The Ministry of Healing and the Gospel of Hope - Chapter Three

Chapter 3: Facing our Fears, Journeying into Authenticity, and Finding Healing in Unexpected Ways  

One of the ways we proclaim hope is to reflect on and share the healing we have witnessed.  To proclaim hope is to be a witness. If hope truly is a virtue, then as leaders, as comforters and companions, we must form the habit of nurturing hope within ourselves.  Only then, will we be able to proclaim it and witness it to the world. We proclaim and we witness through telling stories. This allows us to help to nurture the virtue of hope in others. In telling and retelling stories of healing we proclaim God’s grace and reject the temptation to lead others into despair or peddle them illusion.

When I was a young adult, my dear friend Jim Bain was in the final stages of AIDS and hospitalized.  Jim had hemophilia. Someone with hemophilia lacks the appropriate clotting agent in their blood that prevents them from bleeding to death. Cuts are not just a problem for someone with hemophilia.  Internal bleeding can be very destructive. Various bleedings into Jim’s joints had led to several difficult and dangerous operations and the fusing of several of his joints. In the mid-eighties, during one, or several of those operations, and over the course of taking regular factor eight clotting injections to prevent accidental bleedings, Jim became infected with the HIV virus.  During his final hospitalization in 1993, it was difficult for all of us who loved him to see him decline so quickly.  He was a man who had such a joy of life, a lively sense of humour, and an inherent optimism. It was difficult for his family. His mother had already lost her eldest son, and her husband had died the previous December. At that time, an HIV/AIDS diagnosis was not only a death sentence but a great stigma.  Thus, it was difficult for the community to understand what was happening, for Jim had been reluctant to share the nature of his illness with all but a few of his closest friends. People wondered what was wrong with him. They could see him declining. Was it cancer? If anyone thought it was AIDS they dared not voice it. As one of his closest friends, it was also difficult to deal with what the illness was doing to him and what it was doing to the web of relationships of which Jim was a part. 

ca. 1988, with Jim Bain (clowning around as usual) and my
Uncle Bryan Rason (seated).  Jim and I were charter members
of the Richmond Hill Optimist Club.  I believe this was our inaugural
Charter gala celebration.

After a couple of months of lengthy, emotionally draining visits, very soon before he died, I stopped visiting. The visits were typically characterized by Jim becoming more demanding about bits of minutia that seemed so unimportant to those around him. It was difficult to see him decline, and sadly, the visits were too much for my younger self to cope with. I was in the very early days of my own adult faith formation, and while Jim and I were both people of faith, faith was not something we discussed very much. One day, while unloading my feelings to Athena, the woman that would one day become my wife, she asked me pointedly (being the good Pentecostal that she was in those days), have you prayed with Jim for healing?  The question took me back. I had prayed for him but not with him. I was, after all, the typical shy, reserved Anglican. Jim had been raised in the United Church. Neither of us were anything close to card-carrying evangelicals who prayed openly together.  After a day or so of consideration, I resolved to have the courage to pray with him. I went down to the hospital and asked Jim if he would like me to pray for and with him.  To my surprise and delight, he said yes.  We had a short moment in which I prayed for healing.  It was moment of tender intimacy and then it was done, and he was very grateful. I think we both felt a burden lift and the rift that had formed between us seemed to dissipate.  It was a holy and healing moment.

 A few weeks later Jim died.  After his funeral, I was at the local Mr. Donut (remember Mr. Donut?) with a mutual friend. In fact Jim had introduced me to her several years earlier.  She belonged to an evangelical house church.  I must admit that I had learned much about the faith from her; she had taught me a lot about the Scriptures and had mentored me in many ways. Thus I was shocked when she turned to me and said, “So one thing I don’t get, Dan, if there were so many people praying for Jim to be healed, why did he die?”  I was shocked by her honesty, and yet, I didn’t understand the question.  I didn’t understand it because something remarkable had happened that day that I prayed with Jim. That day both Jim and I had experienced healing. To be sure, Jim’s body was not healed. We just didn’t have the right chemical cocktail in those days. However, the wedge that the illness had been driving between us was healed.  That time of prayer was a moment of God’s grace in which we were reconciled as brothers and I was given the grace to let him go. I had prayed for his bodily healing but found our relationship had been healed, and I found that my heart and spirit had been healed. I believe that Jim experienced a similar healing that day.  His mother told me that the night he died his face lit up. She said, “I think Jesus was with him.” Until that moment of prayer together, it had been the illness that was shaping and defining and harming our friendship, when we prayed together it was Christ who defined our relationship.  In that prayer, through the wonderful power of the Holy Spirit, we were healed.  The illness may have continued to work away on his body, but it no longer owned him, nor did it own our friendship.  We affirmed in prayer, and God affirmed, that we belonged to Christ.

