Does God Want to Heal You?

1. Intro

I've been struggling for a few years now with how the gift of healing works, in the charismatic sense. I know that these healings happen. I've seen a few of them. But I have so many questions. 

Are we to pray as Jesus did, ordering the sickness out? Are we to humbly ask God to do the healing, if it is his will? What about the people who we pray for, but aren't healed? Did one of us lack faith and mess the whole thing up? Should we ask God whether he wants the person to be healed, before we pray for healing? Or should we assume he wants everyone to be healed? Should we expect everyone to be healed instantly - is that what faith is? Or should we just keep praying until there is some proof of healing? And so on and so forth.

Then one day I picked up a book called The Power to Heal by Fr. Francis MacNutt and started reading. It felt like God hitting me over the head with answers.

One insight in particular that I got out of the book I would like to share with you.


2. Background: The Two Theological Positions

A friend of mine¹ once told me that it was God's will for everyone to be healed; the proof was that Jesus healed everyone who asked him. Jesus never turned someone away and said that God was keeping them sick for a reason. This idea contrasts sharply with the current emphasis in Catholic writing on embracing sickness as a suffering that we should offer to God². The fact that Jesus healed everyone is compelling, in precisely the same way that Jesus choosing only males for his Twelve apostles is a compelling argument against women priests.

At the same time, I couldn't quite buy it. Some five or six years ago, a lady that I was peripherally acquainted with got a virulent form of cancer. Whenever I went to pray for her, I felt distinctly that God was telling me not to pray for her healing. I could pray for her soul, I could pray for her family, but not for her healing. She died some three months or so later. More recently, there was an elderly man at my parish who developed some sort of fatal lung condition. I prayed for his healing, but my prayers felt empty. The man himself spoke of growing closer to God through his illness (which he eventually died of). My own experience told me that sometimes sickness was a part of God's will, something he was bringing good out of. Also, God is not limited in power; if it was really his will for everyone to be healthy, then why would he allow people to be sick?

I simply could not reconcile these polar philosophies; I was stuck in limbo between them.


3. The Insight

And then I read the following passage from the book (italic his emphasis, bold mine):

So I must recognize that the reason many people are not healed (or are improved but not altogether healed) is not that God wills it, but it is simply a factor of my own spiritual and human weakness. I must do the best I can, humbly recognize my littleness and determine to grow more, without straining. I don't need to get into lengthy disquisitions about God's will; I just need to recognize that the basic reason people I pray for are not healed has little to do with God's perfect will, or to a lack of faith on the part of the sick person. If anything, it has to do with my own lack of spiritual power. I need to be more in union with Jesus, the source of that power, than I now am.

God's perfect will.

God's perfect will.

His perfect will, as opposed to what he is willing to settle for.

I don't think it had ever occurred to me before that God's will wasn't a black and white, "yes" or "no", sort of thing. I mean, I know I've heard some theology down the line about God's permissive will vs.... well, I forget the other term. Something implying perfect will, I'm sure. But that had never registered in my mind as a distinction that particularly correlated with, well... anything. It was just one of those abstract thought-games, that theologians seem to have fun with. Now, though, as I thought about the difference between "what I ideally want" and "what I am willing to settle for", an example came to mind.


4. The Example: Thinking in Mom Terms

Last July, as a sort of experiment in our homeschooling, I told Kyrie I wanted her to write a story. It had to be at least five sentences long. It could be about anything she wanted, but she had to write it. When she resisted, I told her that if she didn't do it, she had to write "I will obey Mom" on every line of one page of her notebook.

I meant once on each line, but this is better, so I didn't say so to her.

This is what she handed me³.

The second day I did the same thing.

I like how it takes her a few lines before her words line up with each other.

With the same results.

All world-building and no plot. Exactly how I write, the couple times I tried fiction.

Finally, on the third day, she came up with something.

The point is, she obeyed me. Not just on the third day, when she finally wrote something, but the first day. I had given her a choice: write a story, or write "I will obey Mom". She did the latter. She did my will.

But she didn't do my perfect will.

She didn't do what I really wanted her to do, but she did what I was willing to settle for, for the time being.


5. Conclusion

In the same way, I can now see it being God's perfect will for everyone to be healed. When we resist Him, he may settle for something else; he may settle for us being unhealthy⁴. But just as I got what I wanted with Kyrie in the end, so too will he get the health he wants for us, in the end, at the Resurrection if not sooner.

