Only say the word

On the year of reading healing

When you get cancer, people come out of the woodwork to tell you how to heal. 

Facebook friends with links, long-lost relatives with books, DMs with suggestions, strangers with advice. All promising cures, all eager and confident, all aggressively optimistic. Diets or vitamins or herbs or oils, anything to counter the evils that modern medicine will push on you with its poisons and radiations and big pharma and conventional science.

One by one, I batted them away. Ignore, delete, reject, goodbye. 

I have a healthy skepticism of anyone who promises me The Solution. (Not a single doctor worth their salt will ever do this.) The only part that makes me sympathize—though not even enough to respond—is our gut-deep desire to help each other heal.

Trouble is, I know healing is heaps harder than any flashy website or overseas supplement or Amazon book or fad diet will sell you. Healing is (to riff off the late great Eugene Peterson) a long rest in the right direction. It is work, but it is mostly letting yourself be worked on. It asks you to surrender, over and over.

Healing is for bodies. And for souls.

//

We have a simple, strange prayer we utter before communion. 

At one point in the Mass, Catholics say the same words every time, mumbling them low like rumbling thunder, heads bowed in the pews: Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.

As a Catholic, I have a confession to make.

For many months last year, while my body was wasting away from chemo and immunotherapy and every conventional treatment I chose, I whispered a different prayer under my breath. A prayer I made up, to force my own petition. 

My-body-and-soul shall be healed, I muttered instead, smashing in extra syllables, spitting out the words, insisting God heal me the way I wanted. A renegade plea, broken words from a broken body. 

Even as I prayed it, demanded it, wept for it, pleaded for it, I heard the silent answer.

Soul. The word is soul. 

The prayer says soul, and plenty of prayers speak of bodies, but not this one, not yet. 

If you cram in words where words were not, you change the meaning. 

You might think you want to change the meaning, but do you?

//

What does it mean to heal? What does it mean to cure?

For the past year, I’ve walked the world’s slowest lectio divina through the healing stories of the Gospels. I’ve waded through Matthew and Mark; now I’m finishing Luke and heading to John. This was no pious pursuit I chose for my own edification: I simply got an annoying, persistent nudge that now was the time to read these stories and read them all, slow as surgery recovery. 

To say I have learned much would be a humble, humorous understatement. Worn down like water on rock would be more accurate. This inchworm-paced practice felt like cracking open the Gospels for the first time, finding and following a golden thread, one that weaves together all the broken people: suffering women, dying children, grieving parents, disabled outcasts, the chronically ill, the newly sick, the untouchables, the ones who can’t stop bleeding or seizing or crying out to be heard.

My biggest source of wonder is the wideness that Jesus shows in these stories. He heals in private and in public, crowds and individuals, old and young, women and men, wealthy and poor, paralyzed and possessed, living and dead.

Jesus never follows a formula. Sometimes he heals the spirit. Sometimes he cures the body. Sometimes he touches. Sometimes he speaks. 

Always the person before him is changed.

//

Heal. Cure. Body. Soul. Depending on the day or the hour, what I want is clear. Or not.

I want a cure, for my body. Or I want healing, for my soul. Either case seems ultimate, as light and shadow shift in the room. 

Each time I hear the prompting for the prayer at communion, I steel myself, not knowing what I want to pray this time. My soul shall be healed or my body-and-soul shall be healed. 

Am I receiving or demanding? Which is humble? Which is holy? Is body or soul the greater good? 

Truly, I say to you, whenever you think you know, you do not know. 

Only say the word.

//

I am not done with the healing stories. Or rather, they are not done with me.

But lest I wait till the neat-n-tidy end—of the Gospels, of my cliched cancer journey—to decide what it means, I notice how these words are already changing me. 

What strikes me most, after a long year spent trudging through muddy miracles, spit-smeared stories, tassel-touched tales, is how much bodies matter to God. The Word became flesh, and the Word touched our flesh, and the Word gave flesh for our flesh.

Jesus did not just come to save souls. He came to cure lepers, to raise the dead, to give sight to the blind, to help the paralyzed walk, to soothe the fever-struck, to stop the hemorrhaging, to cure the epileptic, to let the deaf hear, to make withered hands and stooped backs strong again. To prove what prophets foretold, to break in the Kingdom among us, to reveal signs of the Spirit indwelling, to urge our limping souls to remember how God’s world shines.

By oncology’s standards, I won’t be cured for years. But on the switch-back, break-neck, tread-worn path toward healing, these startling stories holler at me from the roadside, like a leper who will not be ignored. They are alarming as an abnormal mass, urgent as a pathology report, unmistakable as a scan on a screen. 

Our bodies are allowed to cry out. God welcomes it.

If anyone had advised me one year ago to read Scripture like this, I can assure you I would have shoved away the suggestion with their stupid kale smoothies. Perhaps I picked up these wild stories precisely because I was sick and tired of people telling me what to do for my body. The soul knows its own cravings.

So I know the prayer says soul but sometimes I still whisper body-and. Because I believe both are good and worthy of healing. Because I believe that some-strange-how, I will get to keep both for whatever comes next. Because I believe the God-man from Galilee got up from his cave grave and breathed life into his trembling friends with wounds still fresh in his forgiving hands. Isn’t that enough to hold every impossible tension true?

Only say the word.