Where Healing And Acceptance Meet
Preaching
Gathering Up the Fragments
Preaching As Spiritual Practice
Object:
Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy. Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman's wife. She said to her mistress, "If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy." So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Aram said, "Go then, and I'll send along a letter to the King of Israel." He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments.... So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha's house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, "Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean." But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, "I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?" He turned and went away in a rage. But his servants approached and said to him, "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said was, 'Wash, and be clean'?" So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.
-- 2 Kings 5:1-5, 9-14
A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.
-- Mark 1:40-45
Healing begins with acceptance. We can't change anything about ourselves or our surroundings unless we first accept it. To walk the path of healing, we must first make our peace with whatever it is -- in, among, or around us -- that needs to be healed.
Acceptance, as you know, is not easy. Those in recovery can attest to the years of denial that typically precede making that first step: admitting that we are powerless over whatever it is that has us in its grip. Similarly, when confronted with a difficult diagnosis or other evidence that something about us is not well, we can't take it in at first. Our minds will do almost anything to keep difficult truth at bay.
As the truth penetrates our well-fortified consciousness, we then easily fall into familiar ruts of shame, guilt, or blame. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer in her jaw last year, her instinctual reaction was to blame herself, to wonder what she had done in her life to cause this disease. Did she not brush her teeth properly? Was it those cigarettes she smoked, briefly, as a young adult trying to look sophisticated? Was she being punished for something she had said or done? Her thinking was completely irrational, but I recognized it. "What did I do wrong?" is a natural response to suffering, as is, on the opposite extreme, asking, "What did someone else do to make me this way?" In other words, "Whose fault is this?"
Healing begins with acceptance -- not just acceptance of the disease, addiction, or whatever it is that we wish were not true about us but of our very selves. To heal we must accept ourselves, as we are, broken in all the places that we are broken; impaired in all the ways we are impaired. Acceptance takes us to that deep place where we know ourselves to be flawed in particular, undeniable ways and, in our impairment, unconditionally loved by God. From that place, and that place alone, can we begin to love ourselves for who we are and others as they are, wounds, warts, and all.
Jesus' tremendous healing power flowed from his unconditional acceptance of every person he met as a beloved child of God. He never defined people according to their sin or sickness, but saw them in their entirety, as God saw them. He rejected the rigid purity codes that judged sick people as spiritually unclean. Those with leprosy were particularly isolated in his day, forced to live on the borders of human society, required to cry out their condition whenever another person approached, and obliged to endure condemnation for their supposed depravity. Jesus would have none of that. When lepers approached him, as did the man in today's story, he engaged them as precious human beings. He looked into their eyes and saw them; he reached out to touch them. He was, as the scriptures say, moved to compassion by their plight, and he treated them with dignity. That is to say, he accepted and loved them. And from that acceptance and love, they were healed.
Sometimes the only healing we get is acceptance, which is hard to imagine settling for when what we really want is to be released from whatever afflicts us. A dear friend who has made peace with her paralysis and lives a rich, full life from the confinement of a wheelchair told me that those who are just facing a similar fate don't want to hear how she had found that peace. "They don't want to accept what I have accepted. They want to walk again," she said, "and I don't blame them." Sometimes the healing we are given is acceptance of our lot, whatever that is, and when acceptance takes us to that deep spiritual place where we are known and loved by God, acceptance is enough. There's a story told about an old rabbi who lost his sight and could no longer read or see the faces of those who came to visit him. A faith healer approached him and said, "Entrust your life into my care and I will heal your blindness." "That won't be necessary," the rabbi replied, "I can see all that I need to."
Buddhism has much to teach about the spirituality of acceptance. A sacred Buddhist principle is the acceptance of suffering, discomfort, and tension as part of life. "There is no cure for hot and cold," Buddhists will say. There is no way around the difficulties and heartaches that make us human. Suffering is not the result of a mistake you made; it's not a punishment. To accept suffering is the first step toward freedom.
The American Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, in a book aptly titled The Wisdom of No Escape, wrote this:
The mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular kind of ignorance, unkindness and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, we imagine that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.
Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives ... It's not about trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness ... The only way to do this is to be open, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, and let it teach you what it will.1
When we can accept and learn from what causes us pain, then in a profound way we are healed from it, even if the pain persists.