And even though he has been settling for sickness, and even if he continues to settle for sickness, for his own mysterious reasons, when I am praying, right here and now, for my own or someone else's healing, I can trust that that healing is what God really wants.


<sup>1. An online friend.

2. MacNutt makes the interesting distinction between suffering and sickness; Jesus suffered, but he was never sick. (And we are to imitate Him.) The author also has a curious way of insisting both that God wants everyone healed and that there is such a thing as redemptive sickness, as some saints have experienced.

3. When I showed Ken the picture, he said, "That's true resistance." Which I thought was interesting, since it was, in fact, a textbook example of what Steven Pressfield calls Resistance, in his book The War of Art, which is part of what I was thinking about in asking Kyrie to write the story in the first place.

4. So, clearly, the path towards health lies in resisting God less. For the record, I'm not saying that the sick person is necessarily the one doing the resisting. It may be that God wants them to be healed by someone who is resisting the gift of healing, for example. And the blind man in John 9 was blind so that everyone could be amazed and brought closer to God when Jesus healed him. Ultimately, this means that it was their resistance, and not the blind man's, that was the reason God settled for the blindness.</sup>

Have You Forgiven Bin Laden?

So, first, about forty-odd years ago, the Catholic Church sets up a three-year cycle that determines which Scripture passages will be read on which Sundays of the year¹.

Then 9/11 happens. May they all rest in peace.

Ten is a nice round number for us humans, and we sure like round numbers, don't we? So the tenth anniversary of 9/11 will get our attention, more so even than other anniversaries. Especially since it just happens that this was the year we caught and killed Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the attacks.

Then it just happens that the tenth anniversary of 9/11 is a Sunday.

And it just happens that the Scripture readings on this tenth anniversary focus completely on forgiveness.²

Yeah, God is totally telling us that we need to forgive Bin Laden and the Taliban³.

Warning us to forgive them, I might even say.


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Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time⁴

Reading 1: Sir 27:30-28:7

Wrath and anger are hateful things,
yet the sinner hugs them tight.
The vengeful will suffer the LORD's vengeance,
for he remembers their sins in detail.
Forgive your neighbor's injustice;
then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.
Could anyone nourish anger against another
and expect healing from the LORD?
Could anyone refuse mercy to another like himself,
can he seek pardon for his own sins?
If one who is but flesh cherishes wrath,
who will forgive his sins?
Remember your last days, set enmity aside;
remember death and decay, and cease from sin!
Think of the commandments, hate not your neighbor;
remember the Most High's covenant, and overlook faults.


Responsorial Psalm: Ps 103:1-2, 3-4, 9-10, 11-12

R. The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.
Bless the LORD, O my soul;
and all my being, bless his holy name.
Bless the LORD, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits.
R. The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.
He pardons all your iniquities,
heals all your ills.
redeems your life from destruction,
he crowns you with kindness and compassion.
R. The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.
He will not always chide,
nor does he keep his wrath forever.
Not according to our sins does he deal with us,
nor does he requite us according to our crimes.
R. The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
so surpassing is his kindness toward those who fear him.
As far as the east is from the west,
so far has he put our transgressions from us.
R. The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.


Reading 2: Rom 14:7-9

Brothers and sisters:
None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself.
For if we live, we live for the Lord,
and if we die, we die for the Lord;
so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's.
For this is why Christ died and came to life,
that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.


Gospel: Mt 18:21-35

Peter approached Jesus and asked him,
"Lord, if my brother sins against me,
how often must I forgive?
As many as seven times?"
Jesus answered, "I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.
That is why the kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king
who decided to settle accounts with his servants.
When he began the accounting,
a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount.
Since he had no way of paying it back,
his master ordered him to be sold,
along with his wife, his children, and all his property,
in payment of the debt.
At that, the servant fell down, did him homage, and said,
'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.'
Moved with compassion the master of that servant
let him go and forgave him the loan.
When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants
who owed him a much smaller amount.
He seized him and started to choke him, demanding,
'Pay back what you owe.'
Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him,
'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
But he refused.
Instead, he had the fellow servant put in prison
until he paid back the debt.
Now when his fellow servants saw what had happened,
they were deeply disturbed, and went to their master
and reported the whole affair.
His master summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked servant!
I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to.
Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant,
as I had pity on you?'
Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers
until he should pay back the whole debt.
So will my heavenly Father do to you,
unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart."

