In 1933 my uncle Hardy, who was studying at Tübingen,
Be Not Afraid Healing
Chapter 15
Healing
In 1933 my uncle Hardy, who was studying at Tübingen, met a fellow student, Edith, and fell in love with her. A year and a half later they married and settled at Silum, a tiny commune set high in the Alps. With matching poetic temperaments and a shared love of history and literature, the young couple could not have been better suited for each other, or happier, especially after Edith discovered that she was expecting a child. But their joy was not to last long.
Within days of the baby's birth, Edith developed childbed fever, then universally fatal. Soon the infection spread to her bloodstream. Her temperature rose, her pulse quickened, her veins became inflamed, and her body began to swell. She was dying, and there seemed to be no hope of recovery.
Hardy was not ready to let his young wife go, however, and nor was his father – my grandfather. As Edith's condition worsened, he gathered the members
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of Silum and led them in prayer on her behalf. He also laid his hands on her and asked God to heal her, if that was his will.
Edith slowly recovered, and at one point her doctor
even pronounced her out of danger. Shortly after this, however, her fever returned and she lost ground again. One day she would feel better; the next, she would be critically ill.
It was around this time that my grandfather noticed something he hadn't before: that Edith's spirits seemed to fluctuate with her health, and that both went up or down according to the state of the close-knit group around her. When they were depressed or pessimistic or petty, she weakened tangibly; if they rallied around her with joy and resolve, she regained strength. It was as if her body had become a barometer for the atmosphere of the group.
Shaken by this mysterious phenomenon, the people at Silum prayed more persistently than ever. But their focus was not Edith's physical health. Rather, they sought to have their eyes opened in such a way that they could understand the spiritual nature of her struggle, and identify and remove every potential obstacle to victory, including their own personal agendas and opinions – and thus make way for God to heal them all, in body and soul. As my grandfather explained at the time, "There can be no victory of the Holy Spirit as
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long as people set themselves up as healers of sickness. The Spirit has nothing in common with magic. It can heal, but not until self-will and all other human claims to power disappear. Then and only then will the Spirit
show itself as the spirit that heals sickness, drives out demons, and overcomes death." It was in this sense that Edith's illness was fought and, after a few weeks, finally overcome.
Remembering it all after many years, my parents, who had lived in Silum at the time, explained that Edith had seen her battle in terms of a larger, spiritual one – the battle between light and darkness, life and death. Because of this, she didn't fight just for her own sake, or for her family's sake. Obviously she wanted to live, but she also felt that if there was a victory to be won, it had to mean more than her own survival. It must be a living testimony to the power that is unleashed when people unite to pray for a common goal.
Six decades later, another relative of mine experienced the same healing power of prayer. It was a February day in 1996, and one of my nieces, who had married three years before, had just called my wife and me to announce the arrival of her first child. Simon was a beautiful, healthy, six-pound baby, perfect in every way – at least at first. But within hours, he developed difficulty breathing. Oxygen was brought, and an ambulance called (the birth had taken place at a rural
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clinic). On the way to the hospital, the baby turned blue.
Once there, X-rays soon confirmed what the doctors feared: both of Simon's lungs were badly infected. If he
survived, they predicted, he would most likely sustain hearing loss and visual impairment, if not brain damage as well.
Struggling to shut out the doctors' words, and fearing that this was the beginning of the end, Simon's parents were numb with discouragement and grief. But not for long. Why not, they thought, turn to God and ask him to heal Simon? Why accept defeat?After all, God knew things Simon's doctors didn't. And Simon himself wasn't giving up. Beneath the maze of wires, needles, tubes, and lights, beneath the hum of the mechanical ventilator breathing for him, he was still kicking – fighting for life.
Simon's parents prayed, but his condition deteriorated. By evening he was bleeding from his lungs and needed a transfusion. Later the same night his blood pressure dropped. Dopamine, a powerful drug, was started, but still his life hung in the balance. Ten miles away, however, another force was being enlisted: the prayers of dozens of members of our church. It happened spontaneously, but quickly: as one person after another found out about Simon, plans were made to gather and intercede on his behalf.
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Meanwhile, Simon's parents and a handful of friends continued to pray around the baby at the hospital.
At midnight, Simon suddenly turned a corner; by five a.m. the oxygen was turned down. His doctor, who
had not left the baby all night, looked up, perplexed, and said, "My God, you people must know how to pray. I can't come up with any other explanation for why he's still here." Another doctor was more blunt. "Your child should have died," she said, shaking her head in disbelief.
Over the next days, despite a specialist's prediction of further obstacles, Simon improved so steadily that he was soon discharged. Today he is a healthy fiveyear-old, with no neurologic damage of any kind.
