I begin this morning with a insightful reading about perfection.
When I was a small child, my sister and I used to play a game we invented called Perfect Leaf. We would go into the backyard and search diligently for a leaf on any tree or shrub that was perfect. The first person to find one was the winner. This may sound unbelievable, but the game could go on for hours, particularly in late summer and fall. By then almost all the leaves were imperfect- chewed by insects, shriveled on the edges, marred in endless ways.
Perfect Leaf was more than a game. It taught us a lesson we didn't know we were learning at the time--that beauty and ugliness, perfection and imperfection, can coexist--not only in the same leaf, but probably in ourselves as well. (p.26)
Spoken Meditation
O Spirit of Life Source of all that digs its roots deep in the soil. Source of all that creeps and crawls on the earth. Source driving bees to gather honey and flowers to open. Dwell in and amongst us this day. Teach my heart healing words. Show me the words that help rather than harm. Instruct me in the verbs which bring energy, the nouns pointing to the real, the adjectives describing your subtleties. Reveal to me how words can be offered in a way that connects rather than separates. that develop trust and eshew suspicion, that open the heart and relax the mind. Much as we struggle against the forces of nature we must admit our ultimate and complete vulnerability. May the connection of our hands create strong bonds to support the ongoing delight of our participation in creation. SO BE IT
Sermon
The devastation to people of my generation taken in their prime productive years of life and thinking forward to the time my son will be exploring his sexuality have been some of the reasons I have been active in organizing pastoral aid to the HIV/AIDS community. AIDS has a tremendous impact on young adults today. When Philomena and I decided we wanted to possibly marry and start a family, we conditioned our decision on an anonymous AIDS test. It is harder and harder to find someone under 50, especially in urban areas, who doesn't know someone who has died of AIDS.
At an AIDS Pastoral Committee meeting not too long ago we were discussing the effects of prayer on people with a terminal disease. After all, if you have AIDS you know you cannot become free of infection until a cure is found, which at this point looks very unlikely. Some may be symptom-free for many years but no one to my knowledge has been cured, prayer or no prayer. There is no way currently to remove the HIV virus from one's body.
As part of the committee's work, I agreed to do a AIDS healing service on the 2nd Wednesday afternoon of each month at St. Joseph's Hospital. Since prayer is not a normal part of the way I express myself religiously, I've been thinking a lot about what a U.U. healing service could be like. Those of you who were here on Wednesday evening for the circle worship got to sample one possible style of worship.
At that particular committee meeting where prayer was discussed, Rabbi Kaplan, the Rabbi for the Temple here in Port Charlotte, told us of his experience. At one time, the Rabbi was quite sick in the hospital with a dangerously high fever of unknown causes. The doctors weren't sure what to do and his fever didn't respond to the drugs they had administered. Some members of his congregation learned of his sudden illness and decided to form a healing circle for him. They held hands in a circle and directed loving intentions toward him for his healing. At the exact moment the circle began, the Rabbi's fever began to break. The next day his temperature was normal and he was symptom-free.
Well, we are all familiar with the power of the mind to effect bodily changes. As I listened to this story, I thought it could have been that the Rabbi suggested himself to healing because he knew he was in other's prayers. But the Rabbi revealed he did not know anything about the healing circle, as he was delirious.
The world is full of such anecdotal evidence that healing prayer can have a dramatic impact on a person's health. Doctors can only scratch their heads when a person comes in with advanced cancer for which there is no treatment and then experiences spontaneous and complete remission. There is a book out about these cases which have been studied in great detail. These miracle cures happen more often than one might imagine. We have a great deal to learn about the human body which is full of mysteries.
Being raised by a scientist, I have always been uncomfortable with the unpredictability of healing prayer to effect positive change. Prayer may miraculously heal one person yet fail completely with another. My own personal experience with non-traditional healing has been positive. When I had a broken leg which wouldn't heal, I used this form of healing in addition to traditional medicine and my leg did heal. I can't say if it made any difference because each healing event is unique and unrepeatable. The unrepeatability of miracle cures makes this whole area difficult to study.
