...and heal you of all that harms you.

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.