In Search of Healing and Freedom

Christian Life Community

In Search of Healing and Freedom (talk from Anglesea Weekend)

Susie Hii

First of all, I must say that I am not an expert in this area. Rather I am a seeker, a searcher, a wounded person in need of healing. Healing is a theme very close to my heart because it is my calling in life and because I am in need of healing at all levels – physical, mental and spiritual. The seeds of faith and hope in the healing power of God’s love were sown at Christian Life Community Anglesea weekend in 2008. ‘Then Jesus called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases. And he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal.’ (Luke 9: 1-2.) These words touched me at a deep level and lead to renewed faith and hope in healing and miracles. Jesus performed so many miracles in the Gospels. Do we believe that miracles still happen or that they are a thing of the past? Tom O’Hara writes, ‘If one thing is extremely clear from the gospels, it is that Jesus came to bring healing – not a miraculous cure for a few lucky individuals who happened to meet him, but healing for every human person now, today.’ (1).

Fr. Andy Hamilton says that movements of the heart can lead us to freedom or be obstacles. ‘Two of the main interior movements that restrict our freedom are fear and guilt. Both are emotions that prevent us from relating to others, lock us in on ourselves, immobilise us.” (1). It is my fear of diseases and death after my thyroid operations five years ago that immobilized me, that then leads me on the search for healing. We sing in ‘Amazing Grace”, ‘’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.’ I am not sure whether it was grace or the evil one that taught my heart to fear but I do believe that grace has helped to relieve my fears, and hope that it will continue to bring even more relief. Mahatma Gandhi claimed that the remembrance of God’s name brought with it extraordinary benefits to spirit, mind and body. He said he overcame all his fears simply through the ceaseless repetition of God’s name for there was more power in it than in the atom bomb (2).

I am going to touch on the healing of the body, mind and spirit. Obviously, there are no clear boundaries between these three aspects of ourselves. Disease or disorder in one area affects the others. Similarly, healing of one area leads to healing of the other areas.

Physical cures and mental healing (for most people) now belong in the realm of modern medicine. The more I practise medicine, the more I realize that technological medicine does not have all the answers. Most medications tend to control symptoms rather than cure the diseases. Medicine is advancing at phenomenal pace in the physical area. However, the spiritual area tends to be left behind, ignored. We need to rediscover the power of God in healing and add it to medicine; physical healing from external agents complemented by mental and spiritual healing from one’s inner resources. Prayer is the oldest ‘healing therapy’ in human history. Dr. Larry Dossey notes, “it’s one of the best-kept secrets in modern medicine.” (3)

These days, we practise evidence-based medicine. A study has been conducted by Dr. Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist at the University of California Medical school. Nearly 400 patients suspected of having heart attacks were divided into two randomised groups. The first names of those in one group were given to various Catholic and Protestant groups who were asked to pray for these patients. Neither doctors and nurses nor the patients knew who was or was not being prayed for. The patients who were being prayed for proved less likely to develop heart failure or require antibiotics for pneumonia. It was as if the prayed for group had been given a miracle drug! (3)

For healing of the mind, ‘The essential first step in the healing process is that I openly face my need for healing. This means admitting this need to myself and revealing my need to another by telling the story of my hurts…..The universal experience is that telling the story in itself brings a large measure of healing.’(1) This can happen in our deep sharing of faith in our CLC meetings. We cannot share our faith without sharing our life stories because God is in all things. Our meetings are all the more helpful because God, the Divine Therapist, is in our midst. (However, CLC groups are not therapy groups and if the hurt is too deep, it may be necessary to seek professional help.)

Apart from sharing our stories with others, there is a deeper level to healing, bringing our hurts to God, sharing our stories with God. Cistercian monk, Thomas Keating writes, “Contemplative prayer fosters the healing of these wounds. In psychoanalysis, the patient relives traumatic experiences of the past, and in so doing, integrates them into a healthy pattern of life. If you are faithful to the daily practice of contemplative prayer, these psychic wounds will be healed without your being retraumatised….without your perceiving it, a great many emotional conflicts that are hidden in your unconscious and affecting your decisions more than you realize are being resolved.” (4)

My experience is that digging up the past without asking for God’s help can lead to a dead end, or worse still, a bottomless pit. Without God, there can be no healing. In the words of psychiatrist, Carl Jung, ‘Analytical psychology only helps us to find the way to the religious experience that makes us whole. It is not this experience itself, nor does it bring it about.’ (5)

The more I look inwardly at myself under the microscope, the more faults and imperfections I find. The solution is to take my eyes off myself, look outward to others in need and help them. Inward-looking has to be balanced by outward-looking, contemplation by action/ mission. It is in helping others that we are helped ourselves. We do not have to be completely healed before we can share in the healing of others. We can be wounded healers.

