October 14, 2007 - Healing through the body: The fountain of youth - Frank Alton

2 Kings 5:1-19

I want to begin this morning by sharing with you why healing is so important to me. I don’t do this to legitimate the theme, because it’s central enough to the Gospel to justify being a major focus. I do it to show how I personally connect to this central theme of the Gospel. Those of you who know me well have heard me speak repeatedly of the healing journey. At some level I have been on a healing journey my entire life, though I have only realized that recently. Until recently I traced my healing journey back to the time when my first wife contracted cancer. I believed there was something in her illness for both of us. So I started psychotherapy as a way to make myself more available both to her and to my own healing during her illness.

But as I became more and more engaged in alternative healing in recent years I remembered that my father brought many forms of alternative healing into our lives at a very early age. We all saw a chiropractor when that was definitely considered a marginal profession by society. He took us to eye doctors who gave us exercises to strengthen our eyes rather than glasses to compensate for their weakness. We drank a variety of beverages mixed with protein powder to keep us healthy. None of my friends’ families did any of these things.

I reconnected to that early journey about 7 ½ years ago, though I didn’t know at the time that I was reconnecting. I had some lower back pain & went to some one offering Chinese healing. I didn’t know at the time what led me to seek that out then. But a few months’ later two things happened that I didn’t connect until over a year later. First, my mom died; and secondly, I decided to work more intensely with the Chinese healer. That healing work opened me to what I thought was a whole new realm of healing. In fact, I was reconnecting to a path I had met as a child.

The focus of my healing has not been as much physical healing as it has been emotional healing, though it is important to remember that back pain was the symptom that led to the most recent part of my healing journey. During my sabbatical a few years ago a friend gave me a book entitled, The Mindbody Prescription, by Dr. John Sarno. It helped me make sense of the connection between physical healing & emotional healing.

Dr. John Sarno teaches that many painful conditions – including most neck and back pain, migraine, repetitive stress injuries, whiplash and tendonitises – are rooted in repressed emotions. “The purpose of symptoms is to prevent repressed feelings from becoming conscious by diverting attention from the realm of the emotions to that of the physical. It is a strategy of avoidance.” He quotes Stanley Coen, a Columbia psychoanalyst, who suggests that the purpose of physical pain is to distract attention from frightening, threatening emotions & to prevent their expression. Symptoms … are players in a strategy designed to keep our attention focused on the body so as to prevent dangerous feelings from escaping into consciousness or to avoid confrontation with feelings that are unbearable.” What they are saying is that our bodies instinctively choose to suffer physical pain rather than threatening emotions because it is less scary.

Dr. Sarno tells the story of a patient he calls Helen whom he treated successfully for low back pain. When she was 47 she remembered having been sexually abused by her father as a child and teenager. After she had been treated by Dr. Sarno she joined a support group for women survivors of incest. Her back began to hurt one day but she reassured herself that she knew the psychological reason for the pain. She described the experience: “I went to the meeting, trying to keep kind of under control and not be totally emotional & miserable with people I had barely met. I wanted to see if this kind of group was really right for me. I found myself, in spite of trying to keep some distance, very much over-whelmed – by the amount of pain & havoc wrought in these women’s lives, as well as my own, by the abuse.”

Over the next 48 hours the pain gradually increased until she was paralyzed with it. She wondered out loud with her husband why the therapeutic concept wasn’t working. He replied, “You’re talking about 40 years of repressed anger.” “Then, in an instant, I started to cry. Not little tears, not sad, quiet oh-my-back-hurts-so-much tears, but the deepest, hardest tears I’ve ever cried. And I heard myself saying things like, Please take care of me, I don’t ever want to have to come out from under the covers, I’m so afraid, please take care of me, don’t hurt me. I couldn’t stop and my husband just held me. As I cried and voiced these feelings, it was as if there was a pipeline from my back and out through my eyes. I FELT the pain almost pour out as I cried. I knew that what I was feeling at that moment was what I felt as a child, when no one would or could take care of me, the sacredness, the grief, the loneliness, the shame, the horror. The feelings were there and they poured over me and out of me.” (The Mindbody Prescription, p. 12-13)

The story of Naaman reveals a similar process. We learn several things about Naaman right from the start. He was commander of the army of the king of Aram. He was a great man and a mighty warrior. At the moment of the story he was in high favor with the king because he had won a military victory. The impression we have from all that is of a man who might be a little arrogant, & who might resist receiving help from people he considered beneath him. We are also told that at some point he had contracted leprosy. So we are surprised but not shocked to learn that he took advice from someone who was a child, a girl, a foreigner, a prisoner of war and a servant. She said there was a prophet in Israel who could cure his leprosy. Of course he didn’t relate to her directly – only through his wife. But he did act on her advice. As a commander he figured it was best to deal with kings to set things in motion.

