Text: Mark 9: 14-29
The Faces of Healing: Lord I Believe (Help My Unbelief)
Here’s a story of healing that I encountered a few years ago about the relationship between healing and belief. Some years ago, an academic friend that I got to know through commutes up to Boston shared that he had once been in a terrible accident that had severed his spine. He had been playing hockey, and a catastrophically hard collision left him unable to move. He remembered waking up in the hospital, and finding that he was in traction, lying supine while his head was more or less bolted to the wall. He had some movement in his upper torso, but none in his legs. His family helped him recall what had happened, and doctors let him know that he would likely never walk again. It was a shocking, terrifying moment, he said, especially given how little he could do to ameliorate the situation. All he could do was to lay there, immobile, staring fixedly at the ceiling.
What he could do, however, was to listen to music. He is the most voracious and discerning listener of music that I have ever encountered, and he shared that he passed the long hours and days by having a nurse or family member put headphones on him. He listened to lots of things, but what he listened to most was Jamaican Dub music. For those of you not familiar with that genre, it consists of reggae or ska, the sort of thing we all associate with Jamaica, but the songs have been spliced and electronically manipulated, creating a kind of hypnotic soundscape, which always has a very steady pulse. What he said was that he would lay there, listening to Dub for days at a time, and that he would use the beats as a meditation. Each beat formed a pulse that, in his mind, he directed toward his spine, willing it to mend, willing it to heal. In a few weeks time, he could wiggle his toes. Then he found he was able to move his entire foot, and soon after that sensation began crawling up his legs. He left the hospital on his own two feet. Today no one would guess that an accident had ever occurred.
It’s hard to say what exactly happened to him during those weeks in the hospital. It’s a mystery that my friend insists should remain a mystery. Perhaps the injury wasn’t so bad after all. Perhaps his spine did what all spines in that condition would do if given the chance to heal. Perhaps he was just lucky, which, of course, he was. But he was also convinced that those pulsing sound waves, which he imagined as possessing a mending power, had something to do with his healing.
What do you think? Can your mind, your will, your imagination, work as an agent of healing? Is there a relationship between what we think, what we imagine, what we believe, and the capacity to heal our bodies? And if imagination and belief can be components of bodily healing, what does that mean for other forms of healing, like the healing of relationships, or the healing of societal fractures? If there is such a relationship between those two things, healing and belief, then what is it exactly?
Hang onto those questions for a little bit, because I want to review just where we are in the Lenten journey we’ve undertaken. This year in the weeks leading toward Jerusalem and Easter morning, I’ve chosen to explore some of the stories of healing that take place throughout the New Testament, but especially in the ministry of Jesus. From the moment that Jesus appears on the scene in each of the Gospels, his primary work is that of healing. My conviction is that even though a gulf stands between all of us in modernity and the pre-scientific world of the Bible, and even though hucksters and charlatan faith healers do abound, there is something within these stories that continues to instruct us, inviting us to reflect on our own wounds, and perhaps our own healing. There is something within these stories that gestures toward a power of healing that continues to be present and active in the world, a power to mend, a power that knits together, a power that binds and strengthens. Jesus exposed that healing force as something already present within the world, something overwhelmingly good that we’re too often prone to forget, or to diminish, or in extreme cases, to willfully destroy. I still believe in the healing power of these stories, and in the healing power of Jesus.
But it’s also necessary to put some parameters around what we mean by healing. The root meaning of healing has to do with wholeness. With that understanding in mind, we can then say that healing may not be synonymous with being cured. It might be that one can experience wholeness, without experiencing a cure for one’s ailment. We know from trauma studies, for example, that one might never fully recover from the effects of an overwhelming event. PTSD may not have a cure in any straightforward sense of that word, any more than the ravages of time or age can be reversed. But even if one might not be cured, one might still experience wholeness within it, which would mean being given the capacity to build a new life, one that allows for flourishing, even within the space carved out by an overwhelming event. That would be a healing. So too with illness. One’s cancer may never go away, one’s heart may never function smoothly, one’s body may never function perfectly – whose does? But one might be given the resources to experience wholeness even within those conditions.
