We need to be very careful the way we read healing stories such as the one in today’s Gospel. The OT lesson and Gospel are both about the power of God’s constant presence and about the miracle of healing. Yet more often we aggressively pursue God’s healing power for our own rather than imitating God’s unfailing presence amidst severe challenges.
There is a difference between miracles and magical thinking. Magical thinking is when we think we can either demand that God act as we wish or make little miracles into something they are not. Learning the difference between authentic healing and magical thinking has for me been a series of trial and error, mostly my errors.
One of my favorite shows as a little boy was Bewitched. Do you remember the show? Samantha, a witch played by Elizabeth Montgomery was married to a mere mortal Darrin Stephens, played by Dick York and later Dick Sergeant. Samantha would twinkle her nose and all would be well to every embarrassing or uncomfortable situation. As a youngster my mom was sick for several years after my birth. I was a surprise birth! She had me when she was 48 and so it was a difficult birth leaving her very weak. Of course I knew that I could not twinkle my nose to make my mom well. Even at that young age I knew that much about the difference between real healing and magical thinking.
Even so, as much as I loved the Bewitched show and even though I could not articulate it, I was always frustrated by the huge gap that I felt between my lived reality and the falsity of the Bewitched possibility of prompt magical corrections. Another kid in my neighborhood loved the TV show Superman, but he was not so fortunate and jumped out his family’s fifth floor apartment window so he could fly like Superman. Tragically he did not live to learn the lesson that he could not fly like Superman. Magical thinking cost him his life. My friend died a physical death. Magical thinking can also sometimes lead to a spiritual death too. Today I want to talk with you about the way magical thinking leads to our spiritual death and if not challenged will impede our access to an authentic Christian life.
Dan’s mom, a friend of mine in grade school went to the doctor to discover that she had leukemia and would die in three weeks. Dan’s mom was a woman of great faith and prayed every day of those three weeks seeking a miracle, a cure. His mom even went to great efforts to travel to a shrine in Ireland known for its healing qualities, but an exhausting trip yielded no miracle or healing. His mom became very bitter in those last days before her death and her family too. When she died my friend Dan left the church for over twenty years for that is how angry he was at God.
Dan and I grew up in a Roman Catholic context where if you say these many prayers, the Blessed Mother will give you special favors or if you light these many candles something else will happen. It was a theology of chemistry, mixing magical elements together to get exactly what we wanted. I wish I could say that I left behind the predominance of magical thinking to the old fashioned, pious Roman Catholic Church of my youth. The truth is that I have found that magical thinking is alive and well in The Episcopal Church. Frankly, magical thinking is one of the demons that we all face and that we must all constantly strive against as we choose to follow the path of Christian life.
It was mom’s Alzheimer’s that eventually helped me get over my magical thinking. In the last stages of my mom’s Alzheimer’s she had a massive seizure. She was expected to die. She was being kept comfortable with some oxygen to ease her breathing. At about 3am she began to speak having not spoken for over three years. She recognized us in the room with her and was able to thank us for our loving care. The experience lasted for only ten minutes. And then she fell silent again, never to speak again. She died three years later.
Hearing my mom say my name and hear her words of love after three years of her silence was an experience I cannot put in words for you. Perhaps, a description of my resistance to letting her go again will give you some sense of my lack of indifference. As she slipped away from a little miracle of awareness back into end stage Alzheimer’s I ran down the ICU hallway to insist that the doctors keep her on oxygen and maybe she would speak again.
I was not just thinking that she would speak again but that she would be completely healed of her Alzheimer’s. I knew that part of the deficit of Alzheimer’s has to do with a lack of oxygen to the brain. I was absolutely furious at the doctors and they looked at me like I was nuts. I needed a Chaplain right then not a doctor. In those minutes of rage I went from enjoying the unexpected in a little miracle to demanding that it become a life-defining miracle.
I did not get the miracle I wanted; but my life was transformed. By standing by her side for her 11 years with Alzheimer’s, I learned how to stay present in the midst of very painful, unrelenting losses without denying it, rejecting it, pretending that it would go away, but just by consistently choosing to be lovingly present until the end.
For me being a priest is not about my healing power to fix what ails you or even to fix this congregation. Being a priest for me is about being be a sign of the unconditional love of God. As a son I lovingly and silently stood by to the end with my mother in end stage Alzheimer’s. As a priest I have been able to stand by people without giving them false hope because it might be easier for me than standing silently by as they grieve their humanity. This is not my call alone, but it is yours too. Remember the way I started this sermon. Do we yearn to be great healers like Jesus or are we willing to be fragile signs of God’s unconditional love to Elijah and to the man with demons in today’s Gospel.
Unconditional love leads to transformational healing. Magical thinking suggests that one of us has more healing power than another. None of us can fix each other. Yet powerful transformation can emerge when we choose to be fully present to one another without censoring out the ugly truths of our selves or our shared life.
Over the last few weeks a little miracle has been happening to St. Stephen’s Church. When you have said I need healing prayers, I hurt here, I am tired, I am without hope, I am sad, I feel abandoned by God and more without fear of communal judgment – these our little miracles of healing. However, we must be careful not to magically want to make this little miracle we have been experiencing here at St. Stephen’s more than it is or we risk becoming like the little boy who thought he could fly like Superman and then died the tragic death induced by magical thinking.
God’s healing rarely matches up to the healing we imagine for ourselves. Let’s face it, the miracle that we all really want for ourselves is to be immortal like Samantha in Bewitched. We want to blink away all that is uncomfortable, undesirable and painful. Yet if we wish to be truly spiritually mature, then we must let this kind of magical thinking die.
Do not be fooled it is never an easy path traveling from a life paralyzed by magical thinking to the spiritual freedom associated with authentic Christian healing. To my surprise I grieved the loss of my mother’s cognitive capacity the second time much more deeply than the gradual loss over her eight years of Alzheimer’s. Yet more than anything else in my life it was because of that little miracle that I eventually received the freedom to completely let go of my mom.
As a kid my mom always told me that she was dying. I took her at her word and believed her. Of course I now know that it was her anxiety speaking, as she did not die until forty years later. Yet as a little boy I constantly feared her loss. That little miracle changed me after I got over my momentary rage at the doctors. The little miracle and the rage were spiritually cleansing experiences that gave me the freedom to accept her mortality and to gracefully let her die when the time came.
Big miracles are very, very rare. Big miracles spontaneously happen through God, but never because we pray for them, organize all the magical elements or hold our breath insisting that they magically appear. When we live only for the big miracles we spiritually and physically exhaust ourselves closing ourselves off from the authentic life that God calls us to experience.
Therefore to avoid this, on a daily basis you and I must give our free consent to spiritual cleansing and regularly choose if we wish to journey towards eternal life with God or prefer our magical immortality. The path to spiritual maturity is not an easy one, as we must admit that we are human and that even little miracles will not let us avoid the inevitability of death when God calls us.
We must be ready and willing to let go when God calls us – no sooner like my mom’s anxious fears and no later resisting to indefinitely the call of God. Yet at the same time in all our wounded mortality throughout the process of becoming authentic we bear witness to the unconditional love of God through works of justice, love and mercy.
God Bless You!
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