One of the most public figures in our time and place who was given a few months to live but has now outlived the prognosis by about thirty years is Ian Gawler who teaches others meditation as a way to achieve healing. He was taught meditation by psychiatrist, Ainslie Meares, who used meditation extensively in the management of stress, anxiety and other psychoneurotic illnesses.

I am thrilled to hear mind-body experts talk about how meditation can lead to healing. It leads to harmony, to the peace which Jesus says only He can bring, which leads to healing of mind, body and spirit, to wholeness. Listening to the experts in mind-body medicine talk about meditation fills me with excitement that the methods they teach are like the meditation we as Christians (and those of eastern religions) practise except that the religious connotation is removed though they talk about a wise, inner healer. They use healing through guided imagery, which is like the Imaginative Contemplation St. Ignatius taught. We have this incredible healing power within ourselves, in the Divine within us. It was a moment of grace, of healing when I first heard of the healing power of meditation. Scales fell from my eyes. I was blind and now I see, deaf and now I hear.

When we take medication, there is the main beneficial effect for which we take it and sometimes there are side-effects which are usually adverse. When we practise meditation, our primary motive is to seek God and there are always side-effects which are always beneficial. Jesus said, ‘Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and all these other things will be given you as well.’(Luke 12:31). However, we might want all these other things more than the kingdom of God. Oh Lord, I love you but I love all these other things – good health and longevity, wealth, fame and beauty etc – more. In Annotations 16, St. Ignatius talked about putting our desires in order, so that the motive for desiring or having one thing or another be only for the service, honour and glory of God. If we feel disorder in our attachment, we should take it to the Lord and pray insistently to be given the grace to free ourselves from such disorder (6).

‘Everything that you ask and pray for, believe that you have it already and it will be yours’ (Mark 11:24). These words of Jesus are so powerful. I love them and am very attached to them. And yet ultimately Jesus Himself prayed, ‘Father, if you will, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.’(Luke 22:42). How do we reconcile the prayer of faith – believing that we will get what we ask for – and the prayer of abandonment - surrender to God’s will? A few years ago, I heard Fr. Tom Lakesmith say that when we pray, we will reach a time when our will becomes one with God’s will.

So finally, there is the healing of the spirit, when we become ‘blessed are the poor in spirit, when our will becomes one with God’s, when we are able to say with Jesus, ‘not my will but yours be done.’ This brings us to St. Ignatius’s First Principle and Foundation which I have had to struggle with. This states that ‘we need to make ourselves indifferent to all created things……..we should not want health more than illness, wealth more than poverty, fame more than disgrace, a long life more than a short one…….we should desire and choose only what helps us move towards the end for which we are created.’ Ignatius used the words indifference or detachment to express the freedom we need to respond with generosity, love and hope, to the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The structure of the Spiritual Exercises has the purpose of leading a person to a true spiritual freedom (Annotations 21) (6). That - detachment, spiritual freedom - is the ultimate healing. The healing of our spirit.

And then we will be able to let go, let God; then we will be able to pray with St. Ignatius:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my intellect, and all my will – all that I have or possess. You gave it all to me; to you, Lord, I return it! All is yours; dispose of it according to all your will. Give me your love and grace, for this is enough for me.

References:

At Home with the Spirit, Tom O’Hara, S.J.

Sadhana, Anthony de Mello, S.J.

Healing from the Heart, Mehmet Oz, M.D.

Open Heart, Open Mind, Thomas Keating

The Myth of Psychotherapy, Thomas Szasz, M.D.

Draw Me Into Your Friendship, The Spiritual Exercises, David Fleming, S.J.