Or put it in different terms. Healing is never about a denial of death. Hank Williams, a gifted theologian as well as a great musician, put it best when he sang: “No matter how I struggle and strive, I’ll never get out of this world alive.” Amen. The human condition is unavoidably bodily, which is to say that we’re subject to the same conditions of biology as every other living creature. But that doesn’t preclude healing. Healing and death are not opposites. Still, what we believe about life and death, what we believe about who holds us within life, might make all the difference when it comes to healing. And if the Bible is to be trusted, to say nothing of some of the best medical science of the last several decades, beliefs do matter when it comes to healing.
The paradigmatic story of healing and belief in the Bible is found in Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus encounters a father who is struggling to care for his ailing son. The boy has what seems to be a form of epilepsy, in which he is convulsed and thrown about, sometimes dangerously. The story unfolds on multiple levels. There is a bodily affliction, to be sure, but there is also a spiritual and emotional affliction in question as well, which have deep social connotations. All of those levels are important to the healing in question.
Note the details of the story. The boy’s condition renders him unable to speak, and unable to hear. Not only that, whatever it is that overtakes the child, places him in great danger, particularly around fires, and around bodies of water. Those details are striking. Both are sources of danger, but in the Bible, they’re also both sources of healing. A tongue of fire, you might recall, is how the Holy Spirit is conferred upon the first disciples in the book of Acts. It’s that flame that allows not only for speech, but for speech that can be understood and heard across cultural chasms, where understanding had not previously existed. The flame is a healing agent, helping to overcome separation and misunderstanding between human beings. So too water is always a highly charged symbolic element in the Bible. It’s into water that Jesus is plunged by John the Baptist, and it’s out of the water that he is reborn, hearing the voice of affirmation at the beginning of his ministry, telling him, “You are my beloved child.” In that sense, the water too is a healing element, symbolizing a profound regeneration, a coming into being of a new life. But this child, the epileptic boy, while no less beloved, is powerless to emerge from the water as one reborn. This child encounters the flames, and they simply have the power to burn – not to confer speech.
But there’s another important detail that we have to unpack. The story says that the boy is possessed by a spirit, a demon. Indeed, it is the spirit, we are told, that convulses the boy, rendering him mute, deaf, and prone to accidents around fire and water. How are we in modernity to understand that language of spirits and demons? I would argue that spirit possession needn’t be understood as occult or spooky, as many of us have been trained to believe. It merely has to do with an external agency that sometimes supplants or directs our own agency. There are times that that can be life enhancing. A teacher directs our agency. A mentor directs our agency. A hero, or in religious terms, a saint, someone whose life is worthy of emulation, might help to direct our own agency. That would be a life enhancing spirit. To put it in theological terms, Jesus would be the preeminent case of a life worthy of directing our own agency, which is why the Bible calls that spirit “holy.” In other words, we can be directed by that which has the power to enhance our lives, helping us to flourish, and also, let it be said, to heal.
But the opposite is also true. We can also be possessed by that which diminishes our vitality, by that which diminishes our very humanity. In its most ordinary form, this kind of spirit possession could entail anything from a collective ideology that overtakes us to the claims made upon us by our jobs, or by basic economic necessities. I remember when a member of my own family, struggling with a sense of meaninglessness in a job for which he was generously compensated, confessed that he felt possessed, owned, by his job. To be possessed by such a spirit is to have one’s own vitality sapped, and, in more extreme cases, degraded and distorted. That’s why the ideology of white supremacy can be understood as a form of spirit possession. That’s why the prison industrial complex should be understood as a form of spirit possession, where bodies and souls are owned. That’s why religion can be a form of spirit possession. There are spirits in the world that can and do supplant our own agency, owning our every move, distorting the best features of our God given humanity. We’re not talking about ghosts. We’re talking about that which has the power to animate our lives, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.
But here’s the rub. It’s not always easy to tell the difference between those two forms of spirit. Because sometimes that which seems to be a source of healing, or a source of comfort, might not be what we need at all. That’s what the story is suggesting to us when it says that the boy is drawn to both water and fire – both of them symbolizing the possibility of transformation. Might it be that there is something within the boy that is actually drawn toward that transformation, toward that healing? Read symbolically, is his attraction to fire a hint that something within him is restlessly seeking a source of speech and hearing, while his attraction to water would suggest that that same something wishes for a kind of rebirth, though without being able to find it. In that sense, the boy becomes a surrogate for each of us who longs for healing, but without knowing quite where to find it. That would make the “demon” controlling the boy somehow comprehensible. It’s that within him that drives toward wholeness, but without knowing how to get it, such that the very drive becomes destructive. Is that not the case with many sources of healing? Is that not the basic story of every addict, whatever the addiction – alcohol or opiates, sex or adrenaline? We turn toward something and begin consuming it to relieve an inner pain. But sometimes the source of relief can itself become an affliction. That seems to be the case for the boy.
