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EDGES MAGAZINE Issue |
October 1998 |
| LOVE |
IS
THE GREATEST SOURCE OF HEALING
Mostly
we need to be held to be healed, because healing is quite simply
about love. Being there and walking in when everybody else has
walked out. Of course the process is usually painful because it is
about damage, loss, vulnerability, rejection and feeling that there
may be never again any light or life for us. |
The Image of Angels
is a powerful one for me. Messengers of God who come and go and whom
we entertain often unknowingly. Those thousands of people often
never recognised who reach out to the apparently unreachable, and
have the power to hold them close to their hearts.
Addiction
to drugs and alcohol, food disorders, emotional and spiritual
carnage, is the stuff of many lives. Often the source of these real
life stories comes from our childhood, our growing up, and from the
whole process of living. In many cases things have been done to
people which ought never to have been done, and sometimes it is an
illness which breaks in out of the blue. But alongside all of this
there is a rumour of angels, there are glimpses of hope, of life, of
healing. There is laughter as well as tears, celebration as well as
daylong greyness. This healing has as its source the power and love
of a Saviour who opened the eyes of the blind, touched the ears of
the deaf, wept over the death of his friend before shouting for him
to step out of his tomb, and let those who had bound him unbind him.
Christ the healer is the man of sorrows in Isaiah,
acquainted with grief and familiar with suffering. He is the one who
takes our burdens and pains on himself. But healing does not take
away the marks of pain, which is the lot of all of us. Even after
the Resurrection, Christ still bore the marks of his passion, which
are now signs of victory.
The book "The Diving Bell
and the Butterfly" written by Jean-Dominique Bauby is about a
42 year old father of two who suffered a stroke so severe that he
could only dictate the book by signalling with his eyelid. Painful
in the extreme he produced a book of humour, spirituality and hope,
even for the most severely afflicted. The last sentence of his book
is this, "Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my
cocoon? A currency, strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must
keep looking".
John Michael Hanvey
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