Sermon “The Full Nature of Healing” The Rev. Rali Weaver

Part of the training to become a minister includes something called Clinical Pastoral Education or CPE. I fulfilled my CPE at Maine Medical Center in my third and final year of seminary. In my role there as a Chaplain in Training I worked three days per week spending half of my time with Respiratory Rehabilitation Patients and their families and half of my time with patients and treatment teams on the Psychiatric unit.

You might think that these experiences would be somewhat incongruous. One chaplaincy working to heal the spirits of mentally and emotionally ill patients while the other working to heal the hearts of families loosing their loved ones and people nearing the end of their life. To be honest in the beginning I saw these divisions but as time went on and through the theological reflections I was doing as part of the CPE Program, I began to see the interconnected fabric of suffering and grief that connects us all. For three days per week, from September to May I visited patients on these two floors— over time seeing their experience more and more in relationship to the entire human experience of which we are all a part. And by the time I reached my graduation I felt I had a deeper understanding of the nature of illness as part of the human experience. I am pretty sure that one part of the healing process has to do with this transition between our singular experience and finding how our experience interconnects with others.

On my graduation day from CPE, the speaker, who was the head Protestant Chaplain from Mercy Hospital in Portland, Me, outlined in his speech the need as he saw it for Chaplains. Chaplains, he explained, were needed as divine conduits to remove sin and promote healing. I remember bristling at his words as he described the vital importance of a conduit for the divine to wash away sin, which he saw as the penultimate experience before the onset of an illness.

I was jarred by his words. How could sin be the precursor to illness?

How could any person be more divine than another?

If it hadn’t been my graduation day from CPE and I wasn’t ready to get out of that hospital for good, I would have stood with my arms akimbo and argued against his rationale.

Illness exists. It cannot be avoided. Even healthy people who live otherwise perfect lives, get sick. And some people who sin all the day long, drinking and smoking, which must be sins, sometimes do not get sick.

As I see it if his convictions were true then a whole bunch of people would have had to either been living hidden lives of sin to cause their illness or God makes some huge mistakes.

What I can agree with in the context of his words is that the aim of most religions has been to make sense of illness and suffering and to make clear a pathway to health and wellbeing. Seeing that he was a Baptist Minister in a Catholic Hospital I am not sure he could have seen the situation any differently.

From most religious perspectives the concept disease and dis-ease are never far removed from each other.

There are religious provisions for unaccountable illness such as demons possessing a body or Karma at birth.

Even original sin can be considered something that is thrust upon every person born into this life. When expressed in this way, removing the Karma, or demons or original sin, might by that logic require divine intervention.

One of the most fascinating interpretations of healing (to me) comes out of the Christian Science tradition.

If you aren’t already familiar with it Christian Science is a belief system founded in 1866 by Mary Baker Eddy a deeply religious Christian who wrote books advocating a spiritual solution to health and moral issues

Simply put Christian Scientists believe that sickness is the result of fear, ignorance, and sin. As Mary Baker Eddy articulated it when the erroneous belief is corrected, the sickness will disappear. Christian Scientists trust that the way to healing is to replace the false belief that we are in control with true understanding of God's goodness. In this context suffering occurs only when one believes (consciously or unconsciously) in the apparent reality of the illness and healing of all kinds can take place when the person realizes that illness has no power because God is the only power.

Because Christian Scientists view the material world as an illusion, and the Spiritual World as true, dissolving the false reality of the material world promotes health and wellbeing. In this way of thinking death becomes the ultimate healing because it dissolves all separation between the individual spirit and the spiritual world of God.

I find this theory fascinating because it is quite different from the worldly view I hold as a Unitarian Universalist. And yet, as in all world views, I wonder if there isn’t some element of truth in it.

A few months ago I got the flu. I was uncomfortable, but able to function. Several people commented on my lack of complaining.

But as I saw it, complaining wouldn’t have helped anything. The flu was going around. I was just a part of the whole fabric of people who were sick. And to be honest, I appreciated the amount of sleep I was getting, I appreciated the way the brief illness made me slow down and take care of myself.

Shifting my perspective did not make me well, but it did make the illness easier to bear.

In many ways our Western medical approach resembles the simple causal effect between sickness and cure without taking into account any of the spiritual or emotional causes to an illness.

