Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

February 1, 1998

"Of course it was not I who cured. It was power from the outer world, and the visions and ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds. If I thought I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power would come through it."

--from Black Elk, the great Sioux holy man

A patient who has cancer, a physician himself, brings a story, a parable, to his physician. He begins their session by recounting it:

"Shiva and Shakti, the Divine Couple in Hinduism, are in their heavenly abode watching over the earth. They are touched by the suffering they see. As they watch, Shakti spies a miserable man walking down a road. His clothes are shabby and his sandals are tied together with rope. Her heart is wrung with compassion. She turns to her divine husband and begs him to give the man some gold. Shiva looks at the man for a long moment ‘My Dearest Wife,’ he says, ‘I cannot do that.’

Shakti is astounded. ‘Why, what do you mean, Husband? You are Lord of the Universe. Why can’t you do this simple thing?’

‘I cannot give this to him because he is not yet ready to receive it,’ Shiva replies.

Shakti becomes angry. ‘Do you mean to say you cannot drop a bag of gold in his path?’

‘Surely I can,’ Shiva replies, ‘but that is quite another thing.’

‘Please, Husband,’ says Shakti.

And so Shiva drops a bag of gold in the man’s path. The man meanwhile walks along thinking to himself, ‘I wonder if I will find dinner tonight—or shall I go hungry again?’ Turning a bend in the road, he sees something on the path in his way. ‘Aha,’ he says. ‘Look there, a large rock. How fortunate that I have seen it. I might have torn these poor sandals of mine even further.’ And carefully stepping over the bag of gold, he goes on his way.

The physician asks her patient, "Has life ever dropped you a bag of gold that you recognized and used to enrich your life?" He smiles at her. "Cancer," he says simply. "I thought you’d guess."

Wait a minute. A deadly disease like cancer has enriched his life? The agent of destruction is the agent of healing? How can this be? And yet I have heard many testify to that truth—people with cancer, people with AIDS. It is not always so, of course. Some, like the traveler in the story, cannot see the bag of gold. Some can see only the rock. They want to be cured but not necessarily healed.

There is a difference between curing and healing. Perhaps we should start there. Before the middle of the 19^th century medical remedies--remedies such as bleeding, leeching, and purging--were often useless or actually harmful. But around 1860, physicians became more aware of the deficiencies of their profession, and began to move toward a more scientific approach, one of precision, control, predictability. The body began to be viewed as a kind of complex organism which could best be treated objectively, like any machine that had broken down. With surgery or pills or radiation, that malfunctioning body could be fixed, or cured. Healing was rarely on the agenda. Healing has to do with the spirit, has to do with the whole person, has to do with the cause and context of the illness. Healing has to do with values and meaning. With trust and intention. Healing happens in relationship, soul to soul.

Medical practice is still largely mechanistic, but a shift is coming. Alternative medical approaches, with their emphasis on the whole person, are getting through to the mainstream. Over 1000 health professionals came to a spirituality and healing conference at Harvard last year. Dr. Herbert Benson, president of the Harvard-affiliated Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston, says, "Ideally medicine should be a three-legged stool, with the legs of surgery and pharmaceuticals balanced with spiritual self-care, such as meditation or prayer, but often this third leg is missing." Dr. Benson says that the majority of doctor visits are for illnesses brought on by mental stress, which the first two legs do nothing to alleviate.

Other practitioners see clearly that our individual illnesses must be understood in a larger context. Can one individual, or a single family, be well in a culture that is sick? Can your children escape from the affects of the 400 advertisements most of them see daily? Can you work for a company whose values you deplore and stay well? Can your allergies be treated without any reference to our environmentally damaged autoimmune systems? In this society, we tend to pathologize personal pain, give it a label, give the patient a label—and neglect the root causes. Once again, the personal is the political.