My compromise between my reason and my experience has been to see healing prayer as an activation of some subtle healing ability buried deep in the mind. Knowing others are praying for you might cause a special hormone combination to be released that stimulates the immune system or something like that. I've been content to understand it all as a limited psychological process and accept its value without possessing a precise knowledge of the mechanics.
That is - until I read this book Philomena ordered for me on prayer written by a physician. The book, called "Healing Words" by Dr. Larry Dossey, reviews some of the rigorous scientific studies that have been done on the effects of prayer which have turned up some remarkable evidence that prayer actually does seem to work.
I was most impressed by this example. Laying on of hands has been around for thousands of years. It has been popularized in the medical community by Dolores Krieger's book "Therapeutic Touch". A researcher decided to test her ideas in a double- blind study of forty-four patients with an artificially created, full-skin-thickness surgical wound on an arm. The subjects would insert the arm with the wound through a circular cut-out aperture in the wall of the facility, beyond which they could not see, for five minutes. They were told that a machine would be used to induce healing but they would feel nothing. Half the patients had an expert in therapeutic touch work on their arm without touching them or letting them know if anything had happened to them.
The results were highly significant. By day eight the wound sizes of the treated subjects showed much less variation that those of the untreated subjects, and were significantly smaller. On day sixteen this finding was again seen. Thirteen of the twenty-three treated subjects were completely healed, compared with none of the untreated group.
Probably the most persuasive evidence of the healing power of prayer has come in the study of non-human life forms. Using petri dishes and elaborate controls, fungus and bacteria cultures growth was inhibited. Water held by healers and then added to yeast cells in test tubes changed the level of carbon dioxide production. Mutation rates of a strain of E. coli bacteria was affected by the influence of healers attempting to cause the mutation. In one fascinating study, some rats were injected with malaria and others with salt water. The handlers of the mice were led to believe, inaccurately that all the mice had received either a high or a low dose of malaria and that a healer would try to heal some of the rats but not others. The high dose mice with malaria did worse and the low dose mice did better even though they all have the same level of malaria and no healer participated in the experiment. The expectation of the handlers appeared to influence the mice's infection.
I found this research rather disturbing because it violated my ideas about how healing works. I had two models of healing my mind, one physical and the second mental. It appears, if one can trust this research, that there really exists a third type of healing.
Dossey does see three modalities of healing. The first, which dates back to the 1800's, is the materialistic view. It is the form of medicine we are all familiar with. The body is a causal system. If the body becomes ill, there is a "thing" causing the problem that must be fixed. The forms of therapy of the materialistic view range from the familiar, antibiotics, surgery, CPR etc. to acupuncture, homeopathy and the use of herbs. All operate on the idea that a physical intervention will bring about healing.
The second modality of healing, "mind-body medicine", has evolved since the 1950's or so. It sees the mind as the healing agent and harnesses the body's self-healing power as activated by the mind. These are still operating, as is the first view, in a cause-and-effect manner, but no physical intervention is used. Examples of mind-body medicine include, counseling, hypnosis, biofeedback, relaxation therapies, and imagination-engaging techniques.
The first and second you are probably aware of. The third view is what Dossey calls, "nonlocal or transpersonal medicine". Mind is a factor in healing both within and between persons. Mind is not completely localized to points in space (brains or bodies) or time (present moment or single lifetimes). Mind is unbounded and infinite in space and time - thus omnipresent, eternal, and ultimately unitary or one. Healing at a distance is possible.
Now I recognize those of you who have an allergy to mysticism are scratching hard right now. Dossey's view of what we call "mind" is something like a tree. Each tree seems separate and distinct, yet their roots are deeply buried in the earth. The boundary between where the finest threads of root end and the earth begins is quite fuzzy. Thus one could think of a tree as a highly organized pile of dirt or dirt as unmanifested treeness. Yet if we were to look at the trees from outer space, they would appear as a whole, as a connected, continuous expression of the earth. Translating this image to human beings, we may not have a mind but rather be an expression of mind just as a tree could be viewed as an expression of dirt. The roots of our consciousness are intertwined in ways we cannot see just as the tree cannot see its roots.
