(based on sermon I did at Shantz Mennonite Church on Jan 29, 2023) The focus of spiritual care is not what many people think. Many people see spiritual care in terms of religious care…like reading scripture to people or praying with people for healing or for God’s presence. This type of activity happens at most in ¼ of my visits. Spiritual actually looks very different than that. In this blog, I want to describe what spiritual care looks like in my ministry. In my spiritual care ministry, I find myself driving around the regions of Waterloo and Wellington, including the cities of Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph, visiting individuals, couples or families in their homes. My ministry resembles more the stories we see in the gospels where Jesus is wandering from village to village interacting with people who are often on the fringe of society. Through these interactions with Jesus, these people found themselves discovering God’s presence, and different forms of healing happens. How did this healing process occur? How did spiritual care and healing happen through the interactions between Jesus and those he met on his travels? In today’s world, to help spiritual care and psychospiritual therapy students understand this healing process, supervisors asked them to shared verbatims of sections of a session they had with a client the previous week. These verbatims are quite detailed capturing the interactions that happened between the client and the student along with non-verbal cues. Now these verbatim are never 100% accurate for counsellors can’t capture perfectly a session based on their memory, even if the session just happened the hour before. When we turn to the Jesus healing stories found in the gospels, they are far from being a verbatim of what actually happened between Jesus and the person he healed. Rather these healing stories were written down some 30 years later, as in the gospel of Mark, some 40 years later in the gospel of Matthew and Luke, and some 60 years later in the gospel of John. Because these stories were written so many years later, we can’t treat them like verbatims in a counselling training. These healing stories began first as memories within the Jewish community and then over time transformed into legends about how Jesus miraculously healed people he met as he wandered between Galilee and Jerusalem. As all of us know, healing does not happen as easy as we see recorded in the Bible. If it was, our churches would be packed with people coming to be healed. There is no doubt in my mind that a healing process happened between Jesus and the person he healed…but the details of this process is missing in the healing stories of Jesus. What would be a 5 or 7 page verbatim in a counselling session has been condensed down to just 2 or 3 sentences. Part of my faith journey as a spiritual director and psychospiritual therapist in life has been trying to understand the healing process that happened between Jesus and the people who were healed. The healing story I have chosen to focus on is found in the gospel of Mark. It is the story of Jesus healing a blind beggar named Bartimaeus. The scriptural text is found below. This Jesus healing story provides some clues of the divine healing process. The first clue is that the blind man, Bartimaeus, wanted help from God. He said loudly, “Jesus, have mercy on me.” Upon getting a positive response, he jumps up and comes to Jesus. This may seem self-evident but people need to own their desire for spiritual healing. Within my spiritual care ministry, this means that people need to ask for spiritual care help. I and my spiritual care colleagues only receive a spiritual care referral when people put a request in for spiritual care. Many of the doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, care coordinators, PSWs, etc. in the Home Community Care Support Services (HCCSS) often encourage clients to request spiritual care. But many are not open to it for various reasons. Some people are skeptical of anything religious or even spiritual. Some people are not willing to be vulnerable with someone else and need to stay in control. Some people are not willing to face the fact that they may be palliative and possibly dying. Some people want to avoid anything that may make them sad. And many other reasons. Without some interest in spiritual healing, it is not possible for people to experience healing beyond the physical healing methods provided by our health care system. The next three sentences in this story capture the essence of healing process between Jesus and Bartimaeus. Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher,[h] let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” What happened here between Jesus and Bartimaeus that make this healing possible? To answer this question, I want to turn to self-psychology, one of the primary frameworks I use in my spiritual care ministry. Self-psychology teaches that healing happens for people if they are listened to in such a way that their three primary needs are met. These three primary needs are the needs of every child, and these follow us into our adult years, especially if they have not be met well in our childhood. The goal of any Spiritual Care Provider, like myself, is to seek to meet these three primary needs of the people I am visiting. The first core human need is that of mirroring. Each person wants to be seen and heard by another. This means that people who are sick or struggling need someone who is able to listen and then share back to them what they are experiencing whether it be pain, sadness, anxiety, angry, despair, gratitude, or other emotions. I believed Jesus practiced this type of mirroring with Bartimaeus. He asked Bartimaeus what he wanted. And I am pretty certain Bartimaeus shared his story of how he became blind and how hard it was to live as a blind person. He shared how his blindness caused everyone to reject him, to see him as sinner, just like people with severe addictions or people living on the streets are seen in our world today. He shared of his struggle of being on the fringe of his community begging to hopefully get some food so he would not have to starve. I am sure Jesus listened to him and mirrored back to him what he was saying so Bartimaeus knew Jesus saw and heard him. To be truly seen and heard was a rare experience for Bartimaeus…as it can be for people living with life threatening or terminal illness. The second core human need is that of validating. Not only do people need to be seen or heard, they need their experiences of life validated, that we can understand and appreciate why they think, feel, and behave the way they do. To validate in this way requires us to be a very safe person, a nonjudgmental person…for it is very hard to validate any thought, feelings, or behavior that we judge as wrong. This is what made Jesus so special in his time: he was gracious person to the nth degree. This was why he was such a safe person to the people who found themselves on the fringe of society, people judged sinners by the religious people and most people in his culture. I am sure Bartimaeus experienced this nonjudgement nature in Jesus. Jesus was someone he could bare his soul to and not worry about being rejected or ridiculed or scorned. Jesus could truly understand what his life as a blind person was like. Here is an example of a possible interaction that might have happened between Jesus and Bartimaeus. Here we see Jesus validating