Healing And Transformation

Sunday, April 3, 2011.  Our Adult Education class at church discussed healing today.  Several people in the class had experienced major healing in the past, myself included.  Two aspects of healing that I hadn't given much previous thought to were the transformation in thinking and attitude that takes place in you mentally and emotionally when you go through an experience of healing.  You are never the same person again afterwards.  I knew that but just sort of accepted that's the way it was now.  When I was offered healing, I remember wondering how my husband would react to the changed person I would become when I was healed and once more myself.  However, I had a young child to bring up and I wanted to be there for her.

When others talked of having a similar changing experience, we decided transformation was a part of healing.  That brought us to the question Jesus always asked before healing someone, "Do you want to be healed?"  I always found the question strange because I assumed that naturally someone who was sick or disabled would want to be healed.  Not necessarily!  We all knew people for whom sickness was so much a part of their identity that they would not be able to bear to give up their sickness.  They were aware that becoming healthy would involve change and they preferred the sick identity and the special privileges it bestowed on them, or seemed to.

My husband, as the second youngest in his family, was bullied by his mother and some of his older siblings.  His father died when he was 14 and he had a great fear of being deserted by his family if he displeased them, a fear that turned out to be well-founded when he took the major step of getting married and leaving his mother to live on her own.  His sister told him that this action on his part caused his mother the same grief she had gone through when her husband died 22 years previously. (There are probably some Freudian implications there but that's another story.)  She subsequently stopped talking to him for 10 years and one sister and one brother never talked to him again.

When his oldest sister, who was talking to him and depended on him to look after her, died, he fell and bruised his hip after coming home from her viewing and the next day had a stroke that put him in hospital and resulted in permanent placement in a nursing home, although it wasn't a major stroke.  It seemed to have something to do with her death, with unresolved guilt for wanting to have a life of his own, and with an unwillingness to change his thinking to accept that what his family did was wrong and they actually did do these cruel things to him without him deserving to be treated badly.  The messages they had given him over the years had been so internalized that when there was no one left to criticize him, he ended up punishing himself on their behalf.

To be healed would have involved accepting a view of his past that he found unacceptable, changing and transformation  that was too overwhelming to contemplate.  And so he is dying, bit by bit, no longer able to walk, stand or sit upright without assistance; unable to lift a morsel of food to his mouth, unable to hold a cup to drink and hardly able to suck a straw.  Voodoo spells couldn't have destroyed him more effectively, but it was all done so subtly, under the guise of love; a deadly love indeed!  His time, I fear, is short but oh, it didn't need to be like this.