Saint Paul came to that kind of acceptance in his life when he asked to be healed from a particularly distracting and disabling condition. We don't know what the condition was, only that he called it "... a thorn given to him in the flesh, to keep him from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but the Lord said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness ...' " (2 Corinthians 12:7-9).
Yet there is another truth, one that seems to contradict all that I've said thus far. That truth, revealed to us in the healing stories of the Bible and of our own lives, is that sometimes -- perhaps even most times -- healing begins in acceptance and continues on to full recovery, renewal of life, and transformation of relationships. We needn't simply accept our wounds; sometimes, by the grace and mercy of God, we are fully healed of them, our souls and bodies stronger, as they say, in the broken places. Sometimes the blind receive their sight. Sometimes the lame walk; the sorrowful rejoice; the oppressed go free.
I don't pretend to understand the mystery of healing. I only know that it's true. I hold out for the possibility in every area of my life where I struggle to accept the pain and brokenness that is mine, and even where I have succeeded in that acceptance. I pray the same for others -- for you, those we love, and for our troubled and beautiful world.
The biblical story of Naaman, the mighty Aramean warrior afflicted with leprosy, is a brilliant treatise on healing. Naaman is one of my favorite biblical characters: a strong warrior afflicted with a dreaded disease. He wanted to be well. When he heard of the possibility of healing from a foreign prophet, he set out at once, bringing all the gold and silver he could carry, to appease both the king and the prophet of Israel. But when Elisha told him what the Lord required for his healing -- washing seven times in the Jordan River -- Naaman was incensed. He wanted more than that! He wanted his healing to be dramatic, worthy of the effort he had made. And were it not for the courage of his servant, challenging him with one of the best questions in the Bible, he might have missed the healing available to him: "If the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said was, 'Wash and be clean?' "
What might our equivalent of Naaman's resistance be, the thing we are slow to accept or believe in because it doesn't seem like enough?
For me the answer is time. Healing takes time. And I don't want to hear that when faced with an urgent condition of suffering or sorrow, ruptured relationship or grief. I want healing now. But what if time is essential to healing? What if we can't rush the process along, anymore than we can make a bean grow faster, as my teacher used to say, by pulling on it?
A few years ago, I experienced my first, rather severe, case of tendonitis at the place where my foot meets my shin. I didn't recognize the pain and for a long time I ignored it, thinking I had stretched a muscle. As it worsened, I continued my normal routines of movement and exercise until I couldn't walk. When I finally sought help, the doctor told me that there was nothing I could do but rest my foot. The more I walked on it, he said, the longer it would take to heal. "How long would it take?" I asked.
He replied, "About two months."
It was the longest two months of my life. I would have done anything to heal faster. But what my body needed was time -- time and rest. Whenever I tried to rush the process along, I only set myself back.
Wounds take time to heal. Rabbi Edwin Friedman writes of a woman dealing with various problems of loss -- divorce from her husband, separating from her children, and changes in her relationship with her mother. She was a nurse and she came across a description in a medical journal about physical healing that helped her with her emotional struggles:
When a wound occurs, there are two kinds of tissue that must heal, the connective tissue below the surface, and the protective tissue of the skin. If the protective tissue heals too quickly, healing of the connective tissue will not be sound, causing other problems to surface later, or worse, never to surface at all.2
She was able to make the analogy to the wounds in her family, realizing the danger in allowing the surface to heal too quickly, foregoing the possibility of deeper healing later on.
So often when a wound occurs our inclination is to rush in and try to fix it. But perhaps what's needed is to put our helpful impulses aside and allow time to do its work. "Time and showing up," writes Anne Lamott, "turns most messes into compost." In an essay about learning to raise an adolescent son, Lamott acknowledges that sometimes the two of them are simply a mess. "But that is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess. When I am well, I know not to mess with mess right away; I try to let silence and time work their magic."3
That, I suggest to you, is where acceptance and healing meet: in that place where we open ourselves to the healing grace of God, wanting to be well, reconciled, and transformed, while at the same time recognizing that all healing takes time. In the meantime, in that in-between place where we live most of our lives, we'll be all right. We can learn to live with imperfections. We can mine them for all they have to teach. In so doing, we'll discover the greatest healing truth of all: that we are beloved of God, right now, as we are. In time, all will be well. But in the meantime, God's grace is sufficient for us, and we can live with peace and joy, love and purpose, as we are, right now.