That didn’t go so well. The king of Israel thought he was trying to start a war. Fortunately, Elisha the prophet heard about it and got him to go see him. So Naaman gets in his chariot-cade complete with secret service and heads out to the barrio to meet Elisha, ready to offer him his ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold and ten sets of garments, along with the letter of recommendation he had from his king. Elisha doesn’t even dignify his visit with a personal appearance. He sends a messenger to tell Naaman to go wash seven times in the Jordan River.

Naaman was enraged. “Who the hell does he think he is? He is supposed to come out, stand and call on the name of his God, and wave his hand over my spot of leprosy to cure it. You think I’m going to bathe in your muddy river? If a river is going to heal me, my country has rivers that are 100 times better than this one.” But he really wanted to be healed. So once again he listens to servants – this time his secret service agents. He decides to go ahead and wash in the Jordan. We are told that “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.”

What would Dr. Sarno say about Naaman’s story? Like Elisha, Dr. Sarno would have seen beneath Naaman’s leprosy to what really needed healing in him. Even without laying eyes on Naaman, Elisha knew what Naaman really needed. The rage that emerged in response to Elisha’s prescription, along with the leprosy itself, were the symptoms of what really needed to be healed at an emotional level.

At what point was Naaman healed? When he went into the water or when he came out of it? It was when Naaman literally stepped off his high horse and decided to step in the water that he found healing. At that moment he embraced his child. That decision awakened childlike parts of him that led both to physical healing and to making him more human in all his relationships – with self, others, God. For Naaman, the dirty Jordan River became the fountain of youth in which he was able to get in touch with his child and become lighter and more playful in his spirit. At a physical level it also had to do with making new cells that restored his flesh to that of a child. That was more than a cure – it was a healing of his whole being.

Healing is different from curing. To cure a disease is to get over the physical symptoms. Most of us want that pretty badly when we are sick. So to distinguish that from healing is tricky. To tell someone that physical healing may not be the point, and that healing is a journey we are on for our whole lives, is often not received as good news. When we’re sick it’s not easy to accept that the healing process usually lasts our whole lives. In the Bible healing is another word for salvation. When I’m not sick I like the word in part because it resonates with what I know of Jesus, whose view of salvation involves less rejecting judgment than other parts of Scripture.

Carolyn Myss (Why we don’t heal, p. x) has authored many books about healing, and has been on her own very intense healing journey. She dares to tell people with physical symptoms that healing is bigger than a cure. Many people get to that understanding eventually, but they may reject it initially. She suggests that “illness can emerge as the answer to a prayer. It can physically guide us onto a path of insight and learning upon which we would otherwise never have set foot. It may be a catalyst for expanding personal consciousness as well as for understanding the greater meaning of life.”

She speaks of three kinds of power. Tribal power is rooted in the belief systems of our families and societies. Individual power begins to take effect when we pursue questions like, “What about me? How do I fit my needs into the obligations I have? What are my needs?” This is where illness can be an answer to prayer because through it we may discover our most valuable abilities and contribute the most to others. We have to exercise our power to choose. Finally, symbolic power reaches down to the level of archetypes to allow us to see beyond the physical meaning of events to view them as divine opportunities to evolve our consciousness. Each is more powerful than the previous, and we must overcome it without wiping it out.

All of this relates to the view we are taking in the Center for Healing. We want to focus on helping people deal with stress, trauma and meaning. Physical illness may be the presenting symptom. But we hope that becomes more an excuse that gets people to focus on their health in holistic and preventative ways. We believe that those in turn will us more physically healthy. Western medicine is often criticized as seeing everything in medical terms. But that is actually a fairly new perspective. As recently as 70 years ago most doctors were family doctors who knew about everything going on in the community. If a factory closed down & laid off workers doc knew the layoff had something to do with symptoms he was seeing. Now we call it alternative medicine. Maybe it’s not alternative; maybe we’re just recovering what is traditional. In fact, it may go back even farther than the prophet Elisha who was already practicing it in the time of Naaman.