Reflection – “Thoughts on Healing”

Healing and Dying: My Dad

My dad died just a little over five years ago. It was not a good death for him. His wife, his third wife, didn’t want him to go, and grasped at anything medical science had to offer, hoping for a miracle cure. Of course many in the hospital were quite willing to go along, and the stream of doctors through my dad’s darkened hospital room seemed endless. My dad, with advancing dementia, on dialysis, was stoic up to a point.

Now my siblings and I disagreed with this race for a cure, to the point that his wife at one point screamed at my sister, “You’re just trying to kill your dad!”

In the end we depended on my Dad’s advance medical directive. He had prepared this document years ago, when he was mentally competent, and in it he stated he wanted no feeding tubes, no ventilator, no heroic treatments.  We were able to see that he got what he wished, and he did finally leave us and this world as we expected he would. 

I realize now that for my dad, I was seeking something beyond a cure. As I look back on that time, I hope I offered him some time, space, and presence for healing. I hope I was with him on those rare lucid days, when he had things to say to me, and when I think he followed what I said to him.  While a cure didn’t come, I hope there was healing.

Cure and Healing

In the book “Partners in Care: Medicine and Ministry Together” Chaplain Fredrick Reklau offers a list of contrasts between cure and healing:

Cure may occur without healing; healing may occur without cure.

Cure alters what is; healing offers what might be.

Cure is an act; healing is a process.

Cure seeks to change reality; healing embraces reality.

Cure takes charge; healing takes time.

Cure avoids grief; healing assumes grief.

Cure speaks; healing listens.

I’ve come to understand the distinction between cure and healing in medicine. I’ve come to realize that healing without cure can sometimes be more of a blessing than a cure alone. But our culture has a tendency to focus so much on the cure, that we forget about healing. This applies not only in the health of bodies, but in the health of communities and society too.

The Incident

Yesterday, our Regional Youth Con started here at UUYO. But an upsetting and unfortunate thing happened. A little after ten, as they were unloading their car, a group of two youth and an adult were robbed at gunpoint. They are okay and lost a few possessions.

They and the con leadership did the right things as first responders. They called the police, who stepped up patrolling in the area. The chaplains and other leaders of the con provided support for everyone touched by this, which would be the whole con. Safety procedures were reviewed and enhanced.

I am really sorry this happened. I know I speak for this church community, and I’m sure for the people in our town. This was saddening. It shouldn’t have happened.

The Incident as Metaphor

I want to think about this incident as a wound to the community. In the body, a wound can become infected, and the body can overreact trying to contain the infection, and we end up with high fevers, inflammation, immune responses, and at the extreme, these can become life threatening. In trying to cure the infection, we quite appropriately respond with antibiotics, and various treatments for the body’s reactions, trying to bring things back in balance.

Much like a wound to the body, an event like last night’s robbery can cause our communities can respond to wounds with overreaction. Everybody, the whole body of the community is put on edge, becomes inflamed, trying to respond to the wounding that happened. Fortunately, that’s not what happened at the Youth Con, and I’m glad. It sounds like a lot of things were done right.

When I talked with Rev. Evin Carville Ziemer, A Unitarian Universalist Association staff person here at the con, she worried that this could be a lose-lose situation. By that, we might slip into trying to seek a cure rather than healing.

By cure, I mean that we want to be safe, and we can be tempted to respond to wounding by demanding extreme safety:  more ‘law and order’, ‘round up the usual suspects’, aggressive policing enforcement. We want something done, and we want it done now.

But healing is more complex and multilayered than that. Healing means grieving the loss of security in a case like this.

Healing means feeling compassion for our own people who may carry the trauma of this assault for some time, and realizing that that trauma ripples out to all of us by degrees.

Healing means realizing that an increased police presence does not necessarily make our neighborhood safe, and it could make things less safe for some people.

Healing also means peeling back the layers to understand the fundamental lack of economic fairness in our society that drives people to risk criminal activity for such minimal gains.

Healing is an ongoing process of our police and criminal justice system, as well as other parts of society, behind the scenes, doing the work to discourage criminal behavior, and redirect it when it does occur.

Healing is a process, which takes time. Healing looks to the future, healing brings us together.

Today we explore various facets of healing, in individual people, in communities, and in our society at large. Our youth worship leaders offer a selection of readings and their own reflections on healing.

Closing Remarks

I’m sure many of you have had an healing experience something like this at some point. You go to a healer, maybe a doctor or massage therapist or a physical therapist, complaining of pain or limitation in one part of your body, and the healer points out that your issues relate to injury in a completely different part of your body. The therapist has the ability to see the deeper aspects of injury,  and understands the interconnections that lie beneath the surface symptoms. Because the therapist can probe those deeper realities, perhaps finding old wounds, true healing can take place.

So it is that we, who want to be healers of this world, need to have eyes to see. We need to be able to see the underlying realities that many cannot or will not see. We need to see the racism and xenophobia that course through the veins of this country. We need to see the marks of patriarchy, sexism and homophobia that lie just beneath the skin of society. We need to see how the intense cultural pressures to succeed and to conform distort and sprain the lives of people we love.

We all carry wounds, for to have lived for any length of time is to have been wounded. We know what being wounded feels like, we know pain, and we know hurt. And we also know what it feels like when someone is able to offer us healing.

Knowing wounds, and knowing healing, we too, yearn to offer healing. And in beginning to heal others, we begin to see. To know. And we awaken to a new dawn of understanding, to a new awareness of what is really going on beyond the horizon.  And we, wounded healers all, are present, welcoming, calling forth, that new dawn.