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<sup>1. To the best of my knowledge. We are currently using a 1998 "edition" of the lectionary, but as far as I know, the actual cycle of readings didn't change with the updated edition. Even if I'm wrong about that, though, it's still before 9/11 happened.

2. For a bonus, the one reading that doesn't focus directly on forgiveness - the reading from Romans - tells us that "whether we live or die, we are the Lord's". Just to drive home that all those who died in 9/11, they belong to the Lord. And all those who have survived but lost out on someone or something because of the attacks ... they are the Lord's too. Jesus, who died and rose, is Lord of both the living and the dead, we are told.

3. Yes, I think it matters whether we forgive Bin Laden, even though he's already dead. For our sake, and (because I'm Catholic and we believe in Purgatory and I hope he's there) for his. Forgiving the rest of the Taliban is important, too.

4. The bold emphases in the Scripture verses are, obviously, mine.</sup>

Acknowledge the Cost

Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. If one of you decides to build a tower, will he not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete the project? He will do that for fear of laying the foundation and then not being able to complete the work; for all who saw it would jeer at him, saying, 'That man began to build what he could not finish.' [Luke 14:27-30]

I think we often fail to appreciate the magnificence of that first statement about the cross. "Ah yes," we think, "Jesus died on the cross and we too must be willing to make noble sacrifices in order to follow him. He is, after all, God." But his audience did not know he was God, and they did not know he was going to die on the cross. To them the cross was a form of capital punishment, the way that disreputable criminals died. To better appreciate how this must have struck them, picture Billy Graham getting up in front of a large crowd of people and declaring, "Anyone who does not go to the electric chair for me cannot be my disciple!" What sheer chutzpah, to declare that following you could be more important than the disgrace of being condemned as a criminal and rejected by your family, more important than life itself!

Which makes it especially dramatic that Jesus follows this statement up with a parable about being cautious.

Umm... wait a moment. Didn't he just say following him is more important than life itself? Why is Jesus now telling us to think before we jump? Shouldn't we be jumping headfirst, throwing caution to the wind as we leap eagerly towards whatever He has in mind for us?

Apparently not.

No, he says, first you have to count the cost. You have to know what you are getting into.

I've run into trouble in this area before. I relate all too well to that builder who got halfway through and then ran out of money. Every now and then around the house I discover one of the notebooks that I kept from high school on. Invariably I find in these notebooks a list of all the things I need to improve about myself: daily cleaning, reading to the kids, exercise, and so on. I would make the lists and jump headfirst into doing all of them at once, without ever asking myself how hard it would be or whether I could realistically achieve it. I mean, they were obviously the right things to do, so God must want me to do them. When I fell flat on my face, over and over again, I came to the conclusion that I just didn't have enough willpower. I simply wasn't a good enough follower of Jesus, since I couldn't make myself do these things¹.

So now I'm trying to be better about this. I'm trying to remember that everything comes with a price. Everything I do demands something of me. Everything requires spoons, and (healthy as I am) I have a finite number of them to go around. I still believe that God gives me what I need to do his will; but now if I think I can't pay the price, that becomes part of the discernment process in whether it's his will at all.

Sometimes we are not the ones who pay the price for our actions. Sometimes, that sacrifice comes down on others.

When we start preaching about the sin of homosexual sex, we must accept that homosexual people will sometimes take that personally and be driven away from God because of our words. When we lobby to make abortion illegal, we must admit that somewhere a young woman will attempt to kill the baby herself, and die because of it, and that we would prefer that over legal abortion. When we take up homeschooling, or breastfeeding, or Catholicism, or growing vegetables, or golf, and especially if we ever get excited and tell others why we did these things, we must realize that some people will take our decisions as a condemnation of theirs, and there will be nothing we can do about it.

I read an article years ago about embryonic stem cell research, where the author insisted that anyone who was against it needed to be willing to look straight into the eye of someone with Parkinson's disease and say, "I know that you might die because I oppose this research,² but I believe it is worth your life." That's what I mean by 'acknowledge the cost'. If we can't admit that, then we are being weasly. We are trying to have our cake and eat it too. Whether you are Democrat or Republican, religious or atheist, everything has its price. Every position that we could possibly take up demands something uncomfortable from us, and we either acknowledge that price and pay it, or else we are two-faced hypocrites.

