The concept of healing has often felt nebulous to me. What does it mean to experience healing? What does healing look like? Over the course of my life, I’ve found that when people speak of healing, they mean returning things to what they once were or what we deem “normal”. As you might imagine, I’ve found this problematic.
I’ve also wondered, “how are we healed?” Several months back, I was on a quest to dig deeper and so every time I came across the word, my attention was seized. One day I came across the passage on the healing of a boy with a spirit in Mark chapter 9 and Jesus’ words, “This kind can come out only through prayer” struck me. When we pray, we are attuned to the Spirit in ways that transcend our present understanding of reality. And in these moments, healing occurs. Our spirits, our lives, align with the Divine.
We all want to experience healing, where God meets us in our deepest pains and darkest hours. Our most basic human desire to see or find God might even compel us to fabricate experiences of God by doing or running “God’s errands” as we grope around in the “dark” to find God.
This is a matter of control. And in our controlling efforts, we box-in God - sometimes within the physical walls of the Church - only separated by our own negative choices and distracted by our own ignorance.
We’ve forgotten where God resides; we’ve lost the way of mysticism or contemplation. G.K. Chesterton said,
“Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of.”
In The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr puts it this way:
“I have never been separated from God, nor can I be, except in my mind.”
Sit with those two statements for a moment. Take a deep breath. Listen as you inhale … and exhale.
Now read Acts 17.22-31. I encourage you to take a look at it in the Message.
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Communitas is the spirit of community we experience as we find our deepest connections to God through the time and space we have for living - which God has made through human beings and the hospitable earth, so we could seek after God and actually find God!
The good news is that God is made known to us.
Our God-created being is intricately intertwined in the Spirit operating as “One” with the world - creation and one another. In her book, Native, on identity, belonging, and rediscovering God as a Potawatomi woman, Kaitlin B. Curtice says,
“When I began to pray in Potawatomi, I understood something different about prayer - That it is a holistic act that involves all of me, and all of the creatures around me, communing with God.”
Yes! In God we live and move and have our being. Prayer is oneness.
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We know God. We see God. In John 8.12 Jesus says, “I am the Light of the World.” Richard Rohr reminds us:
“Light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything.”
And this way of illuminated knowing - life breathed into us - moves us toward repentance or radical life-change. This is a turning from our false selves to our true selves - the part of us “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3.3). Here, our connection to God is illuminated.
We are in Christ.
That also means we are in Christ with those around us. When our isolated “I” turns into a connected “we”, we’ve moved from Jesus to Christ (see Rohr, page 37). In community, we experience healing with each and in every breath. Remember, the Greek word for Spirit - pneuma - means wind or breath. Breathing then models our human vocation: incarnation - like Christ - of matter and spirit operating as one.
“Every time you take in a breath, you are repeating the pattern taking spirit into matter, and thus repeating the first creation of Adam. And every time you breathe out, you are repeating the pattern of returning spirit to the material universe.” - Rohr
So, what is healing? It is not a pattern of returning things to what they once were or what we deem “normal”. The reading from Acts reminds us that God has given assurance to all by raising Jesus from the dead. Resurrection and renewal are, in fact, the universal and observable pattern of everything. This is healing!
This week we engage in the practice of breath prayer as we seek to experience the Spirit as Inner Healer, through the pattern of resurrection and renewal.
So, breath with me. Be healed. We are in Christ.
(By Melissa Millis)