November 4, 2007 - Healing relationships with the deceased - Frank Alton

MP3 File

John 11:1, 7, 11, 14-15, 17, 20-22, 28-44

We come to the final sermon in this series on healing. I have wanted to create a frame for the center for healing we will be opening next year. Friday night a group of us met in Judy’s and my home to update each other on how the center is progressing. It was very encouraging. I want to keep the center before you as we prepare to open next spring.

This morning as we celebrate All Saints Sunday I want to speak to a dimension of healing we don’t often consider – healing our relationships with those who have died. In my experience, this kind of healing incorporates all the dimensions of healing we have addressed this past month – body, soul and spirit.

This area of life doesn’t come naturally to me, both because of my personality and because of my Protestant upbringing. Protestants stopped celebrating All Saints Day because it was associated with an understanding of the doctrine of the communion of Saints that included granting a special role to certain saints and asking their intercession for us. At the end of the Apostle’s Creed we say, “I believe in the communion of saints.” The meaning of that belief has varied greatly over the centuries, but it experienced a major transformation in the Protestant Reformation. Protestants rejected the idea that believers needed an intercessor between them and God besides Christ. In order to clarify that rejection, the reformers downplayed the role of saints who had passed on. It has only been in recent decades that the Presbyterian Church even includes a liturgy for All Saints Day in its Directory of Worship.

The first time I even thought about the doctrine of the communion of Saints was about 25 years ago when I was walking with one of my spiritual mentors in Lima, Peru. Father Henri Nouwen and I were through a Cathedral in downtown Lima when I asked him why Catholics prayed to the saints. He explained it with a logic that made sense to me. Christians ask each other to pray for them, and actually do that when they gather to pray. Christian belief also claims that those who die in Christ are actually alive in the spiritual realm, and that they are worshipping God. If that is true, it makes sense to ask Christians who have died to pray for us as well. While I never actually asked one of my ancestors to pray for me, I no longer saw the practice as silly.

It was not until both my parents had died and I started a phase of my healing journey that opened me to some new approaches to healing that I actually began to converse with those who had died. A significant moment in my healing journey came when I forgave my father – 24 years after he had died. The healing work happened at the levels of body, soul and spirit. Certain forms of body work were unblocking the spiritual energies that needed to flow through me. That happened in ways that I didn’t understand at all, but took on faith. In the midst of that I wrote a twelve page letter to my father, which I put in a wine bottle and tossed off the Venice pier. Finally, I carried on some dialogues with both my father and his father, whom I had never met. It was during one of those dialogues that I started weeping uncontrollably and realized that I finally understood my father, could accept his humanness, and forgive him for not being the perfect father. It helped that I had become a very imperfect father in the meantime.

That experience opened me to see all kinds of ways that unprocessed feelings with those who have died impact every aspect of our lives, from our physical and emotional wellbeing, to our ability to carry out our life work. To hold grudges against those who have died keeps us stuck in many ways. It blocks both emotional and physical healing. When we’ve been hurt by someone who is already dead it’s challenging to find healing from the wounds inflicted. I had an emotional healing through forgiving my father.

Dennis, Matthew and Sheila Linn tell a story about someone who experienced physical healing through a form of prayer that led to forgiving one who had died. They teach what they call the “Shoe Prayer” which is based on the Sioux prayer, “Great Spirit, grant that I may never criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in his moccasin.” At one retreat a man named Gereon participated in a shoe prayer. It turns out that in 1944 Adolph Hitler’s soldiers killed Gereon’s entire family. Gereon was so eager to take revenge that he became involved in three different plots to kill Hitler. 35 years later, Gereon still had not been able to forgive Hitler. During the shoe prayer he traded his right shoe with his neighbor and was astonished to receive a military boot just like Adolph Hitler’s.

As he tried to walk in Hitler’s shoe, he felt the tightness of that military boot. He tried to enter more deeply into Hitler, sitting like a soldier with his back as stiff as a rod and his feet stubbornly dug into the ground. As he became aware of the terrible constriction and rigidity of Hitler’s world, he was surprised to start feeling compassion. He realized that he was able to forgive Hitler for everything except his hardness of heart. But then he broke into tears as he realized that Hitler’s hard heart felt just like his own that for 35 years had been unable to forgive. By the end of the prayer Gereon had taken in enough of God’s healing love for his own hard-ness of heart that he could offer it even to Hitler. But it was only as he bent down to remove the military boot and return it to his neighbor that he realized that for the first time in 35 years he could bend over without the ever present sharp pain in his back. He had literally taken Hitler off his back & received a physical healing.

