New Entry In The Series (A Little Tardy...)

(You may or may not remember that I had begun a series of posts about six weeks ago that was interrupted by my life...  Well, I've finally had the time to think enough to add another entry...)

As I puttered around the bathroom this morning, my free-streaming thoughts flowed to the brink of the cliff once again. No matter where I go inside my head these days, it seems I end up there sooner or later: craning my neck over the edge of the great canyon between "What I Have Been Taught" and "What I Can Believe After Fifty Plus Years of Life." Or maybe, not so much peering into the crevasse, as already ten steps into the empty air. Waiting for the moment when I glance down, look at the camera, squeak "help!" and disappear in a cartoon poof.

Today, my thoughts went to illness, and healing, and my assertion in a previous post to the effect that a loving, omnipotent Dad In The Sky who possesses the ability to end suffering or heal illness would just do it. Some claim that God is fully capable of conferring miraculous healing, but only heals those who fill certain criteria. Obviously, we don’t know the magic formula by which to obtain healing every time, or we would never be ill again. Nevertheless, "miraculous" spontaneous cures occur from time to time. Just often enough to keep us believing that divine healing is a matter of praying hard enough, or being good enough, or having a mighty purpose in life we have yet to fulfill, so the Divine grants us some kind of reprieve.

I am supposed to believe that this all-knowing, all-powerful God, who loves us so much that we haven’t the capacity to understand that love, allows things like cancer and AIDS and malaria and ebola virus to plague the human race, for inconceivable reasons of Its own. And every now and then, this God will zap a miraculous healing on someone, just to let us know that It is capable of doing so. And to keep us in line in front of the altar…

I’m sorry, but I think that paints a ridiculous picture of the Author of the Universe. What kind of capricious, callous, venal Supreme Being have we created for ourselves? We could fit the body of our knowledge about the connection between the physical and the spiritual on the head of a pin. We know spontaneous healings occur, but we are clueless as to the mechanics of such things. As always happens when we reach the limitations of our human knowledge, we toss the unknowns into the lap of "God." But do we never stand back and really look at this "Collage God" we’ve constructed? We’ve ended up with an all-powerful, all-loving God who is frighteningly schizophrenic about how It chooses to use Its power to express Its love. When we have a hard time dealing with how all these conflicting talents and abililities add up to something we are compelled to love and worship, we turn to those age old cop-outs: "It (illness, accident, premature death) is God’s will," or the Catholic version—"It’s a mystery."

So what do I think the secret is? How do I explain miraculous inexplicable cures? My current theory is that there is an intrinsic connection between our "souls"(or "spirits" or "energy") and our physical bodies. A connection that we understand is there, but have no concept as to the depth and magnitude thereof. Or what effect the ability to channel that energy at will would have on things like illness and pain. Perhaps miraculous cures occur when a particular resonance between our bodies and the energy that gives us life is obtained.  Some ancient mystic "religious" traditions have explored these connections. But in our culture, these tiny beginnings of what might be real understanding of what we are and how we work are shouted down by two powerful lobbies: Christianity and Western medicine.

Christians believe that Christ healed the sick, so healing must come from God. Okay. What if I don’t argue the existence of God, or a "Divine" being? What if I don’t argue that Christ was sent by that Being, or especially ordained by It? But what if the reason that Christ healed the sick was not to show that all healing comes from God, but to demonstrate that human beings themselves possess the capacity to heal? What if we’ve been "going forth" with the wrong message all these two thousand plus years? (One of many…)

As far as western medicine goes, for all its touted basis in sound science, it has major flaws. Not the least of which is the fact that it only peripherally acknowledges the link between body and "energy," or soul. When miraculous cures occur beyond or counter to the medical community’s understanding, they shrug their shoulders and say, "Can’t explain it," shake off the cold sweat and hack into the next body. Western medicine, still a mostly male-dominated good ole boy club—almost a cult itself—has no time or respect for methods or research outside its own narrow scope. Who knows how much mankind has suffered for the smug discrimination of "modern" medicine?

It’s a pity that there is so much we don’t understand, a body of knowledge we don’t have that so dwarfs that which we have. And we, as a race, are not interested in knowing what we don’t know. We aren’t interested in knowing that we don’t know. We so want to believe that we have a handle on everything…or that we are just a few electrodes and test-tubes away from having all the answers we need. And anything beyond that is thrown into the lap of that Being who handles all the Stuff We Don’t Get.

I was listening to a discussion about evolution the other day. Someone made the very wise observation that when you make your God the explanation for everything you don’t know, that God shrinks every time you learn something new. Is that what we want? A shrinking God? Or do we want to invest our energy in finding out what our connection really is to the Author of the Universe? Some of my readers have made comments that human beings were uniquely created to communicate with the Divine, even to hunger after that communication. That may well be true. But what exactly is it that we are meant to draw from that communication? I fear we may be hopelessly tuned to the wrong channel…

Tags: miralces, healing