TruthBook Religious News Blog

Tue, Aug 25, 2009
William McKenzie/Editorial Columnist

Despite the cries at town-hall meetings, the House's health care bill contains no "death panels" that would force end-of-life decisions upon elderly Americans. But the protests certainly have revealed a deep anxiety among some voters about the end of their lives.

Part of that is natural. No one wants someone else making decisions for them about how their days come to a close. Yet it also speaks to a heightened fear that many of us have about our mortality.

Texas Faith moderator Rod Dreher explored this subject in a paper he did for his Templeton Cambridge journalism fellowship this summer. He drew upon the writings of Orthodox theologian Jean-Claude Larchet, author of "The Theology of Illness." Here's an excerpt from Rod's work:

Larchet laments the way today's patient has become entirely dependent on physicians for deliverance from physical illness and related maladies. Paradoxically, despite the great advances medical science has made in treating illness, Larchet says patients today have fewer spiritual and psychological resources with which to cope with illness than their ancestors did. He identifies five factors in modern life in the West that put the patient at the mercy of physicians:

Please click on "external source for the complete, very interesting article.

Labels: death, faith, fear, illness, mortality, Texas Faith, William McKenzie

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Friday, August 10, 2007

The Dilemma of Spiritual Healing

If only my mother would remember that she's God's perfect child--and so is her doctor--maybe she wouldn't feel so guilty.

By Susan Sherman

I lay in the dark with a headache, praying to know that it wasn't real. My mother told me I was God's perfect child, made in His likeness. I was His reflection, she said, like an image in a mirror. I couldn't have a headache because God couldn't have a headache. I fell asleep, and the headache lifted. I was three.

Spiritual healing has long been part of my family on my mother's side. It was normal for my mother and grandmother, who had continued the family drift away from Judaism, to talk about illness as error, an illusion, to "un-see" anything negative because God could never have made it. My mother followed my grandmother into Christian Science, the religion founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, a New England woman who was healed of a serious injury by studying the way Jesus healed--seeing the allness of God and the nothingness of evil.

Although the church does not directly prohibit anyone from getting medical help, in reality there's a good deal of social pressure not to seek it. If you're under a doctor's care, you can't visit a Christian Science practitioner or hold church office, and you feel guilty even sitting in church or doing the weekly lesson readings. You're not radically relying on God, and it's your own fault that you're not being healed. As Mrs. Eddy writes, "If patients fail to experience the healing power of Christian Science, and think they can be benefited by certain ordinary physical methods of medical treatment, then the Mind-physician should give up such cases, and leave invalids free to resort to whatever other systems they fancy will afford relief." (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures page 443). Emphasis on "think" and "fancy."

For years, we had many healings in my family. And sometimes we didn't.
My grandmother died of breast cancer in 1968. Years later, at age 67, my mother developed lymphoma. When the tumor grew noticeable, she went to a doctor, who told her unequivocally, "This is fatal if not treated." Fearing to go through what my grandmother did, she was treated medically. She didn't die. But her guilt at becoming ill in the first place (through the sin of false belief), and then resorting to materia medica for healing, brought on a serious depression and panic disorder. It was an agitated kind of depression that raged for five years, wreaking as much havoc in her life and ours as the cancer. The depression abated for 12 years, then returned full force following another treatable bout of cancer this year.

My mom has tried desperately to get her faith back. At times she will renounce medicine, then obsessively worry about minor symptoms and go to the doctor. She will take half-doses of antidepressants and then read her Bible. She will call her Christian Science practitioner many times a day, but the words offered by this saintly woman don't sink in. Swinging back and forth between medicine and spiritual healing, never feeling confident in either, she has become undone by guilt. Constantly denying and "un-seeing" material conditions are too great a strain on her mind.

This story doesn't have a happy ending (yet). But for me, it does have a big lesson. I've learned that having to choose "either/or" cuts us off from the manifold blessings of God. I believe now that God created us, body and soul; that God created many kinds of healers--physicians, nurses, medical researchers, massage therapists, medical intuitives, acupuncturists, and psychotherapists, as well as purely spiritual healers. Why is it OK to accept all the scientific advances of the 21st century, except in the field of medicine? Because Jesus was evolved enough to heal without drugs? Jesus also said that the lilies of the field don't toil or spin. Yet we still work and wear clothing.

I believe in spiritual healing, and sometimes I can get to a deep place within, that place that I first located as a child when I had a headache. I get there by closing my eyes and picturing myself diving down, down into a vast ocean beneath the pain, and just resting there in God's arms. I call it "my place of healing." But if I can't get there, I don't feel guilty about reaching for an aspirin.

Labels: Christian Science, health, illness, Susan Sherman