Christ the Healer

1992 (Year C), 23 February / Epiphany 7

St. Peter de Beauvoir Town

Eileen Kalamassias was an old woman I knew in Tower Hamlets. She had cancer and was near death. She’d always enjoyed reading and I offered, in as gentle way as possible, to read her one last book. Wuthering Heights she said, and, after much discussion, we decided that that would be it. So I went each day to read her two chapters. People die all over the place in the book, but we ploughed on until we got to the point where Catherine, the heroine, dies. ‘Are you sure you want me to carry on with this?’ I said. She nodded, for she was too weak to speak. I read out this amazing vision of death and heaven, said ‘Goodbye’ and left. Almost as soon as I got home the telephone rang. It was her daughter saying that Eileen had died.

I tell this story to show that some people can decide for themselves when they want to die, and in Eileen’s case it felt as if it was a part of her healing. Mother Francis Dominica of Helen House, a hospice and respite care hostel in Oxford, tells of a mother whose two daughters had a rare genetic illness. The eldest one, a girl of thirteen died suddenly on Boxing Day and her four-year-old sister, seeing her dead said ‘I wanted to die first’.

Five days later she too was dead. Healing, if there was to be any now was made possible as Mother Francis Dominica began to listen to the mother and slowly draw out a little of her pain.

Of course, we have, within ourselves the ability to cause much of our own pain, by eating the wrong foods or smoking or drinking too much. Deep within ourselves we have the ability to decide when to die, and by the same token there are those who seem to be able to choose when they will get better. We recognise this power in the things we say to them. ‘Snap out of it,’ we tell those who are depressed, ‘The answer to your problems lies within yourself. You must help yourself.’

Yet there are those who for whom such encouragement seems cruel. For it is impossible. Those, who through no fault of their own have need of healing and cannot do it on their own. If it is to come from anywhere it must come from beyond themselves. Doctors must be called in, nurses must help and occasionally prayers have to be said. It must’ve such a situation as this, for the man, whose friends felt they simply had no other option than to lift him onto the roof and lower him down into the room so that Jesus might see him. He was beyond all they could do and clearly he could do nothing for himself.

So there are those who need to heal themselves, nobody else can do it for them. There are those who need to be healed from outside by others, they cannot do it for themselves. What all need, is to be open. All need to choose to be alive. Both involve being open to God and in him open to other people. Openness and a desire for life is what characterises all who are made whole by Jesus.

It follows, I think, that the life of those who are truly whole, cannot be sustained in isolation or privacy. It must express itself in community. It means being open to the exchanges which allow healing to take place, and heaven knows everyone of us stands in need of those. It means being open to the opportunities where healing can flow from one to another and the pain and darkness of one is shared and relieved by another.

This was the kind of interrelationship that God intended for the ancient Hebrews in the dream of ‘Shalom’. The poor, the unfortunates, the aliens, those who needed to be made whole, were to be remembered and room made for them in the scheme of things. It was a principle of live and let live, of fitting oneself into a pattern of the whole; it pursued the ideals of ecology before the word was invented. And that was to be the way of it because that’s what it meant to be healed, to be made whole and to choose to make oneself whole.

A society, a community which chooses to be dead rather than alive, chooses to be ill for, it prefers to be a little deaf, a little blind to the needs of some of its members. It will be apathetic, it will value self – preservation above all things. Yet there will be those brave enough to challenge this. They will be accused of blasphemy yet they will make people whole and those who were more dead than alive will be left saying, as they were in the Gospel this morning, ‘Never before, have we seen the like.’ AMEN