October 28, 2007 - Healing through the Spirit: Unblocking the Flow - Frank Alton

Joel 2:23-29; Luke 3:21-22; 4:1-2a; 16-19

This morning our healing journey moves from soul to spirit. There is an important shift here, and it involves a change in direction. Thomas Moore summarizes it: “In our soulfulness, we endure the most pleasurable and the most exhausting of human experiences and emotions; in our spirituality, we reach for consciousness, awareness, and the highest values.” (Thomas Moore, 231) In other words, soulfulness makes sure we are grounded in the earth, while spirituality makes sure we are connected to heaven. Both are essential in order to be whole people.

Much of the world views this through a series of energy centers in our bodies – places where spirit either flows or gets blocked. The heart is considered the central center if you will. The energy centers below the heart involve self esteem, money, sex, power, and connection to family and tribe. All of that seeks to be rooted in the earth. The energy centers above the heart involve love, forgiveness, self expression, intuition and wisdom, all of which seek connection with the divine. Today we are going to focus on this latter group as we focus on healing through the spirit.

Why is healing through the spirit so badly needed in our culture? Where do we see that need most clearly? Some of it seems so obvious that it hardly bears saying. We must begin by unblocking the spirit energy that has been trapped and blocked in our own lives so that life can flow again. The traumas and stresses life brings our way cause spirit energy to get stuck in our energy centers. The stuckness takes different forms in our lives but always manifests itself concretely. Think of the ways you see it in yourself and in others. Most of us know some kind of stuckness resulting from a fear or phobia. We’ve all been laid low at some point by an illness. If we’ve lived long enough we usually acknowledge that illness is often the result of our refusal to stop from winding ourselves up into frenzy. Our bodies simply force us to stop so we don’t kill ourselves. We have also seen in ourselves and/or in others the way chronic anger and frustration, as well as irritating passive aggressive behavior, can stymie our best efforts to get on with life.

We also see the need for spirit healing in the way people desperately seek the spirit because it has been driven out of modern life. Life has become technical, mechanical and routine. More and more people live in cities, and cities only function well with a certain degree of mechanization. Even people who live in rural areas are spirit starved because their lives are also mechanized to a great degree.

The desperation is manifest through the ways people seek spirit. People try out mind-altering drugs because they sense a need to connect to something more than the life they live. Traditional cultures used to help people make those connections. Now we have to figure it out for ourselves. Others seek healing precisely by reconnecting to traditional and alternative spiritual practices like rituals and initiation rites from ancient cultures. Still others are rediscovering ancient approaches to medicine that have been forgotten in the west. Music has always been a window to spirit. It used to be channeled through the church. Now it is a constant companion through Ipod-connected ear phones or speakers that pipe it into every place people gather.

People are less and less willing to engage religion that only speaks to the area north of the neck and doesn’t really connect their spirits to deeper meanings. So Pentecostal, charismatic and African American worship styles are on the rise. The ancient practice of spiritual direction is being rediscovered as people act on their longing for guidance in spiritual matters, not just instruction in religious matters. The church is even taking another look at religion and politics, realizing that the answer isn’t removing politics from the church but infusing it with spirit.

A third arena that reveals the need for healing through the spirit is creation. Sacred texts of all major religions speak of creation as a spirit infused reality. When creation is sick it is a spiritual problem. The Hebrew text we read from Joel speaks in these terms. The Christian version of this is most clearly stated by Paul in Romans: “Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, who have the first fruits of the Spirit. Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (8:19-23) The current condition of creation as viewed in the destruction of the environment is a matter of spirit sickness; healing will only come when that connection is realized. Indigenous people have a lot to offer us here, as they see matter as the skin of spirit, a permeable boundary between the dimensions of spirit and matter. Something of that is evident in Romans.

One final symptom of our need for spirit healing is the way our society has rejected its youth and forgotten its elders. The prophet Joel describes a spirit-infused society: “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old ones shall dream dreams, and your young ones shall see visions.” The flip side of this has been well described by Michael Meade: “The fabric of a culture tends to unravel where its young people are rejected and its old people are forgotten. When a culture rejects the dreams of its youth and forgets the visions of its elders it becomes destructive to life regardless of its heralded ideals. A culture that rejects the spirit of its youth will come to lack spirit and imagination when faced with life’s almost impossible challenges. A culture that forgets the necessity of converting “olders” into genuine elders will have leaders who can’t learn from the past and, therefore, can’t imagine a meaningful future.” He gets very specific about our own country: “Either the United States will learn from the lived knowledge of its elders and the nascent dreams of its youth, or it will stay the course and blindly follow the predictable path of hubris and tragedy into the desert of time.” He expresses some hope that “perhaps the United States, with such a large population of potential elders, is trying to wake up.” (Water of Life, iv-v) Let’s hope so.

