Healing Body and Soul

Healing Body and Soul

Sermon delivered on Feb. 19, 2017

Rev. Laura Bogle

Readings

From the novel Gilead by Marilyn Robinson.  The whole book is a letter written by an elderly minister to his young son.  In it he recalls a time in his childhood when he “baptised” a bunch of kittens.  He says,

“I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand.  Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing.  It stays in the mind. …There is a reality in blessing…. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that.  I have felt it pass through me, so to speak.  The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time. (23)”

From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk.  He is recalling his early training as a psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center:

“I remember asking [our great teacher Elvin Semrad] once: ‘What would you call this patient—schizophrenic or schizoaffective?’  He paused and stroked his chin, apparently deep in thought.  ‘I think I’d call him Michael McIntyre,’ he replied.

Semrad taught us that most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people ‘acknowledge, experience, and bear’ the reality of life—with all its pleasures and heartbreak. … He often said that people can never get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel.

I remember being surprised to hear this distinguished old Harvard professor confess how comforted he was to feel his wife’s bum against him as he fell asleep at night.  By disclosing such simple human needs in himself he helped us recognize how basic they were to our lives.  Failure to attend to them results in stunted existence, no matter how lofty our thoughts and worldly accomplishments.  

Healing, he told us, depends on experiential knowledge: You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.”  (p. 26-27)

Our story this morning, about little Maggie and her three friends, helps us to understand the difference between a cure and healing.  The friends learned that healing is not so much about doing something but about being something.  About being present in their bodies next to and even touching another person who is suffering.  They may not be able to cure the girls’ sickness but they sure can help heal her spirit of loneliness.

Dr. Michael Lerner, who has spent decades supporting people with cancer, writes:  “Healing can be described as a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual process of coming home.”  (http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=1066 )

Science is telling us that that kind of healing, the kind that keeps loneliness at bay, the kind that involves physical touch, the kind that brings you home to yourself, is also an important part of the health of our bodies, spirits and minds.

LissaRankin is a medical doctor who has spent several years thinking about, writing about the connections between physical healing and our spiritual, emotional lives.

One of the studies that she points to was one conducted in Roseto, PA, beginning in the early 1960s.  The local medical doctor had noticed that the very low, practically non-existent rate of heart disease and heart attacks in the community which otherwise seemed to have lots of high risk factors.  What kept the men there, who ate meatballs fried in lard, and smoked and drank with abandon healthier than people in neighboring towns?

After a 50-year study, the main conclusion was: community.  Living in community, in this case an Italian immigrant community, closely connected to others, lowered stress. Relationships nourish the health of the body.

Lissa Rankin on physiology of loneliness:  “When we feel socially isolated, then the limbic system goes into threat. The flight or fight response. (the stress response.)

The body is beautifully equipped with natural self-healing mechanisms.  … We have natural longevity enhancements built into our bodies.  But here’s the kicker: those natural self healing mechanisms only work when the nervous system is in the relaxation response.  When we know that we belong, when we can feel ourselves in love, in community, in tribe, then the nervous system relaxes.”

Americans have high rates of being in stress response, and lonely people have even higher rates.

Consider this, according to Lissa Rankin:

Obesity increases your mortality by 23%

Alcohol abuse by 37%

Loneliness by 45%

Robert Waldinger, researcher at Harvard, followed 700 men over 75 years, and found that “the people that fared the best were the people that leaned into relationships with family, with friends, with community.”

Lissa Rankin asks, “When was the last time your [medical] doctor prescribed healing your loneliness as part of your [physical] wellness plan?”

There is deep connection between our mental/spiritual health, our bodies, and our social relationships.  Trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has worked over decades helping people who have experienced extreme trauma – survivors of catastrophes, war veterans, those who have experienced rape, neglect, abuse.  In his book The Body Keeps the Score, he shares his journey as a psychiatrist from a medical model of caring for conditions like PTSD, that focused primarily on medication and sometimes talk therapy, to a broader model that incorporates our physical bodies and yes, our social relationships. 

“You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.”

He has also come to believe that “Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being.”  When we isolate people as only a patient who is to receive a cure from someone or somewhere else—a doctor, a minister, a magician, a pill—then we “separate suffering people from their community and alienate them from an inner sense of self.” (p. 38)

Sometimes in our seeking to cure or to fix, we actually make the problem worse by isolating, stigmatizing, separating.

Now, I’m not telling ya’ll to never be alone. As an introvert myself, I *need* time alone to recharge and reconnect with myself.  Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. I’m asking you think about whether and when you are lonely;  who around us in our community might be lonely?  When and how are you touched—appropriately, with love and care for boundaries?  Who in our community is not touched?  When you notice that, what can you do?

Just this week I had a conversation with someone who recently found out an old, dear friend is dying, probably will die very soon.  What can I do, he asked me.  What should I do?  I feel helpless.

The best I can offer you, I said, is to simply be with the person.  Then you’ll know if and when they need or want something more.  You cannot cure this person of their disease, but you can make sure they don’t feel alone.

It’s something I have to re-learn myself, over and over, that so very often we can’t fix each other—whether cancer or depression. 

For a year in seminary I worked as an intern chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital.  It’s a Level One Trauma hospital for the region, and it is also the hospital that people who have very little supports—the homeless, the marginalized, the poor and mentally ill—are usually taken first.  The chaplaincy program there was a special one, a little bit different from many other models I have encountered. It was volunteer-based, most of them lay people, who had been coming for years and years. 