Some of you will remember the song, “I have seen clearly now the rain is gone.”  It was Jim’s favourite song. When I look back, I realize that most of Jim’s life had been spent in physical pain. By some cruel twist of fate his physical pain was added to by the tragedy of the HIV virus.  Yet, he would not have countenanced framing his life in these terms. His pain was real, but neither hemophilia nor HIV defined him.  For Jim, life was truly wonderful, joyful and every moment was a gift well worth living.  No matter how much suffering he faced, “it was gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny-day,” as the song said. To know Jim was to know that this was not some starry-eyed optimism, but rather hope.  Jim’s very being was imbibed by hope. Jim understood the reality of pain.  Jim understood the cross.  The thing about hope is that it not only looks forward, but that hope looks back from the vantage point of the risen sun, through the rain, through the tears, and reframes our human frailty in the embrace of God’s strength.  You see, Jim lived a life of wholeness and health, in spite of physical ailment.  He knew that hemophilia was not something to be cured but simply his condition for living.  He chose to live well.  So when our mutual friend asked, “why was he not healed?” There answer should already be evident. He was already whole.

This is the context in which I first learned about Christian healing.  Too often we have focused simply on that simplistic idea of cure as “fix” and been sorely disappointed when that fix is not to be had. Our disappointment shields us from seeing the healing that has actually taken place and the wholeness that is to be found in Christ present amongst us.  As I stated in the Introduction of Prayers for Healing from the Anglican Tradition, healing prayer is about widening our peripheral vision that we might see the signs of God’s grace in a hurting world.

Once again, I beg you not to misunderstand me.  I am not speaking against the notion of praying for physical cure, I would not have compiled a little book of prayers for healing if I did not believe that God grants healing in all ways to people, in body, mind, and spirit.  It should always be our deep desire to see those who are sick returned to physical health. I prayed for Jim’s physical healing. Yet, healing takes a variety of forms. We all know many for whom we have prayed that have been healed in body and yet there are many others whose physical illnesses have not abated with prayer.

The unfairness of this reality is something we must confront. This is what theologians call the problem of theodicy: why does a loving God allow suffering, and more poignantly, suffering in some and cure in others? One afternoon I heard Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People,H HHHhhhhaldjaljlaon the CBC Radio promoting a recent book and he commented that we all wish we could live in a world in which young people don’t die, where the unjust are punished for their deeds, in a world in which earthquakes, wars and famines would not take the lives of the most vulnerable among us, and yet, we must deal with the world in which we live.  Does the fact that God does not intervene shake our belief or does it compel us to search for deeper meaning?

Kushner wisely moves us from the question of “why?” which is an honest and fair question in and of itself, and reorients us to consider the reality that is before us. Reality is what we have.  I think that for the Christian, the signs of healing whatever they might be, are signs of God’s love for a hurting world.  I am convinced that more often than taking the pain away, God journeys with us in our pain and suffering.  What often happens is that the pain along the way obscures the reality of the presence of God.  The cross we bear often blinds us to the resurrection already shining its light upon us.  The gift that my friend Jim shared was an ability to see healing in the unconventional places and in unconventional ways, to catch a glimpse of the Resurrection from Golgotha. For Jim, his conditions for living were more challenging than for most of us and yet he saw his pain with different eyes.

Sometimes it can still be difficult for us to see the healing hand of God at work. One evening, in the early days of my parish ministry, I received a telephone call to rush to the ICU to visit a parishioner who had been admitted for a stroke.  His family held vigil at his bedside.  I had enough experience to know that the situation was very critical.  The signs were not good.  He was in an induced coma and not expected to live. Tubes protruded from him as he lay motionless on life support. I attempted, in prayer, to prepare the family for his death.  That was an extraordinary pastoral miscalculation.  Unsatisfied, and perhaps a bit shocked by the prayer that I had offered, his wife then prayed most fervently for his complete recovery, correcting my wrongheaded prayer commending him to God’s mercy and will. To my great surprise, within days he was awake and cogent and had suffered no paralysis.  Thankfully, God had answered the prayer of the worried wife, rather than that of the young priest.  However, after a few days it became evident that some of his cognitive functioning had been impaired. There was some hope that with therapy he could make some progress, but sadly, considerable damaged had occurred.

