Until the Very Desert Blossoms

There are a multitude of churches, yet so few healed individuals. Despite the church's rich healing potential, the realities often fall devastatingly short of this potential. In fact, the church has often promoted sickness and sick religion rather than health and healing. This is particularly true when religion is used to express personality rigidities through religious devotion.

For me, the question has become whether the ideal healing potential of the church can be made reality--whether the church can redefine its purpose and rediscover its humanity. A perpetual problem within the church is the ongoing existence among its membership of whited sepulchers which Christ rebuked. It is ironic to find fellow sinners within the church's life laboring arduously to project the shadow which clouds their own lives onto the other--whomever the other is in terms of race, class, sex, or economics.

It is ironic because the church, if it is true to a biblical understanding of itself, knows that it is the sinner and the outcast--ultimately unworthy of the grace extended to it through God in Christ. Throughout salvation history the people of God have gone the way of the harlot for whom Hosea mourned and lamented. When we lose perspective on our true identity as the people of God, we cut off the possibility of becoming the healing body we were instituted to be. When we in the church have learned to accept who we are--the broken people Christ came to restore--we can extend the compassion of Christ in an authentic way.

The healing church must be willing to act as a primary mediator of healing both to its own membership and to society at large. Most of us in the church have resisted casting our lot with the emotionally poor and oppressed in the same way we have failed to recognize and respond to the literal poor and their minimum survival needs. Dorothee Soelle suggests in her book Suffering that only those who themselves suffer can recognize and respond to the suffering of those around them. I would add that we must make friends with the pain within ourselves in order to transcend it and move toward overcoming the fear and loathing we instinctively feel for those who blatantly exhibit their poverty, either emotionally or economically.

Making friends with pain does not suggest resting there, but it may be a beginning place for many of us who have absorbed so many instincts away from what is painful and repugnant in ourselves and in our brothers and sisters. One of the primary messages for the church today is that we are the poor, we who are in sin, and we are called to serve the poor as healers of the whole person, with all that this implies emotionally, spiritually, and economically for the total reshaping of our lives as God's people. We in the church cannot be a healing church until we know who we are--the people who have walked in darkness and have seen a great light. And if we are a people called by God to be that light which we have seen and experienced, then we must determine what it is that makes a church a healing church.

The first mark of the healing church is that it must be home--home in the ultimate spiritual sense for which most of us have been seeking home all our lives. The church must be that kind of home which is only available to the undeserving. This kind of home is described in Robert Frost's powerful poem, "The Death of the Hired Man":

Home is the place where,
when you have to go there,
They have to take you in....

I should have called it
Something you somehow
haven't to deserve.

Frost has captured the paradoxical nature of the home that the church must always strive to be: a "place where when you go there they have to take you in" and, at the same time, a place you somehow "haven't to deserve."

The church is called to be the kind of place where people have to be taken in, embraced, received in all their human misery and creative potential in order to be healed. This model of the servant church is reflected in the servant songs of Second Isaiah, and was carried out in the life and ministry of Christ Jesus. If we are interested in being faithful, we must reevaluate ourselves in the way of the servant posture of Second Isaiah and of our Lord. What does it mean to be willing to be a servant people? One of the things it surely means for us in the church is that we have to take in whoever is sent.

But, beyond simply opening the door to someone whom we would not choose, we are to create an atmosphere of caring. There must be a climate of love in which one is set free to tell his or her story and to know that at last it has found a resting place. This is not necessarily because individuals in the church have unusual gifts of insight or healing, although they may, but because the church was intended to be that place where we find a resting place and a home for our whole beings, the place where we explore the meaning of our own history in the context of salvation history and the history of the particular congregation to which we have found our way. The church was designed to embody the "home for the heart" that Bruno Bettelheim and others have had to create outside its boundaries because they could not find it in the church.

Another mark of the healing church is that it is to be a new family. The concept of the new family in Christ is as old as the inquiry of Jesus, "Who is my mother and my brother?" It is not that the concept of family described in scripture is unknown to us; rather the cost of becoming a family in the biblical sense is so high that most of us in the church have chosen the path of least resistance. We choose what is familiar. The nuclear family is a product of recent history, particularly American culture, and it is not the picture of family given to us in scripture.

There is a great deal of confusion about family in the church today.