Sarah Conn, ecopsychologist, takes on the diagnostic categories of the DSM IV, that is, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that mental health practitioners use. She believes that individual symptoms are often signals of cultural distress, kind of like the proverbial canary in the coal mine. She tells of a client who is in the process of healing from a shopping addiction. She owned 300 pairs of shoes, and now she’s down to fifteen. Maybe the diagnosis should be "materialistic disorder," says Dr. Conn, and maybe we should understand that this woman is a microcosm of the culture. What happens to the individual when community breaks down, and that person tries to fill the emptiness with consumer goods, substances, celebrities? What if we asked about every illness, mental as well as physical, what is the cultural context of this illness? What must we do to get at the causes, not just the symptoms? Am I my brother’s keeper? So much of our pathology is culturally determined, at least in part. We can never be divided from our brothers and sisters.

Go ahead, buy your child a pair of Nike tennis shoes. He’s been bugging you for them for weeks. How much of the cost comes from advertising? How has that advertising changed the value system of your child? Will he be teased at school if he doesn’t have the "right" shoes? And what is the chance that if he steps into the wrong neighborhood, he could be beaten up, just so some other kid can get those shoes? To heal the individual, we must heal the earth, heal the political system, heal the economic violence done to so many in the name of freedom of opportunity. As Howard Zinn says, "You can’t be neutral on a moving train." Doing nothing is supporting the status quo. We cannot be healed alone.

If this sounds like a lot to take on, remember that you don’t have to do it all—just your piece of it, in your time, in your place. Your life will touch other lives, and they in turn will touch others, and much goodness, much healing, can happen. We move together, not alone; we move in community. That is the meaning of church. Here we live out of healthful values: we learn respect for ourselves and our neighbors; we raise our children to know their own worth; we heal ourselves and move out to the larger world around us with our healing energy.

The healing of our lives requires connectedness; we must understand our interdependence. And if we are connected in the grand scheme of what is, surely we are connected in ways we hardly understand, one to the other. Let me tell you a story a friend told me a few weeks ago—an amazing story. She said that one night when she was fast asleep in her bed in Versailles, Kentucky, she was awakened by a stupendous crash. She went right to her phone and called 911 and reported that there had been a terrible accident in the street just outside her house. She hung up the phone and went outside to see what she might do to help. But looking out her front door, she saw nothing. She went to the back door, but again, the street was empty. By this time the police were there, and abashed, she simply apologized for calling them unnecessarily. The next day she got a telephone call from her daughter’s roommate. "I don’t mean to bother you, Mrs. Vance," she said, "but I thought you would like to know. There was a terrible train wreck in a tunnel in Germany last night, and your daughter was in that train. Some people were killed, but your daughter is fine." My friend asked about the time of the wreck, and it coincided exactly with the time she was awakened—accounting for the change in time zones.

Can it be that the brain works in ways we have as yet to explain? Can it be that love knows no boundaries of time and space? Recent medical experiments with prayer are compelling. Cardiologist Randolph Byrd at San Francisco General Hospital asked people from across the United States to pray for roughly half of 393 individuals admitted to the coronary care unit with either actual heart attacks or severe chest pain. In this double-blind, controlled experiment—neither the patients nor the physicians nor the nurses knew who was and was not being prayed for—those for whom prayer was offered did better in several ways. That group had fewer deaths, required less potent medication, and none required mechanical breathing support. Experiments involving prayer indicate that distance makes no difference, that theological orientation matters not—the prayer of a Christian Fundamentalist and the prayer of a Buddhist or of an agnostic are all equally efficacious. The essential requirement seems to be compassion. "Only love can generate the healing fire," says Agnes Sanford, a gifted healer. Healers don’t themselves heal—but rather act as conduits for this greater love.

Again, the distinction between curing and healing. Healing goes way beyond curing. It has to do with "reweaving the torn fabric of life." The one who is healed is brought into harmony with her own values, with other people, with the earth. It is certainly possible to have a sick body and nevertheless to be healed. It is possible for illness to call us into new relationships, new responsibilities. We learn dependence. We learn humility. We learn thankfulness for precious gifts we formerly took for granted. To the extent that illness brings about transformation of spirit, whether or not a cure is effected, to that extent a person is healed. "Millions long for immortality who wouldn’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon . . . ," says Susan Ertz. I want my body to be whole—for what purpose? Why am I living? What is the meaning of my death?