The boy is a surrogate for all of us who long for healing, but so is his father. The words that pass between him and Jesus about belief and unbelief are some of the most poignant in all of the Bible. “Anything is possible for the one who believes,” Jesus says. “Lord, I do believe,” the father replies. “Help my unbelief.” Who among us hasn’t known that internal division between belief and unbelief? Who among us hasn’t felt conflicted, hanging in the balance between the world of the possible and what seems impossible? Who among us, confronting a desire for healing, has not wavered between the conviction that nothing will work, and the glimmer of hope that perhaps a change is going to come?
“You spirit, that keeps this boy from speaking and hearing, come out of him,” Jesus says. The boy convulses, a sign of the struggle to become free of that which has dominated and controlled him. It leaves him on the ground, as though he were dead. Jesus then responds the way he often does when he heals. As he did with Simon’s mother in law, the story we heard last week, he takes the boy by the hand. And he lifts him up. In private, the disciples are perplexed about the episode. Why couldn’t we do what you did, they ask Jesus? Why were we unable to heal the boy? Jesus’s reply is instructive. This form of healing can only come about through prayer.
To pray is to learn to believe in a transformation of the self and of the world, which can seem, empirically speaking, impossible. What is unbelief but the despair, drilled into us by the powers that be, that nothing can really change, that nothing can be different, that mending can never really occur? What is unbelief other than the erosion of confidence that that wholeness and healing truly are available? The impotence and resignation of unbelief can only be countered, Jesus suggests, by a form of disciplined attention, trusting that the change we desire, the healing we seek, is yet available, even after what feels like a lifetime of disappointment.
And so what is the connection between prayer and healing, between the mind, the will, and the power to mend? Jesus doesn’t provide any simple solutions at the end of the story, and I won’t either. But the story does indicate that what we believe is most true about the world somehow matters. It hints that what we believe has the power to inform our responses to ailments, illnesses, and other challenges. Prayer is an imaginative activity, where the mind extends toward a Spirit of life and healing that goes by many names, a Spirit that is both within us and around us. The story hints that that form of activity somehow introduces a healing power into our bodies and into our world. The story hints that that mending activity might always have been present. Is that what it means, at the end of the story, when the boy’s senses are finally restored, and when his agency is given back to him? Has he experienced a mending power that he will forever speak about, even if his words are finally inadequate?
That’s something of what happened to my friend while he was paralyzed in a bed. He performed an imaginative activity akin to what we call prayer, and it seemed to be a component of his healing. It can’t be universalized. Healing doesn’t always arrive in the way we hope or anticipate. But he trusted that there was within the world that which could heal, within him or without. It’s something even he can’t fully explain or understand. Even so, it seemed to make a world of difference.
It can matter for us too, we who need healing on so many levels. Trusting that there is that within the world that mends, that stitches us together, can be the first step toward experiencing that healing. In that regard, I was powerfully instructed this past Friday when I visited our Muslim friends at the Berlin Mosque. They were, they are, understandably shaken by all that’s happened in New Zealand, and by all the violence that’s continually inflicted upon Muslims and other minorities. But I was met with the same generous embrace that I’ve grown accustomed to in that space. They practice a form of hospitality and grace that is born of a deep seated trust that there exists in the world a benevolent presence that does heal and that does mend. It’s the same presence that we seek to follow in our own way here at FCCOL. Beliefs matter, and that form of gracious embrace, I believe, is what will overcome a harmful spirit loosed upon the world. When the call to prayer was offered, I lined up with the faithful and knelt, touching my forehead to the ground. Some healings occur best through the power of prayer.
Suspended as all of us are between belief and unbelief, we trust, insofar as we are able, that a healing power courses through the world, through our bodies and through our lives. Amen.