The idea that things might be connected even though they are separated by space and time is coming out of some interesting findings in particle physics. Evidently, two sub-atomic particles that have been in contact with each other and fly apart remain somehow connected. If one particle is influenced by a field, the second particle exhibits a similar influence even if no field is present. Thus the actions to one particle instantaneously effect the second.
This kind of influence again may be anecdotally familiar to you. A mother is suddenly aware that her child is in danger and calls him or her, only to discover at that exact moment, the child had been in an serious accident. Certain individuals have demonstrated a remarkable ability to diagnose a patient's illness with only their name. My boss at a computer plant I worked in told me the story of his wife waking up screaming because a relative had been swept off a bridge in his pickup truck in Mexico. After checking the story, indeed this had happened at the moment she awoke. Perhaps you have your own stories to share during conversational response.
There seems to be lots of anecdotal evidence that we are not as separate as we think, yet since many of these anecdotes don't yield to scientific study, it is impossible to prove it. My question for us today is what if the evidence points to a truth about our universe? What if prayer, even at a distance, can assist in someone's healing?
Well, if prayer works, do I have to revise my vision of the presence or absence of God? Dr. Dossey's survey of different healing-at- a-distance techniques seems to suggest that the form of the prayer doesn't matter. Those who sit silently sending warm loving feelings and images seem to heal just as well as those using petitional prayer to a deity, maybe better. What seems to be most important is setting one's intention to aid another and feeling some kind of connection. I think this is quite encouraging for Unitarian Universalists. We can unite around an intention to help and each offer a prayer in the form that feels the most harmonious with our experience and understanding.
Still, the unpredictability of prayer nags at us. This nonlocal form of healing seems to be quite out of our control. The disappointment of praying for another and seeing them get worse can be very disillusioning. In these moments, one is forced to let go of the results and trust the value of the intention. It may be that for certain people a quick end is the desired outcome, which may be why they may get worse and die. Few of us want to linger when our health has failed. I remember seeing a member of the Niagara Falls congregation in the hospital after she had had a stroke, and praying a silent prayer that she be allowed to go if she was ready or hang on if she wasn't. She died that night and I was glad for her, for she had lived a full, creative and productive life. Andy has a stuffed bear she made for him and I remember her when I see it.
The great value of prayer for others and ourselves is the resulting feeling of connection it develops with all life. It challenges the view that we are all autonomous robots wasting away in an empty meaningless universe. Prayer can work to persuade us that we are indeed one in the spirit and that we are more than just teeth, bone, flesh and hair. Prayer can work to persuade us that we are profoundly interconnected in a way that transcends the moment of our death.
Dr. Dossey speculates that the scientific evidence, as it accumulates will begin to persuade the medical community that prayer has its place in the healing process. In the future, you may walk home with a prescription for prayer before meals and at night before going to sleep. Or perhaps the surgeon general will put a label on each bottle of medication saying prayer may be beneficial to your health. It may even someday be malpractice not to suggest prayer as a possible healing therapy along with other more traditional approaches.
As a religious community who draws wisdom from "Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science", I think we have to look long and hard at this evidence and ask ourselves how prayer might be used here in our Fellowship. This prayer isn't to glorify an idolatrous image of god but rather to seek wholeness and healing for ourselves and the world. Perhaps the unwillingness to offer a prayer itself might be a form of "idolatry of the mind and spirit".
Let me repeat that this is new territory for me. I have been uncomfortable with the word, coming from a humanist background and having Buddhist leanings that discourage petitional prayer. Yet I cannot look away from this evidence that the communal goodwill of this congregation perhaps can be somehow directed to help those in our congregation who are sick or in need. Let us explore this area together and see if we can find an affirmative response that supports the mixtures of faith and unbelief within this congregation.
Countless numbers of people who pray for diseases to go away would be utterly baffled and stunned should this actually happen. As Susan Ertz put it, "Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." What on earth happened? Where did the cure come from? Why did it occur? What is the purpose of my healing? What am I to do with my life now that the disease has gone?
Healing words of prayer can open the door to a deeper experience of living. The onset and remission of disease is only one level of the healing of our spirits and our remembering of our true nature.
May we remember that healing is fundamental to life and words bring expression to our need for wholeness.
Go in peace.
Make peace.
Be at peace.
Copyright (c) 1995 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.