Healing is, in fact, associated with spiritual wholeness or salvation in many of the world’s religions. In the 17^th Chapter of Luke, we have the story of the ten lepers. They see Jesus and beg, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priest, and as they walk away, they find they are cured. Then one of them turns back, praising God with a loud voice, and falls on his face before Jesus, giving thanks. Then Jesus says, "Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? (This one was a Samaritan, a member of a despised race.) And Jesus said to him, "Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well." Throughout Jesus’ ministry, it is clear that what he offers is a change of heart—the healing of the body symbolizes a larger kind of healing, a healing of the soul.

Although some people seem to to have a special gift for healing, we all have healing powers. One physician put women with metastatic breast cancer in support groups and found that they lived twice as long as women who were not in such groups. What went on in those groups, the physician was asked. Nothing spectacular, just people caring about one another. The woundedness in one brings out the healer in the other, and a kind of mutual blessing occurs. If we isolate ourselves in our pain—whether it is physical or emotional pain—then we tend to become identified with the pain itself. We become the pain. But when we understand that our pain is part of the pain of human existence, part of the human dilemma, then the pain becomes part of what is. We do not feel alone, set apart--and indeed our suffering can even become an offering for all who suffer. Our wound can be a windown for the Divine to enter.

Some of us are professional healers, so to speak: doctors, nurses, therapists, ministers. It is all too easy for us to go to the mechanical model—you know, the carburator is broken, let’s fix it--because then we are protected from difficult emotions—fear, grief, anger. Like the time some years ago when a congregant came to me with an horrendous story of childhood abuse. I listened, but felt my body withdrawing. I moved into a task mode—now let’s see what we can do about this. I gave advice. This is how to fix it. This is how to move on. Months later he made an appointment with me to tell me just how unsatisfactory that session had been. "Do you know what you should have said?" he told me. "You should have said, ‘I’m so sorry all that happened to you.’" He was right. I had to learn.

Let me tell you a story about a young woman named Jenny who was the agent for healing her fiance. No, she was not a physician. She just loved him. It is a tragic story in some ways. Her young man had become separated from his ski party and spent three days in below-zero weather and yet somehow managed to survive. He had been flown from the ski center to a world-renowned team of vascular surgeons in New York to see if they could treat his progressive gangrene and save his feet. The outcome was not clear for about three weeks, and then his left foot began to improve and his right became steadily worse. The surgeons said it would have to be amputated, but he flatly refused. He wanted to keep his foot. Gradually he began to get sicker and sicker as the toxins from his injured foot began to flood his body. His family and friends were desperate, but he would not be moved. He would keep his foot. Then one evening when a group of doctors came in to share the most recent studies and to review his worsening condition, his fiance, driven beyond her endurance, broke in. Weeping, she tore his engagement ring off her finger and thrust it onto the swollen black little toe of his right foot. "I hate this damned foot," she sobbed. "If you want this foot so much why don’t you marry it? You’re going to have to choose, you can’t have us both." The medical team all stared at the little diamond surrounded by the blackness of the foot. Even under the fluorescent lights, the diamond shone with life. The next day the young man scheduled his surgery.

So I maintain that Jenny healed him. No, he wasn’t able to keep his foot. But he learned about the nature of love. He learned about commitment. He realized that what had kept him alive for those three days in the snow was his love for Jenny and the promise of their life together. He had identified so much with his foot that he had forgotten that the person he was, the man Jenny loved, would still be there, foot or no foot. He learned that he was more than his perfect physical self. He was a person, with a life, with meaning, with love. If that’s not a salvation experience, I don’t know what is.

When we are ill or hurting emotionally, it is so easy to identify so completely with our condition that we seem to be inseparable from it. We are the cancer, we are the depression, we are the betrayal. But in fact we are not. The essence of us exists aside and apart from anything that can happen to us and anything that can happen to our body—our essence is thoroughly and completely untouchable. It exists in a realm that cannot be ravaged like the flesh. "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God."

We will all have times when we cannot feel the truth of this invincibility, our holy otherness: we will be distracted by pain, confused by loss. But we will return to this sanctified place again. We will come to know that the spark that animates our being is like the diamond in the flame: unscarred, unscathed. And then we can walk the road that is our life and see the bag of gold for what it is, not a rock to avoid, but an offering for our salvation. We will pick up the bag and jingle the coins and smile and go our way. So be it. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.