It was different because of how the program was started.  Called Sojourn chaplaincy…  begun as a ministry of care and compassion during the AIDS crisis of the 80s.  SFGH was the first hospital in the country to have a ward just for those suffering from HIV and AIDS,  And remember at that time, in those early years, the stigma.  How gay men especially, who had often already been abandoned by their families, were abandoned yet again by communities, churches, even medical establishments who treated them with fear and loathing.

Imagine the loneliness in that suffering.  Imagine the difference it made simply to have another human being come to your room and hold your hand, touch your forehead, speak with you, look you in the eyes.  That is how Sojourn Chaplaincy began.  Not to save people or to force religion upon them, but to simply be a human healing presence. 

During my time there I was witness to the power of connecting in relationship, the power of simple bodily touch – and sometimes in specifically religious ways, only when this was invited and asked for.  I began to think about how religious rituals like blessing and praying and anointing—rubbing a forehead or a hand with oil—are ways we embody that broader web of relationships, the love that holds us all.  Holding a hand or touching a shoulder I could have the experience of “really feeling their mysterious life and my own mysterious life at the same time.”

Being part of a religious community, engaging in spiritual practice can be a powerful way to take care of our physical health—partly because of the connection it provides.  Lissa Rankin lists 10 health habits they don’t teach in medical school and one that she includes is to attend religious services!

“Attend religious services. Individuals who attend religious services regularly live 7 ½ years longer (almost 14 years longer for African-Americans) than those who never or rarely attend religious gatherings. One study found that high levels of religious involvement were associated with lower rates of circulatory diseases, digestive diseases, respiratory diseases, and just about every other disease studied. But this is only the case if your religion is in alignment with your authentic self. If going to church or temple or the mosque relaxes your nervous system, it’s good for your health. But if it stresses you out, you’re better off staying home.”

It is not just any social connection that helps--The key here is that it is about feeling accepted, and accepting others.  Getting beyond the separation of differences that pull us apart.  Being able to be your full authentic self, flawed and whole at the same time.  Coming home to yourself.

The healing stories of Jesus can be understood in this “coming home to yourself” way.

Perhaps more than any other primary religious figure or prophet Jesus’ ministry was focused on healing.  No less than 37 stories of Jesus healing a person or a group of people in the Gospels.

Now like the rest of the Bible, if you take everything literally you are often likely to end up in the weeds.

There’s a long strand of Christian thought that the disability and illness that Jesus cured came about because of the ill persons’ sin, and could even be traced back to humanity’s fall in the garden of Eden.   But if a person just has enough and the right kind of faith and piety then that person will be cured, restored to perfection.  We certainly saw that kind of theology at play—and still do—during the AIDS crisis, when ill and suffering people were blamed for their own suffering.  They were sick because they were gay, etc.

Now this theology doesn’t fit in our Unitarian Universalist worldview that affirms the basic goodness of life and humanity, and the persistent affirmation that every single body is sacred.  That is a strand of theology that has just as long a history in Christianity, but happens to have not been the one present in our dominant culture! 

Many of us may say we don’t believe it, but still carry around the dominant thinking, catching ourselves thinking – It’s my fault I’m sick, I didn’t take good enough care of myself, I haven’t been good enough, I haven’t given enough, etc.

It’s my fault I’m depressed, there is something wrong with me, I’m broken and can’t be fixed.

I love what the poet Mary Oliver has to say about this: “You do not have to be good.  You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert.  You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” (Wild Geese)

I personally like to think Jesus would have said the same thing. 

There’s a different way to understand Jesus’ healing stories, if we use our spiritual imagination, and look at the larger context of the biblical times.  Think about who Jesus heals:  women, lepers, the mentally ill, the blind.  Jesus transgresses social separation to be in bodily contact with those who have been outcast, isolated, shunned.  Those who no one else would touch.

If we focus on the healing in these stories, and not the cure, perhaps they are more believable to our rational, scientific UU sensibilities.  It is hard to believe that a leper’s disease might be cured simply by the touch of another human being.  But might that person be healed?  Might they come back home to themselves? 

Might they feel their wholeness, all of who they are, recognized and affirmed?

Last week we heard about the Japanese concept of kintsukuroi—the practice of returning broken pottery to its original shape, gluing the pieces back together with gold between the cracks.  The resulting piece of pottery is both broken and whole at the same time. 

Each one of us is imperfect in our bodies; in our culture we like to label some people as disabled—as if we don’t all have differing physical abilities.  As if we won’t all at some point, if we are lucky, face changes in our physical abilities due to age.

I also like to say that each one of us exists on a spectrum of mental health, day to day.  Some days and seasons I’m mentally healthier than others.

We each one of us are flawed, imperfect in our bodies, broken at times by life’s experiences.  If we threw everyone who is broken away, there would be no one left. 

As a community of faith we seek to hold the brokenness and wholeness at the same time.  Like a broken bowl held together with a small seam of gold. 

As a community of faith we seek to re-connect our bodies and spirits for healing.

As we have been acknowledging for weeks now, these are difficult times, times of uncertainty, times of anxiety, fear, anger and sadness.

We need to be able to bring our full selves, including our vulnerable bodies, to the work of justice, and our task of loving the hell-ish places out of this world.

We need one another to be well, to be strong, to survive. 

We will not heal ourselves alone, but together – we can.

We cannot heal our community alone, but together—we can.

We need all the resources we can muster.  And so today I am offering a healing ritual, an embodied blessing.  You are invited to come forward for a blessing on your hands with oil – extra virgin olive oil! – and few healing words. Bring your imperfect and whole self forward; I will greet you with my imperfect and whole self.

Blessing:

“You are not alone -- I bless you with Love—may Love be a source of your strength.”

May it be so.  Amen.