital stays than nonbelievers. Toward the end of every article, some soured-toned skeptic is wheeled out to raise objections about the methodology of these studies, and finally the reporter concludes by noting, "The debate rages on."

But that "is it real, isn't it real?" framework invariably fails to explore the profound social, financial, and political challenges that this radical spiritual practice is already posing. If your prayers for a more incisive and varied examination of the subject in the popular press have gone unanswered, there are, fortunately, other places to look.

One of the most surprising is a Hungarian bestseller called "To Err Is Divine," originally published as "Tranzit Glória," for those of you speaking in (other) tongues. The novel, by Ágota Bozai, isn't interested in the validity of spiritual healing per se. But this distinctly East European satire raises provocative questions about the way modern culture attempts to thwart or appropriate nontraditional methods of healing.

When the story opens, Anna Lévay is a 62-year-old high-school teacher of Hungarian literature. She is exceptionally reserved, conscientious, and, by necessity, penny-pinching. Her days, like her well-respected classes, follow regular, unalterable patterns. She knows exactly how long to run hot water into her bath. She knows just how to arrest a tear in her pantyhose. What she doesn't know is how to explain the halo that has suddenly appeared over her head.

As an atheist and an academic, she turns to the library and the laboratory, researching the appearance of halos in classic literature (varied) and measuring its temperature (moderate). Her primary concern - besides the thought that she might be mad - is how to comb her hair and sleep under the halo's glow. "One should act as if nothing has happened," she thinks primly before donning a pair of sunglasses and drifting off.

Not coincidentally, Anna has been studying Kafka with her students, and readers familiar with "The Metamorphosis" will find their antennae twitching at the absurdist quality of "To Err is Divine." Bozai understands the comic persistence of our daily routines even under the most extraordinary circumstances. The appropriately stilted English translation by David Kramer, under close consultation with the author, maintains its ultradry wit as the circumstances grow increasingly bizarre.

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