So what does it mean to wake up to spirit healing? How does spirit energy get released? Clearly the healing must address the deep needs we have just described. Many are rediscovering the power of initiations as a way to awaken spirit healing. One way to consider the struggles of youth, the troubles of the aged, and the changes and dangers sweeping through both culture and creation is through the lens of initiation. The awareness of the need for some kind of initiation intensifies whenever and wherever radical changes disrupt the flow of life.

That was the situation into which Jesus arrived to be baptized. Jesus received the Spirit in his baptism. The Gospel of John says we receive the Spirit by being born again, which is a symbol of baptism. Remember that Nicodemus took Jesus too literally – he thought birth is something that only happens once. We still take Jesus too literally if we think it only happens twice. The message in that is that the initiation symbolized by baptism doesn’t only happen once. It has to keep happening throughout life.

What does initiation accomplish? What we notice through Luke’s story of Jesus is that the Spirit tends to drive people into the fray of life. Jesus was first driven by the spirit into the wilderness. That is where we reconnect with the invisible spiritual realities that infuse life with transcendent qualities by facing our naked selves, unprotected from all the props that come from outside ourselves. At the end of forty days Jesus was sent into a different part of the fray – his hometown. From there the Spirit sent him to the poor and oppressed, which in turn got him in trouble the rest of his life.

The healing of the Spirit is not a gentle healing. It involves scary change. Jesus said, “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” Peacemaking involves entering the fray to work for peace where there is no peace. Almost everyone wants peace. But often we seek cheap peace. We want it at no cost. We want it by ignoring or denying or escaping conflicts of which we are a part. That is not Spirit-infused peace.

Thomas Moore makes this connection clear: “The Jordan is the archetype of our willingness to live fully, to have our own work and mission, and therefore to be blessed, as the Gospel story tells, by a higher parent and a protecting spirit. The Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca painted this scene at the Jordan, showing Jesus standing straight in his full dignity, while in the background another man is about to be baptized – any of us taking our turn – has his garment almost off, lifted over his head in a posture of exquisite ordinariness. It’s an inspiring image of the willingness to step courageously into the river of existence, instead of finding ways to remain safe, dry and unaffected.” (The Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore p. 243)

There are terrible consequences to remaining safe, dry and unaffected. The prophet Joel speaks of selling people to others: “You have sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks, removing them far from their own border.” What could that mean in our context? Could it include things like destroying the reputations of individuals and communities by creating rumors about them? The message of Joel is that the only way to stop the cycle of violence and destruction is to enter the stream of the spirit where nothing is gained by exercising vengeance. History itself brings judgment so people don’t have to. Judgment is never the last word with God – just as gossip and destruction are not the last word. In a biblical view of history, healing the land, the animals, broken relationships and broken spirits is the promised future. When we believe that, we don’t have to resist the Spirit that drives us into the midst of a broken world.

When we allow the Spirit to do her work, she leads people into all kinds of activities they never thought they would do, and that are not their actual jobs. I think of Richard Prince, who works as a handy man and has qualifications for all kinds of things. Richard can’t stop himself from taking people to Tijuana to build houses, and to investing in the lives of youth. Those aren’t the ways he earns his money but they are ways he manifests the Spirit. Most of us go about looking for a job by gathering qualifications & credentials and submitting them to people looking for someone to do a particular job. But many of us have experienced the kind of leading Richard demonstrates, which is also the kind Jesus had in the wilderness and in Nazareth, and the kind his mother experienced when the Spirit came upon her to conceive Jesus.

The final piece of spirit healing involves reconnecting the pieces of creation to each other & to their true purpose so that healing & reconciliation can come to the whole cosmos, because God has created us all to work together in harmony. Joel describes how first the soil is infused with spirit and released from its fear and healed; then the same thing happens for the animals; then the environment is restored to its original intention of sustaining the life of creation; and finally the generations of human ones will be unblocked so the spirit can flow again, and society can be ordered properly, such that the young have bold visions and the elders dream dreams. Luke reveals the same truth thru the story of Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth where a young man announces his spirit-led dream quest of reconnecting to full inclusion in society those who have been thrust to the margins - the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed. Indeed, when the Spirit is present, for each child that’s born, a morning star rises and sings to the universe who we are and we become makers of peace and healers of spirit.