The Healing Litany
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
O Healing River
Minneapolis, Minnesota
I want to talk about healing.
But I do not want to do it in a hospital.
I do not begrudge them, nor is there a chip on my shoulder. Well, on second thought, perhaps there is. And perhaps there even should be. In my view the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower spoke of so prophetically when he left office, is matched by the Medical Industrial Complex that is intent on technological interventions and cures that will no-doubt be profitable. So yes, I’m not impressed, though I am thankful for a few interventions that have saved my life.
But still.
I want to talk about healing but I do not want to do it in a hospital. I want to go “out there” where we begin to live out the implications of our expensive stay. I want to go “out there,” when rehabilitation ends and life begins to re-configure itself. I want to go “out there” where healing happens because life extends itself, renews itself, replaces wounds with scars and then moves along with the dawn of each new day. I want to be “out there” where it happens almost accidentally, in places we least expect it, in places we love it and make way for it.
I want to talk about healing.
I want to talk about life.
I’d like for us to open our eyes. Churches long ago ceeded healing to the healing industries, insurance companies, the medical/industrial complex. They do not perceive themselves as arenas of healing. If they do, if we do, we quickly begin to follow the medical model, and almost want to turn church into either a gym or a mini-clinic (though doughnuts remain by the coffee urn).
Yes, churches can give blood pressure readings. Yes, they can have walking clubs. Yes, they can remind folks of immunizations. Yes, they can learn the ins and outs of various disease.
But what I want to talk about, and find, is deeper than that, it is broader than that. Most of all, it is more beautiful than that.
It is found in the way people care for each other, respond to each other, learn from each other. It is found in the way we say, “Happy birthday” to Gertrude, who has been a member of our church for 80 years, and is now about to turn 98. There is no intervention to stop the passing of years. But there are blessings to love it, to honor it, to bring it fully into the light of love and wisdom.
“What are you doing here?” a pastor once asked the intern who had been assigned to his church. The startled intern didn’t know just what to say. He was at his desk, at church, waiting for something to happen.
“Get out there,” said the pastor.
“Where?”
“Out there,” said the pastor. Out there on the sidewalks, in the cafes, on the porches of people, in their gardens, in their homes, in their lives.
I want to talk about healing.
“So do we,” say its practitioners.
“Good,” I say. “Then let’s go. Let’s listen. Let’s look.”
A healing river awaits us.
- O Healing River