Well, it has been a very full few weeks of preparing food,
personal insights, continuing to develop friendships, and sadly saying goodbye
to a number of those friends who have finished their time on Iona. My past few
weeks have developed a regular structure as I have been placed full time on the
kitchen staff with a steady schedule. Sometimes I have to wake up at 7 am to do
the morning shift (making porridge, making bread for the day, preparing various
vegetables for our lunch-time soups and evening meals) but most often I begin
at 9 30, work until 2 30, and then return to the kitchen at 5 to heat up the
evening meal and wash up afterwards.
Every Tuesday night we hold a service of prayers for healing
in the Abbey Church, and this past Tuesday I was blessed to participate as a
reader, reading out names of those people and situations for which prayer is
requested, and also in the liturgical practice of laying hands on those who
sought healing for themselves, for others, or for the world. The prayer which
we say the same every week and for every person, while they kneel and we place
our hands upon their head, is as follows: “Spirit of the living God, present
with us now, enter you, body, mind, and spirit, and heal you of all that harms
you. In Jesus name, Amen.” It is powerful in its simplicity which, despite that
simplicity, leaves no part of a person untouched; we pray for the whole person,
for their mental, physical, and spiritual healing. Also, I find it profound and
also an act of great trust that the healing itself is not given specific
content; there is nothing but the appeal to the living spirit of God to heal of
all that harms, which indicates that though we know we need healing, we are not
always sure what it is in us that needs to be healed. It is an important act of
trust, then, to say in the prayer that we leave whatever sort of healing takes
place in the hands of God, trusting that God offers to us what we need and
withholds what we do not.
I experienced what I believe to be genuine meaning as I laid
my hands on the heads of dozens of people and said in unison with the whole
congregation present the prayer of healing mentioned above. As I reflect now, I
think that this ministry of healing also took on great significance because of
some reading and listening I have been doing to an influential spiritual
writer, Richard Rohr. I have been particularly taken by his emphasis on a
created goodness and “True Self” within each and every person, and this means a
lot, I think, for spiritual and mental illness, especially when we are
disgusted, repulsed, or furious with
ourselves.
“You,” Richard says, “and every other created thing begins with
a divine DNA, and inner destiny as It were, an absolute core that knows the
truth about you, a blueprint tucked away in the cellar of your being, and imago Dei that begs to be allowed, to be
fulfilled, and to show itself. As it says in Romans (5:5), ‘It is the Holy
Spirit poured into your heart, and it has been given to you”.
This is such an
enormous hope as so many of us seek mental health and spiritual wholeness
because the healing that we stand in need of in not something we have to look
for, not the right book (which is part of my poor motivation to reading
Richard), not the right doctrine, not the right experience. It is, in fact,
right within us in our very embodied and created goodness. And this is the
case, I have chosen to trust, even when I am emotionally unstable, judgemental
of myself and others, eager to find fault in the world, and somehow resistant
to seeing things from any perspective other than depression. We are never
separate from the love of God because it is planted so deeply within us. In fact, it’s so deep that we are tempted to
miss it or forget about it, kind of like how we take air and breathing for granted;
an absolutely necessary sustaining force that we would die without but we so
rarely think about. And our True Self, the inner silence, the imago Dei, the peace that surpasses all
understanding- it is always within, even
in the darkest places of despair.
I have experienced it to be hard (almost impossible) to
continue to trust in that darkness. But the healing that I have begun to
experience is both completely my choice and free will, since it is within me that God has planted my true self,
but also completely not my choice because it is God who has planted himself and my true self and not me at all. I
might have to think of another way to say that, but that’s my best shot for
now.
So my prayer for you now is that the spirit of the living
God, present with us now, enters you, body, mind, and spirit, and heals you of
all that harms you. In Jesus name, Amen.