What had happened? Had God not answered prayer, or had God only partially answered prayer? These situations are pastorally difficult and require careful sensitivity. What was the healing that this man experienced? I still struggle with that question. I suppose we can only face the reality of suffering and believe that whatever healing occurs or does not occur, we are not alone in that suffering but walking alongside a God who cares so deeply for us that he knows what it is to suffer alongside us. Perhaps healing is simply the companionship of journeying together through pain and suffering.

One of my favourite stories of healing involves the weekly prayer list.  You will know the one that I am talking about; it is that long list of names that occurs in our weekly intercessions and prayers of the people.  A few years back I went to visit a woman who had been diagnosed with cancer.  I visited her in hospital and asked if she would like to be on the prayer list?  “Heavens, no!” she replied, “every time you clergy put someone on that list they die!” For many, it seems that there is only one way off that list and it involves a visit to the funeral home. She conceded that I could pray for her, but privately.  And so I did.  I am happy to say she has made a complete recovery and lived for many more years.  The truth is that many people do make it off that list with a full or at least partial recovery.  As a priest, I think we need to get better at publicizing that fact and thanking God for healing that occurs daily in our midst.

            I often think of my friend David. I met David in my curacy in Thornhill and knew he was facing a very serious diagnosis of stage four prostate cancer.  Once a month we offered anointing during the Eucharist for healing and wholeness.  His wife nudged him one day and asked him if he was going for up anointing.  He said, “Certainly not.”  He had in his mind people getting knocked over and throwing their crutches away.  He did not need false hope.  However, he later stirred up the courage to speak with the rector who explained to him what sacramental anointing was and what it was not.  The next time anointing was offered he mustered up the courage, and with God’s help, came forward.  He later told me that as the lay anointer offered a gentle simple prayer and as his forehead was anointed he felt a warmth and grace come over him, like a blanket.  This was in 2009.  I left the parish in 2010 and expected that I would never see him again.  You can imagine my surprise when, a couple of years later, he and his wife showed up at my new parish, having moved into the area, and joined the congregation. His cancer has not been cured but he outlived every expectation. With considerable medical intervention and with lots of prayer and hope, he lived on for another eight years – long enough for him to truly come alive in his faith, to see his grandson come into this world, and to bring that little boy to church to begin to form a relationship with the God of hope. When I greeted him that day he walked through the doors, he said “surprised eh? My doctor says I’m supposed to be dead.”  His faith had come alive.  He told me that he had begun to read Scripture (starting of course with Job!) and that he had begun to try to understand his life in light of where God had led him and where and how God was leading him today. He became a founding member of a cancer support community we started in that parish. He was a great companion on the journey, laughing, crying, and hoping along with so many others on that same road. Dave was one of the great evangelists of hope that I have known in my life and a true witness to God’s healing power. Healing is never just about the body, nor is it even just about our souls.  It is always about the arrival of the kingdom of God.

            What all of these stories have in common is the thread of honesty.  In the face of illness we are tempted toward either despair or illusion.  Retreating into despair only fuels brokenness, and retreating into illusion makes reality all the more difficult when we must ultimately face it.  Illusion only delays despair.  What prayer does, though, is awaken us to the truth.  Prayer calls us into our deepest place of authenticity.  In prayer we articulate our human frailty and vulnerability. In prayer we also articulate and proclaim our belief in the all-powerful and all-loving God of hope. In prayer we check in with the great physician who tells us no lies, who does not give us false hope, but instils in us truth and hope through his self-giving love.   In prayer we become open to new possibilities for healing that are unimaginable when we otherwise retreat into despair or illusion.  In prayer we ground ourselves in our true baptismal identity.  In prayer, in sacramental anointing, in witnessing, we remember that we belong to Christ.  This reality is the subject of our next chapter.

….THE MINISTRY OF HEALING AND THE GOSPEL OF HOPE CONTINUES NEXT WEEK…