____________
1. Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape (Boston: Shambhala Press, 2001), pp. 14, 32.
2. Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (New York: The Guilford Press, 1985), pp. 42-44.
3. Anne Lamott, "Holy of Holies," and "Adolescence," in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), pp. 76, 100.
-- 2 Kings 5:1-5, 9-14
A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.
-- Mark 1:40-45
Healing begins with acceptance. We can't change anything about ourselves or our surroundings unless we first accept it. To walk the path of healing, we must first make our peace with whatever it is -- in, among, or around us -- that needs to be healed.
Acceptance, as you know, is not easy. Those in recovery can attest to the years of denial that typically precede making that first step: admitting that we are powerless over whatever it is that has us in its grip. Similarly, when confronted with a difficult diagnosis or other evidence that something about us is not well, we can't take it in at first. Our minds will do almost anything to keep difficult truth at bay.
As the truth penetrates our well-fortified consciousness, we then easily fall into familiar ruts of shame, guilt, or blame. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer in her jaw last year, her instinctual reaction was to blame herself, to wonder what she had done in her life to cause this disease. Did she not brush her teeth properly? Was it those cigarettes she smoked, briefly, as a young adult trying to look sophisticated? Was she being punished for something she had said or done? Her thinking was completely irrational, but I recognized it. "What did I do wrong?" is a natural response to suffering, as is, on the opposite extreme, asking, "What did someone else do to make me this way?" In other words, "Whose fault is this?"
Healing begins with acceptance -- not just acceptance of the disease, addiction, or whatever it is that we wish were not true about us but of our very selves. To heal we must accept ourselves, as we are, broken in all the places that we are broken; impaired in all the ways we are impaired. Acceptance takes us to that deep place where we know ourselves to be flawed in particular, undeniable ways and, in our impairment, unconditionally loved by God. From that place, and that place alone, can we begin to love ourselves for who we are and others as they are, wounds, warts, and all.
Jesus' tremendous healing power flowed from his unconditional acceptance of every person he met as a beloved child of God. He never defined people according to their sin or sickness, but saw them in their entirety, as God saw them. He rejected the rigid purity codes that judged sick people as spiritually unclean. Those with leprosy were particularly isolated in his day, forced to live on the borders of human society, required to cry out their condition whenever another person approached, and obliged to endure condemnation for their supposed depravity. Jesus would have none of that. When lepers approached him, as did the man in today's story, he engaged them as precious human beings. He looked into their eyes and saw them; he reached out to touch them. He was, as the scriptures say, moved to compassion by their plight, and he treated them with dignity. That is to say, he accepted and loved them. And from that acceptance and love, they were healed.
Sometimes the only healing we get is acceptance, which is hard to imagine settling for when what we really want is to be released from whatever afflicts us. A dear friend who has made peace with her paralysis and lives a rich, full life from the confinement of a wheelchair told me that those who are just facing a similar fate don't want to hear how she had found that peace. "They don't want to accept what I have accepted. They want to walk again," she said, "and I don't blame them." Sometimes the healing we are given is acceptance of our lot, whatever that is, and when acceptance takes us to that deep spiritual place where we are known and loved by God, acceptance is enough. There's a story told about an old rabbi who lost his sight and could no longer read or see the faces of those who came to visit him. A faith healer approached him and said, "Entrust your life into my care and I will heal your blindness." "That won't be necessary," the rabbi replied, "I can see all that I need to."
Buddhism has much to teach about the spirituality of acceptance. A sacred Buddhist principle is the acceptance of suffering, discomfort, and tension as part of life. "There is no cure for hot and cold," Buddhists will say. There is no way around the difficulties and heartaches that make us human. Suffering is not the result of a mistake you made; it's not a punishment. To accept suffering is the first step toward freedom.
The American Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, in a book aptly titled The Wisdom of No Escape, wrote this:
The mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular kind of ignorance, unkindness and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, we imagine that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.
Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives ... It's not about trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness ... The only way to do this is to be open, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, and let it teach you what it will.1
When we can accept and learn from what causes us pain, then in a profound way we are healed from it, even if the pain persists.
Saint Paul came to that kind of acceptance in his life when he asked to be healed from a particularly distracting and disabling condition. We don't know what the condition was, only that he called it "... a thorn given to him in the flesh, to keep him from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but the Lord said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness ...' " (2 Corinthians 12:7-9).
