Questions about Healing

 

Questions about healing.

Even before we moved to Monroe, I began asking parishioners at St. Paul's, "How can I help?" This was modeled after a TV series that Mary Pat and I enjoy where the head of a hospital regularly responds to people who come to him with problems, "How can I help?"

Again and again I would hear the response, "We need healing."

Healing. I have long known that the word and concept of healing was not as simple as it sounds. I wonder to myself what does even the word mean? What does the person using the word mean? It means a myriad different things, depending on the person and the circumstance.

Dictionary meanings include: cure, fix, mend, rehabilitate. One line of thought would have it that healing is essentially "transcending suffering." I have heard preachers and teachers over the years emphasize that healing and wholeness are related; so the word would mean "becoming whole." Healing and wholeness are both related to "holiness." A book that was influential for me some years ago is titled, All sickness is homesickness. The book develops an understanding of healing as physical, emotional, and spiritual. It is varied in its approach and outcome, in its method and its intention.

Jesus was a healer, among other things. His words "God saves." It leaves me wondering if God is the one who provides healing, while we may provide temporary cures, fixes, rehabilitations? Is rescuing someone a healing? Redeeming someone? Certainly rescuing and redeeming might well be experienced as healing. Are they something different? Does one take priority over the other?

In the midst of a pandemic, people around the world are quite accustomed to the challenges of healing at a time when people everywhere are suffering from the effects of Covid-19. Vaccines have demonstrated the ability to prevent the infection or "serious hospital stays or death." Vaccines would seem to have a healing component. Vaccines have saved a multitude over the last century from diseases like polio, smallpox, measles and others.

Vaccines don't cure however. Does healing have to cure the disease? Perhaps healing has to do with learning how to live with disease or disability with grace? We hear of stories like that all the time.

Pharmaceutical developments have produced much healing over the years. In my lifetime the development of antibiotics have cured many infections. I heard it said that the prominent cause of death in the first century of the common era was "tooth decay." In the absence of antibiotics, tooth decay could quickly develop into abscesses which could quickly spread to the brain or the circulatory system, leading to death.

Yet, while antibiotics have seemed miraculous in their healing properties, we have also become aware that they have led to the development of super-bacteria. Can healing itself be a cause of disease?

When I was young I was for a time interested in watching Oral Roberts on TV. He seemed to provide in his spectacular healings a regular dose of entertainment as well as healing. I was interested in the possibility of the miraculous and at the same time was not entirely sure that so-called "miracles" weren't the work of charlatans.

On the other hand, at this point in my life, I have seen many examples of people's lives being transformed by a simple word or gesture. One strong, manly man, melted in tears when I told him that my church would be happy to baptize and welcome him in our baptismal pool. I have accompanied men and women who have experienced healing when they found the grace to admit their addictions.

Healing can sometimes feel like death. It can be the death of a former way of life that needed to be ended so that a new life could take root.

Some of you may have heard the story about the man who was being chased by a tiger and falls off a cliff. Luckily he catches a branch and is hanging there from it, trying to figure out what to do. In desperation he cries out, “If there’s a God up there, I’ll do anything if you’ll save me!” Suddenly a voice booms down from the heavens, “This is God and I want to save you! All you have to do is let go of the branch!” There’s a long pause as the man thinks that over, then he finally turns back up and says “Is there anyone ELSE up there?”

There is healing of body and there is healing of emotional and spiritual reality and often I think that the emotional and spiritual are more important than the body. There is healing of disease, but equally important is healing of heartache and homesickness. There is an intractability about the healing that happens with the loss of a loved one. Over and over again one hears that the pain never goes away. But with healing, some kind of peace or acceptance is possible.

Healing is not a problem to be solved; nor is there a simple method for achieving it.

I once heard a man speak to a crowd of several thousand people. He was born with no arms or legs. He kept his audience enthralled for over an hour with his energy for life, his joy, and his determination to choose life over death. His healing had not been getting new limbs but was found in his limitless hope.

Can healing be pictured by something like that? What does it look like? How do we know it when it arrives? Will we know it when it shows up at our doorstep? Will it feel like something we have crafted or like an extraordinary gift that we do not deserve? Will we say "Thank you?"