While I reject the idea that sin is the cause of illness I do think there are ways that western medicine encourages the quick fix that keeps us from embracing what our bodies might be trying to tell us.

When I was in seminary I was diagnosed with Epstein Barr Virus: a chronic fatigue virus similar to infectious mononucleosis, which is one of the most common virus’, found in the human body. I was working a very rigorous schedule at the time, trying to keep up 15 credit hours at the seminary, working 25-30 hours per week cleaning houses and offices, working for 8 hours 3 days per week doing my CPE and working as a Lay Chaplain at my sponsorship church. In order to study I was sleeping an average of 3 hours per night and driving a minimum of 400 miles per week. All the stress of those days left me overtired and weakened my immune system. However it wasn’t until I began to get high fevers and my throat began to close that I started to pay attention to the stress this was putting on my body.

Just 2 or 3 days after the diagnosis when I thought I was well enough to return to class my Old Testament Professor (who happened to be a Catholic Nun) began to talk about how the ways that we interpret our life events effects our ability to see God moving in our lives. Even as a Catholic Nun and as a Christian she believed that she had a choice. She described a time when she broke both of her legs slipping down some stairs in the wintertime. She said that at first she kept angrily thinking “God, why did you do this to me?” and after a time of lament with a slight shift of focus she reframed her question to ask “God- what are you trying to teach me”.

As you might imagine these words hit me as hard as a ton of bricks. What if I, in all my busyness, paused to ask what my swollen glands and high fever had to teach me.

At once I knew the answer. I had been living my life on high speed and it was obvious my body was saying “SLOW DOWN”. Not only that but I was in a bad habit of putting everyone else’s needs ahead of my own. The constant habit of ignoring my need to eat, to exercise, and to drink enough water coupled with the constant need to please others and a schedule that required me to burn my candle at both ends had led things to their present state.

Over the months and years since I have taken a great deal more care with my body and spirit. I am far from perfect, but what I can do really well now is pay attention.

I bring this up to you today because I think one of the most vital steps in healing is paying attention. We must pay attention to our bodies, to our spirits, to our minds and to our environments. Knowing what is really going on can help us see where the life we are living is incongruous with the life we want to live. Knowing this will not make us well and being unconscious will not make us sick but paying full attention will help us to be grounded in our response to anything that comes our way.

The other problem with the theories of sin and sickness lie in the implication that only good things can teach us and that illness is a failure. To believe that any suffering is the end of the story is I believe a misguided obstacle to wellness. (Please notice that I say wellness and not healing) As I see it true wellness, requires both the grounding that comes from paying attention and the reminder that sickness isn’t ever the end of the story. If we can approach any suffering, grief, illness from the perspective that it can teach us something, we might actually learn something new or create something new.

This is the story of our final hymn this morning. Thomas Andrew Dorsey is the author of over 600 gospel hymns, and he wrote Precious Lord (the hymn we are about to sing). His lyric was born out of a very difficult time in his own life. The way he tells it he had given up his life as a jazz performer to settle down with his wife and start an upright life in so doing he dedicated his life to writing ‘gospel music’ (which he believes he first coined the name for). The life of a church musician was hard and he often had to leave his wife to attend revival meetings all across the country. One morning he left early, forgetting to kiss his pregnant wife goodbye and got on the road going from Chicago to St. Louis to play his music. When he arrived at the revival he received word that his wife and baby had died during childbirth. As you can imagine he was devastated. He describes wanting to go back to working at gin joints and returning to the reckless life he had lived before he was married. However in his grief he sat down and wrote the lyrics to Precious Lord. As he described it -- the words for the song came to him “like drops of water falling from the crevice of a rock”.

“Precious Lord take my hand, lead me on, let me stand, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn. Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light, take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.”

Without loneliness and grief, we most likely would not have this song. Without difficulties and sadness and problems and sickness what else might we miss?

The true nature of healing does not come from the medicines we take or any prescribed remedy, it is how we make sense of our own part in the human experience, whether we suffer or are liberated by our perspective, how awake we are to life’s lessons, and what precious gifts we are able to find within the darkness.

May each of us live and breathe as singular beings, become grounded in the mystery of life’s interconnectedness, and open our hearts to the lessons that come our way.

And as we dedicate the space for our Memorial Garden today may we honor it for what it may become, a representation of interconnection to the whole of human experience, a place for sanctuary and for healing in nature offering peace and beauty to all who pass.

May it be so.