Yet there is another truth, one that seems to contradict all that I've said thus far. That truth, revealed to us in the healing stories of the Bible and of our own lives, is that sometimes -- perhaps even most times -- healing begins in acceptance and continues on to full recovery, renewal of life, and transformation of relationships. We needn't simply accept our wounds; sometimes, by the grace and mercy of God, we are fully healed of them, our souls and bodies stronger, as they say, in the broken places. Sometimes the blind receive their sight. Sometimes the lame walk; the sorrowful rejoice; the oppressed go free.
I don't pretend to understand the mystery of healing. I only know that it's true. I hold out for the possibility in every area of my life where I struggle to accept the pain and brokenness that is mine, and even where I have succeeded in that acceptance. I pray the same for others -- for you, those we love, and for our troubled and beautiful world.
The biblical story of Naaman, the mighty Aramean warrior afflicted with leprosy, is a brilliant treatise on healing. Naaman is one of my favorite biblical characters: a strong warrior afflicted with a dreaded disease. He wanted to be well. When he heard of the possibility of healing from a foreign prophet, he set out at once, bringing all the gold and silver he could carry, to appease both the king and the prophet of Israel. But when Elisha told him what the Lord required for his healing -- washing seven times in the Jordan River -- Naaman was incensed. He wanted more than that! He wanted his healing to be dramatic, worthy of the effort he had made. And were it not for the courage of his servant, challenging him with one of the best questions in the Bible, he might have missed the healing available to him: "If the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said was, 'Wash and be clean?' "
What might our equivalent of Naaman's resistance be, the thing we are slow to accept or believe in because it doesn't seem like enough?
For me the answer is time. Healing takes time. And I don't want to hear that when faced with an urgent condition of suffering or sorrow, ruptured relationship or grief. I want healing now. But what if time is essential to healing? What if we can't rush the process along, anymore than we can make a bean grow faster, as my teacher used to say, by pulling on it?
A few years ago, I experienced my first, rather severe, case of tendonitis at the place where my foot meets my shin. I didn't recognize the pain and for a long time I ignored it, thinking I had stretched a muscle. As it worsened, I continued my normal routines of movement and exercise until I couldn't walk. When I finally sought help, the doctor told me that there was nothing I could do but rest my foot. The more I walked on it, he said, the longer it would take to heal. "How long would it take?" I asked.
He replied, "About two months."
It was the longest two months of my life. I would have done anything to heal faster. But what my body needed was time -- time and rest. Whenever I tried to rush the process along, I only set myself back.
Wounds take time to heal. Rabbi Edwin Friedman writes of a woman dealing with various problems of loss -- divorce from her husband, separating from her children, and changes in her relationship with her mother. She was a nurse and she came across a description in a medical journal about physical healing that helped her with her emotional struggles:
When a wound occurs, there are two kinds of tissue that must heal, the connective tissue below the surface, and the protective tissue of the skin. If the protective tissue heals too quickly, healing of the connective tissue will not be sound, causing other problems to surface later, or worse, never to surface at all.2
She was able to make the analogy to the wounds in her family, realizing the danger in allowing the surface to heal too quickly, foregoing the possibility of deeper healing later on.
So often when a wound occurs our inclination is to rush in and try to fix it. But perhaps what's needed is to put our helpful impulses aside and allow time to do its work. "Time and showing up," writes Anne Lamott, "turns most messes into compost." In an essay about learning to raise an adolescent son, Lamott acknowledges that sometimes the two of them are simply a mess. "But that is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess. When I am well, I know not to mess with mess right away; I try to let silence and time work their magic."3
That, I suggest to you, is where acceptance and healing meet: in that place where we open ourselves to the healing grace of God, wanting to be well, reconciled, and transformed, while at the same time recognizing that all healing takes time. In the meantime, in that in-between place where we live most of our lives, we'll be all right. We can learn to live with imperfections. We can mine them for all they have to teach. In so doing, we'll discover the greatest healing truth of all: that we are beloved of God, right now, as we are. In time, all will be well. But in the meantime, God's grace is sufficient for us, and we can live with peace and joy, love and purpose, as we are, right now.
____________
1. Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape (Boston: Shambhala Press, 2001), pp. 14, 32.
2. Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (New York: The Guilford Press, 1985), pp. 42-44.
3. Anne Lamott, "Holy of Holies," and "Adolescence," in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), pp. 76, 100.