Forgiveness isn’t the only kind of healing available to us. Last Wednesday evening we had a service in which we engaged in a series of rituals that addressed this healing work. Some wrote letters to people who have died. Others prayed and were anointed with oil. Still others simply sang meditative songs together, or sat alone looking at the candles. All kinds of healing related issues came up for people.

This healing doesn’t only happen through rituals either. I had an experience 5-6 years ago that happened in the midst of my work. I was having my weekly supervision session with one of the interns at Immanuel who was doing her Clinical Pastoral Education at a hospital. She was telling me about baptizing the dead fetus of a baby who died in the mother’s womb and had to be removed by Caesarian, and how weird that was for her as a Protestant. As she spoke I began to weep. I was remembering another fetus – the son that my first wife and I lost when she was diagnosed with cancer. At the time I was so absorbed with the impact of my wife’s cancer that I had never really grieved the death of my son. I had never even thought of him as a real person. But as the intern shared her story, I realized that my son would have been 21 years old at the time. That made him real enough to me to begin my grief work of facing some unhealed and unprocessed feelings that were coming to the surface.

Sometimes the healing affects us powerfully in our jobs. How we react to things often shows which story line we are following. Whenever we react strongly to something, it usually indicates that we are reacting out of the place of our hurt and unhealed child. The place we usually get stuck is in old scripts for our lives that are no longer working for us.

Recently, I was in a conversation with a woman who is starting a non profit agency that works for children. She is doing everything in her power to make sure that children are safe in the agency, since so many children get hurt in programs that are otherwise designed for their well being. We were exploring whether she had done enough or if she needed to take more precautions. It became obvious that there could never be enough precautions. She said that people who don’t protect children from harm are scum. Even if you have done everything possible to protect them and one gets hurt, you are still scum. We explored where that “script” came from, and learned that she had been hurt as a child, and felt that her parents had not done enough to protect her. She was not able to break through that stuck place that day, but she knew where her work needed to be.

The biblical story of Lazarus has become one of my favorites around All Saints Day and funerals. It gives permission to so many different expressions of grief, and invites both internal and relational healing around death. I was pleased to find a beautiful book entitled Simple Ways to Pray for Healing that uses the Lazarus story to help us do our healing work with those who have died. I want to invite you to visualize the story of Lazarus with me as a way to begin the process of healing a relationship in your life. I believe that doing this in the context of worship facilitates a prayerful connection for healing. Of course, you may choose to opt out of doing the visualization. Feel free to sit and do whatever meditation might be helpful. But I am going to lead the rest of us in a visualization.

Sit comfortably, close your eyes and begin to focus on your breath. Breathe deeply and slowly, breathing in the love of God that surrounds you. Continue breathing deeply and with each breathy fill yourself with Jesus’ compassion for the deceased.

With your right hand make a fist. Let it become as hard and as immovable as the stone that covered Lazarus’ tomb. Now, take a moment to visualize a deceased person in your life who is behind that stone, someone with whom you would like to dialogue.

Before you move the stone, share with God how you feel about this person’s death. Like Martha and Mary who complained to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died,” you may wish to express your disappointment. On the other hand, perhaps you feel relief. Take a moment to express whatever feelings come up, and then listen to what Jesus most wants to say back to you. When you feel ready, push back the stone with Jesus and imagine that the deceased person is, like Lazarus, bound from head to foot. Unbind the person, beginning with the forehead. When you have uncovered the eyes, look into those eyes and share what you most want to say. When you have said everything, continue unbinding the person until you get to the heart. As you unbind the heart, look inside it and see what it is that the person most wants to say to you.

Continue to say and do with that person whatever will most fill both of you with life. Perhaps you want to travel in your imagination to a favorite spot, or introduce new members of your family, or have this person fill in some hurt place in your life. If you are praying for a miscarried, aborted or stillborn baby, perhaps you wish to name the child and baptize it with Jesus.

Finally, if it seems right, make a space for this person in your heart. Perhaps imagine putting a rocking chair or a candle there; invite her or him and Jesus to make their home in your heart. Take a moment to feel the warmth of their light filling your heart. Take deep breaths; breathe in all that they want to give you. Slowly return to this room and open your eyes.

The communion of saints takes on many forms. Whether or not that visualization worked for you, I invite you to keep working on those relationships that still need healing in your life. You might want to go home and write about this experience. You might want to talk to a trusted friend about it. However you do it, notice what gets unstuck for you – what shifts for you. If you’ve been sweeping under the rug all the unresolved issues with people who have died, let the saints come marching back into your life so that you might experience healing that can affect your whole life.