Healing, yes, again.

It’s a moment, and it’s a walk

Suppose for a moment there is such a thing as divine healing. Suppose it is a mark of the presence of Jesus, a downpayment towards the later, greater transformation of the world. The world is much more complicated if that is true than if it isn’t.

If it weren’t true, you’re sick, you get on with it. If it is true, there’s a kind of lifeline flung down from the skies. But that lifeline is elusive.

I think a lot about this because I am a Christian and I am someone who credibly can be said to have made unanticipated recoveries from fatal events. One morning my heart stopped and had to be electrocuted repeatedly until it returned, as it were, to the beating path. Two years later I spent a month in a coma. As readers of this blog already know. And I think about healing a lot because body parts still malfunction and because now I have started a new part-time job which is all about responding to the ill-health of others. And also because people around me, some Christian, some not, some sort-of, some maybe, fall sick or their loved ones do and what does healing mean in all those situations?

I’m beginning to conclude it’s about peace with God and the wellness of your soul in his presence. There’s a Sunday-School staple of a woman called Hannah, who was childless, who went to the temple to pray for a child. The priest saw her lips moving and said, more or less, go easy on the sauce, lady. She told him she wasn’t drunk, she was praying, and he said ‘Go in peace then’ and she went and the account tells us ‘her face was no longer sad.’

I have to say that’s been important for me almost every day through the last decade. When she left the temple, Hannah wasn’t pregnant, nothing had changed, but ‘her face was no longer sad’. Everything had changed! The heart of the thing had changed. She had found peace with God in the moment.

That’s why I believe healing is instantaneous, or at least a thing that happens in the moment. It is peace with God for now. Healing is also a walk, sometimes a walk for the rest of your life. It is a walk where every day, or maybe every hour, or maybe sometimes every few minutes, you refresh yourself with God’s peace. As you string these moments together, hours, days, you are healed. The shape and orientation of your life is transformed, yes by the illness, but more by the companionship of God.

The Bible is a treasure-chest of this stuff. The Psalms, for example, on my reading, are repeated swings of the pendulum between pain and peace–hymns and anthems on which we can be carried.

What about when you are mentally ill, trapped in your own mind? What about chronic terrible pain? What about uncertainty and waiting? All these are hard places from which to find a settled peace with God. I agree but I don’t have any other remedy unfortunately and would prescribe the same medicine, with the proviso that we don’t do this alone: a community can help bear the load. And (even if we don’t believe in him) God is sovereign, greater than us, for us, and personally attuned to our darkest corners.

‘As frantic as a firefly in a child’s jar’

An unaging soul in a decaying body

I like this description of the way an eternal part of us remaining even while the body shuts down. This description is from the book The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed, a beautifully evoked tale about three women of Somalia at the beginning of the civil war in 1988. And like good fiction will, it tells you more about Somalia (and much else) than any number of surveys or reports.

She presses her palms into her eyelids and replaces the torpor of her life with shooting amber stars and exploding electric galaxies. She learnt to do this as an indolent little girl, whiling away dead time by voyaging through the quiet, almost-black world behind her eyes. She has not aged much as a soul, still thinks too much, loses herself to dreams and nightmares, her body hiding — no, trapping — what is real and eternal about her, that pinprick of invisible light in skin, desperate for release into the world, as frantic as a firefly in a child’s jar.

Nadifa Mohamed, The Orchard of Lost Souls, 2013, p 163-4

Bread of tomorrow

Hungry for the future.

Rowan Williams’ enjoyable little book Being Disciples (SPCK) has a whole chapter on daily bread which is interesting.

He talks about the need for bread in the wider context of our humanity and being those who need to receive as well as give.

He also notes ‘the odd Greek word that is used in the Gospels for “daily bread” whose exact meaning has proved elusive’ but it could have meant in the original Aramaic that Jesus

was telling us to pray for the gifts of the coming kingdom to be received in the present … The need, the hunger, we must learn to express is a need not simply for sustenance but for God’s future. What we need is the new creation, the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’ (p42)

Rowan Williams Being disciples p 42.

Resume virtues and eulogy virtues

Take your pick

Temporary

Nice snippet from an article I was reading recently, attributable to a New York Times columnist called David Brooke.1

Resume virtues are the things you put on your CV, the promotions you got, the sales you made, the money you earned.

Eulogy virtues are the things people say at your funeral. He always had time for people, he was a good dad, he made people around him feel good.

Since we are absolutely going to die, and all we achieved will be forgotten, decayed, or (at best) archived, maybe good to work on the eulogy virtues.