Simon's story, like Edith's, is a memorable testimony to the power of prayer. But despite their drama, neither story is unique. In fact, instances of recovery prompted by such intercession are so common today that healing and prayer are often spoken of in the same breath. They are also spoken of so casually, and so often sensationalized, that many people regard them with a justifiable mixture of skepticism and embarrassment.
Still, the biblical connection between prayer and healing, as spoken of in passages like the following one from the Gospel of Matthew, cannot be dismissed: "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For
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everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened."
To someone who has experienced healing or witnessed it in another person, these words of Jesus
are not a mere promise, but an undeniable reality. To someone who has not, on the other hand, they may arouse frustration. What about the spouse or parent or child who is prayed over day after day, but then dies anyway? What about the person who seems to have been healed, only to be snatched away later? (This happened to Edith, by the way: eight years after her brush with death, she died of a ruptured appendix.)
Reflecting on such questions, I have no answers. But I do have a few thoughts, the first being that to set one's hopes on miracles and wonders is to set oneself up for disappointment. Optimism is a powerful medicine, but it can't undo the laws of nature or the will of God. It is true that when we act in faith, miracles do occur. But as the Swedish thinker Dag Hammarskjöld once observed, the consequence is that in clinging to such happenings, we are "tempted to make miracles the ground for our hope…and thus lose the confidence of faith."
Further, no matter the apparent effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of our prayers, I believe we should still turn to God and believe that he hears us. And in doing so we should not forget that though most of us habitually focus, in our prayers, on telling him our
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problems and desires, we might be more successful in discerning his will by becoming silent and letting him speak.
Finally, we should also realize that God may not
respond to our prayers for healing in the way we expect him to, and that the questions we ask may not even be answerable in the way we want them to be. Writing in A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis noted, "When I lay some questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child, you don't understand.'"
Lewis continues, "Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think… How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that."
Given the modern tendency to believe that we can find a cure for every ailment, if we search hard enough, this is an important point to contemplate. In the realm of healing, for example, how can we be sure that the treatment is more important than the ailment? Where does one end and the other begin? Could it be that they are sometimes one and the same? When an arrogant,
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self-absorbed person has been brought low by misfortune or tragedy and turned into a humbler, more loving one, has he been harmed or healed? Perhaps we are too limited in our thinking, those of us who think of
healing merely in physical terms.
That wholeness and healing can be found in death as well as in life is not hard to accept in the case of an elderly person who has lived life to the full and is ready to go. But the thought is valid, regardless of age. When Zach, a young man, was stricken with an aggressive cancer, his congregation prayed that God might heal him and bring him back to health. Zach received topnotch medical care at a local university hospital, and for several months he defied the odds and bolstered his supporters' confidence. At one point he was even pronounced in remission. Then, about a month later, he suddenly took a downturn. In a matter of weeks he was gone.
Speaking with Zach and his family shortly before he died, I sensed that their church's continuous prayers for healing, while sincere, had not necessarily lessened their ordeal – and had made it even harder at times. How should they react, for instance, when wellmeaning friends insisted that Zach would pull through, when their gut feelings told them that the opposite was true? Should they just play along – "trust in God" and pretend to believe what they couldn't? Not knowing
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what to think, I blurted out something like, "Well, Zach, are you ready for whatever happens – not just ready to be physically healed, but also ready to die?" My point was that the whole question of recovering
or being cured wasn't getting him anywhere. His cancer was now so advanced that he surely didn't have more than a week or two left. There was no time for distractions…
After an intense struggle, Zach decided that what he really needed to do was face the fact that he was dying, and honestly and unconditionally accept God's will for him, whatever it might be. In the days that followed, he continued to slide downhill, but it no longer mattered to him. He was dying: there was no denying that. But he was also – paradoxical as it sounds – experiencing the healing that had evaded him for so long.
Inwardly, Zach was undergoing an unmistakable change. He became less self-conscious, he reached out more to other people; he mellowed and deepened. Most remarkable for this once confident, argumentative twenty-something, he began to reflect the childlike spirit Jesus says each of us must find if we are to enter the kingdom of God.
Zach's transformation did not come easily, or without a price. Nor did the healing he found make saying goodbye any easier. For his mother in particular, it was still unspeakably hard: "When you lose someone you're
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close to, especially if you're right there with him when he goes, the hurt and the shock are indescribably deep. I just don't know how we got through it." Even so, she agreed with her husband, who said, "There is no way
Zach's death was a defeat. It's true his cancer wasn't successfully treated. But he found peace of heart, and in that sense he was healed."
Despite their grief, there was a healing of sorts for Zach's parents too. As his father said afterward, "Life still has its ups and downs. Some days we fall apart; other days we do okay. But being with our son on the final night of his life changed us. We finally saw that death need not be a frightening thing. It may be the last enemy, but it's not the end of the story."