Person—Not Machine

When Tom Harpur says the medical establishment is sick, he is neither trite nor merely ironic. Harpur, a force to be reckoned with here in the Great White North, is worth hearing on both sides of the border. He is Canada’s most popular religious columnist and a television commentator; his books are often Canadian best sellers. This former Rhodes Scholar was previously an Anglican priest and New Testament seminary professor.

He says the medical establishment is ill, not just economically and bureaucratically, but because of over-reliance on a medical model that sees the body as merely a machine. The church is also sick unto death, as reflected in dwindling numbers and its overlooking of the mandate to heal.

Harpur cites the January 28, 1993 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine report that "a surprising 34 percent of Americans, or approximately 61 million people, used...unconventional therapies or forms of non-medical healing in 1990." Many of those people were well-educated and most did not tell their doctors that they resorted to acupuncture, chiropractors, homeopathy, massage, self-help groups, relaxation response, meditation, biofeedback, prayer, or laying-on of hands.

Yet Harpur told me: "Doctors are moving. They’ve been dealing first of all with body-as-machine and then psychosomatic body-and-mind (usually in a disapproving way, the negative effect of the mind on the body). Now they are realizing the positive effect of the mind as well....Then we’ll have a whole person again that we’re dealing with, rather than this truncated one."

Harpur went on to say: "One of the great themes of our time is healing, although it isn’t always put in those terms. The recovery movement is one example." At the time of our interview, the top four Canadian best sellers, including his own, all dealt with healing. "Over the years, it has become increasingly evident that healing, both as a metaphor and as a reality, might well hold the key to the renewal of spirituality in the post-Christian world of the future," he writes.

Since leaving his position as a New Testament seminary professor and becoming a journalist 22 years ago, he says: "My job has been to try and find places to lock on to the person at the edge or outside [of the church]. Where is he or she hurting? And where does the gospel lock on to them? As Tillich said, [develop] ‘an answering theology’: Look at where theology answers the questions that are being asked rather than forcing our answers on them."

Harpur has a reputation as a debunker and iconoclastic skeptic, thus his interest in healing seems surprising. It grew from his pastoring. He writes: "I was acutely conscious of not filling the gap between the correct church rhetoric and the average member’s often inarticulate longing for wholeness and healing." Jesus exhorted us to preach, teach, and heal, but Harpur—like most pastors—focused on preaching and teaching.

He read widely on healing, especially the book of Acts, and began a midweek Communion service that included laying-on of hands. There were no signs, wonders, or startling cures, but he writes: "The sick said it gave them fresh faith and hope that they were on the road to fuller health; the dying found it calmed their fears, brought peace and, not infrequently, a sense of healing light at the end."

Harpur examines the history of healing, particularly its Judeo-Christian roots. Salvation means being "made sound or whole" and comes "from a root meaning alive and well, sound in every aspect of one’s being." Salvation/healing is intended for individuals, communities, and all humanity; Jesus’ most important characteristic was as a healer. Harpur writes: "The message of the Bible is that the energizing, creative intelligence ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’ is constantly seeking us out to make us whole."

Churches could work closely with those who practice medicine. In Great Britain, thousands of healers (many of them Christian) often work alongside doctors. Healing could lend itself to church renewal as our communication and worship would speak once again to people’s deepest yearnings, "to enunciate more clearly in everything [Christians] attempt or say the full, healing message of acceptance which the Gospel contains."

In spite of widespread use of such non-conventional methods and even the scientific evidence of results, there is resistance. Harpur told me: "I don’t blame doctors for being skeptical. Medicine had to struggle to be free of a lot of superstition." Yet many doctors are "fed up with not being able to deal with something deeper than the mechanical side," he says.

He explains some of the obstacles: "Our materialistic culture dislikes the thought of non-material interventions"; "The Western materialistic outlook excludes the possibility of spiritual healing." And our culture, leery of touching, resists laying-on of hands or Therapeutic Touch.

Western medical publications are funded by pharmaceutical ads and not geared toward "non-medical" research. There are other vested interests too: In the United States, $600 billion was spent on medical products and services in 1989. Yet as Canada spends $70 million annually and the United States $1.6 billion annually to fight cancer, general cancer rates still rise. (The Office of Complementary Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, gets only $2 million a year.)

Harpur could not be more timely, given the increased interest in recovery and healing, the crisis in health care throughout North America, and the current re-evaluation of medical priorities in the United States. This well-written, thought-provoking, and carefully researched book encourages the reader to take seriously the potential of spiritual healing.

Harpur urges all Christians to re-read the Bible from the perspective of healing. He longs for Christians to form healing communities as in the book of Acts. He noted to me that justice, shalom, and peace are on a healing continuum that includes relationships with the Earth and the political search for peace.

He reminded me that "the word ‘religion’ has two Latin roots meaning ‘to bind up and bring together things that are broken.’ So wherever we see brokenness," he said, "the language of healing and the actions of healing are appropriate. Religion becomes a way of looking at the whole of life again."

The Uncommon Touch: An Investigation of Spiritual Healing. By Tom Harpur. McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1994.