We must acknowledge the cost because it is the truth. But we also must accept it, because only then can we work to minimize that price. If we pretend there are no women for whom an unexpected pregnancy is a matter of life and death, then we excuse ourselves from putting our energy into finding those women and saving them. If we pretend no one is hurt by our words because we don't mean them to be hurtful, then we give ourselves leave to spout off whenever and however we feel like instead of crafting our passionate speeches with care and limiting them to those circumstances that God leads us towards. When we acknowledge that there are real people out there dying of diseases that might be cured by embryonic stem cell research, then suddenly we care more about searching for a cure for them from another source.

And when we look honestly at what must be sacrificed, sometimes we will find that the price is too great, and we are not willing to pay it. And other times we will find that the price is as great as the electric chair; but that it will be worth it.



<sup>1. There's also the whole aspect of perfectionism and trying to do something on my own instead of letting God do it in me. But part of my failure was naively thinking I could do everything, no matter how difficult.

2. The fact that embryonic stem cell research hasn't actually demonstrated results the way that adult stem cells have is worth making. But this doesn't change the fact that it is a real possibility that embryonic stem cells may turn out to be the only way to cure certain diseases.</sup>

What's Missing From the Evolution Debate?

Kyrie refused to draw an evolution picture for me on a sunny day when she could be outside,
 so you'll have to put up with my cartoons.

The Beauty of Evolution

Evolution-as-Science, Evolution-as-Religion, Intelligent Design, Young-Earth-Creationism, Old-Earth-Creationism - the debates around evolution go on and on. What I'd like to present here is something that I don't recall ever seeing in these debates before. I maintain that there is a beauty to the theory of evolution that many of us are missing.¹ (The scientifically-inclined among us probably already see the elegance of the theory - I'm talking about a somewhat more theological beauty.)

Men Are Not Angels

The glory of the angels is that they were formed complete in the first moment of their existence. The legend of Athena says that she sprang, a fully-formed adult, from the skull of Zeus, her father. The angels are like this, springing full-grown from the mind of God. They are never children, never need to grow up.

Men are not angels.

Our glory is not to be complete from the start. Our glory is to come into being over time. We begin as a single cell, knowing nothing. We grow; we learn. We move from being self-centered babies to people capable of self-giving love. Mentally, physically, and spiritually, we begin as the tiniest spark and grow, over time, into the fullness of who we are.

As With Men, So With The World

This pattern that we find in multiple aspects of our own lives is repeated over and over again in nature.

• An adult chicken grows from a small egg.
• A giant oak grows from a single nut. 
• The towering sunflower plant begins as a tiny, edible seed.
• Every living organism begins as a single cell and grows into full reproductive maturity². 
• The human species as a whole began small - with a single Adam³ - and has grown now to our current size of almost seven billion. 
• The very universe itself began as an infinitesimally small point before expanding rapidly from there⁴.

Clearly, it's a pattern God likes.


Evolution

Evolution is merely one more bullet point in the list, right in between "human species" and "the universe". Evolution says that all of life, too, began as a tiny spark and grew continuously to become the large, diverse body that we have now. 

And that's pretty much it.<sup>5




1</sup> I was talking with my sister-in-law one day, and she said she didn't believe in evolution. Knowing her to be a very intuitive, beauty-driven soul, rather than a primarily abstract thinker (as I am), I gave her an overview of how I see evolution fitting into God's design of things. I forget how long it took me to do it - ten minutes, maybe - but at the end of it, she said she was convinced. To which my response was along the lines of, "Wait, what? You've completely reversed your position because of something I said? Huh. That's not usually the response I get." Although she has since told me that she's still not completely convinced.


² Even single-celled creatures require some amount of time and, I think, growth, before they can reproduce themselves by splitting again. But I admit there may be exceptions to that general rule that I am not aware of.


³ Assuming the Bible meant that literally, which it may not have. Although I am rather inclined to think it did. Either way, the human species definitely started off a heck of a lot smaller than it is now.


⁴ When I hear that scientists have found that the expansion rate of the universe seems to be increasing, I wonder if the universe is going through an adolescent growth spurt.


⁵ You would be surprised at how many related thoughts and speculations I made myself leave out of this post. Hell; free will; more on the angels; aliens; C.S. Lewis; Christian Scientists; intelligent animals; Limbo and babies.