We tend to accept the predominant understanding of our culture embodied in the nuclear family which is often the least demanding yet the most fragile setting for enduring human relationships of caring and love. Yet the possibility exists within the church for a reinterpretation of family, as well as a sketch of what a church can look like when it attempts to understand itself as family which transcends the boundaries of natural and cherished blood relations. Prevailing cultural realities require of the church a model of family with enough power to combat the disintegrating pressures which surround us both from within ourselves and without.

The healing church is one that knows what it means to be unconditionally liable for another simply because he or she is brother or sister in Christ. This kind of family ultimately doesn't recognize the same limits that are established in the average Christian family as we know it. The family which is shaped around being called to be God's people does not love its natural family less, but it is always aware that it is living out of a different understanding, a different order. This order is rooted in not having to deserve God's steadfast love, but having, in the end, to choose the costly act of receiving that kind of love and all that it will require of us in terms of the relinquishment of the control of our own lives and our own families.

A third mark of the healing church is that it is a church which knows that it belongs to another order, and as such travels lightly, in the understanding of being pilgrims in a strange land. Paradoxically, this means that the church which has found its identity as the people of God is called to establish a new order and to live in it on this earth, rather than merely to anticipate the end of time, in which that order will be revealed in all of its fullness.

A common misconception has occurred in many corners of the church: individual salvation has become exclusively stressed rather than the knowledge that we are called to be the kingdom and to work for the kingdom now, on this earth, and not wait passively for the eschatological climax of history.

Knowing that we are a called people enables us to detach ourselves enough from our culture to see the spiritual realities which are frequently obliterated, perhaps most often by those of us in the church who resist the fact that the road to salvation is narrow, and the way put before us by Christ and his committed followers throughout the decades has been costly. The question for the church in all of this is to discover what the pearl of great price is and how as a called people to find it.

The fourth mark of the healing church is that it is a church which understands itself to be on a pilgrimage in search of self-understanding and a pilgrimage toward mission. The powerful connection between healing and mission is one that we in the church will have to learn to make. In Isaiah 6, the prophet's healing and vocational calling are simultaneous. The healing church is the church which has discovered this wisdom and gives its members creative work to do as well as offering comfort for the troubled soul.

This recognition of the healing power of a beloved work implies the fifth mark of the healing church. The healing church recognizes that Carl Jung was describing something true about human existence in the connection between the coming to terms with our shadows and realizing our creative potential. The picture we have in the church is a picture of a people recuperating from the wounds of their personal histories and at the same time acting out of a powerful creativity in response to God's call to gird up their loins and do the work he has given them to do. Here I would suggest the image of the wounded healer that Henri Nouwen set before us. We in the church are wounded, and it is in the recognition of the depth of those wounds, and the recognition that we are called by God in our wounded state to do his work, that our true freedom comes.

The church must be that place where sin can be openly acknowledged and transformed by the love of Christ in the fellowship of the believers. But if this is our choice, then we must be prepared as the church for what Paul Tournier has named the painful path of humiliation which opens into the royal road of grace and freedom. Tournier reminds us that Jacob dared to wrestle with God, and yet his soul and body were preserved. The other part of that story must be remembered as well, for it has important meaning for an understanding of the true cost of being the church. Jacob wrestled with the angel and God put his mark upon Jacob--he went away from the encounter limping. Jacob experienced the realities of his wounded self in the knowing of his bond to be God's own. That, it seems, is our lot if we choose to undergo the costly way of seeing ourselves as we truly are and choosing to follow Christ at all cost.

The healing church is the church which knows its costly heritage and who, like the prodigal son or daughter, returns to claim the undeserved inheritance of the steadfast love of God. When the church knows these things and chooses them, it will discover a time of healing and reconciliation unlike anything that it can possibly imagine. Such is the experience of those within faith communities who have chosen the costly life for the sake of the joy that comes in the deep sharing of life with one another. In themselves, such communities are not sanctified or above reproach. But they are making a statement about a choice which has been made--a choice to come apart from the culture enough to cast their lot with God's people in a costly way, in the conviction that this is the true path to freedom. The fruits of such a time in the life of God's people have been described in Isaiah 35:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing....

Then the eyes of the blind will be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then shall the lame man leap like a hart
and the tongue of the dumb shall sing for joy...

But the redeemed shall walk there,
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

The church that can choose the abundant life offered through costly discipleship is the church in whose midst healing flows until the very desert blossoms and is populated by a people who know that healing and salvation are one.

Karin Granberg-Michaelson had recently received a master's degree from Wesley Theological Seminary, where she studied pastoral theology, and worked as a chaplain intern at Children's Hospital in Washington, D.C., when this article appeared.