Bartimaeus’ experience and his doubts that God even loves him anymore. A lot of my work in spiritual care involves validating people’s experiences. So many people have been taught that it is wrong to cry, or wrong to be angry at God or wrong to doubt. People often tell me that they have to stay positive…and that often means that so much of their life experience, whether it be sadness, despair, grieve, fear, guilt, shame, helplessness, etc. has to be hidden away, buried, or dismissed. When this happens, people are actually rejecting themselves for having these negative experiences. That self-rejection soon turns into self-hatred where they start judging and hating themselves whenever such negative emotions arise. So, a lot of my work involves validating people’s experience, even validating that part of them that wants to dismiss all those negative experiences. It is important that I hold all their problematic behaviors with a gracious touch. I may say things like the following: As I have grown in my ability to be nonjudgmental like Jesus, I have discovered that one can find ways to validate every experience in life. When we are able to validate a person’s experience, we help them break this pattern of self-rejection and self-hatred which research is discovering can contribute not only to mental health issues but also physical health issues. Instead, through our validation, we are nurturing a healing Presence to arise in the person we are validating. It allows them to connect with a deeper part of them, the God or divine part of them that begins to validate their own their feelings and experiences. The third core need that a person has, based on Self psychology, is the need to experience twinning. People need to feel that they are not alone, that they are not too different, too strange, and thus someone truly can understand or empathize with them. When we allow ourselves to twin with someone, we open ourselves enough so that we can sense inside ourselves a little of what our friend/client is experiencing. When we do this, we become more attuned to our client’s experience causing them to no longer feel alone with their struggle. In meeting each core need of our friend or client, we are forming a deeper connection with them. By meeting the need of mirroring, we are forming a connection with them as we reflect back what we hear and see. By fulfilling the need of validating, we are developing a deeper relationship with them, but this demands that we become nonjudgmental in how we feel toward what they are sharing with us. When we address the need of twinning, we are establishing an even deeper connection with them, one that involves us forming a relational field with our friend/client that makes it possible for us to sense what they are experiencing. To form such a shared relationship requires an even deeper practice of nonjudgement for now we are allowing ourselves to feel a little of what our friend or client maybe feeling whether it be sadness or anger or despair or guilt or anxiety or helplessness. Many people can twin with sadness and the positive feelings, but it requires a lot of training and personal work to nurture the psychological maturity needed to twin well with anger, depression, anxiety, shame, helplessness and other negative feelings. Many people are uncomfortable with most negative experiences and thus can’t twin well with such feelings. I am certain Jesus practiced this experience of twinning with Bartimaeus. Jesus felt inside himself a little of the loneliness that Bartimaeus was feeling. Jesus sensed Bartimaeus’ anger at how his religious community and friends had abandoned him. Jesus recognized the doubt that Bartimaeus probably had…wondering if God existed let alone cared for him. If Bartimaeus felt any self hatred, which is common for people who live with chronic health conditions, Jesus would have experienced that too in the relational field that had formed between Bartimaeus and him. In my spiritual care ministry, not only do I do a lot of validation, I also allow myself to twin with clients who need my twinning to help them hold and understand the many complex feelings they may be encountering. I remember a man in his sixties who had wrestled with health issues all his life beginning with cancer in university days. He beat that cancer but the radiation treatments he encountered then caused major damage to his pancreas and heart leading to serious health complications and medical interventions throughout his life…until finally he came down with a cancer again that couldn’t be beaten. He never lived a normal life. He had a lot of anger toward life and God and so every session I met with him involved being with the why question and all that intensity. I could twin with that anger in a good way for I had spent years processing that same anger when my brothers died from HIV/AIDs 25 and 30 years ago. In the end, he said he would concede his life into God’s hands, that was his way of surrendering into God at death, but he also said, he planned to have a big debate with God around how unfair his life had been. I applauded him for his honesty. I remember visiting a mother and two sons who had lost a husband and father my age to cancer. This man was a very private man who kept all his feelings and pain to himself so when he came to hospice, he died within a couple of days. His family were shocked. Nobody knew except him knew how sick he really was. Because of the intense grieving happening in family, I was allowed to do more than one bereavement visit with the family. During these visits, I did a lot of validation for the temptation for all of them was to treat their negative feelings in the same way their husband and father did: bury them, deny them, keep oneself busy so they didn’t feel them, and put on a happy, smiling persona that says…”everything is fine. How are you?”. I remember a visit where I met with the three of them for the first time. In that first visit together, I had shared the importance of simply being with their feelings allowing their feelings to simply be there without getting lost in them but also without managing them through denial or being busy. I had also done some teaching around centering prayer which is a Christian spiritual practice similar to Eastern meditation where you practice being with your experience without managing it for 10-20 minutes each day as you are able. During the next visit, the one son commented that he had tried the centering prayer thing but it didn’t work for him. (I smiled inwardly for this is a common response to meditation/centering prayer). But then he said he had noticed that “being with his experience” happened naturally when he was interacting with his 3 year old son. When he was with his young son, he found himself naturally in the Present Moment and doing so brought back memories of times he had with his father as a little boy. And while these memories brought up sadness and caused him to tear up, they also brought up love for his Dad. And then he said, “it was weird… there I was playing with my son and at the same time crying. I fought the urge to stop my crying, like you said Gord, and allowed my tears to continue. And then I felt a happy feeling come to me as I was crying and playing. Strange.” I told them that this is what can happens when we are able to be present to our feelings without judgement….even the negative ones. We may have a feeling of goodness arise at the same time we are feeling our negative emotion. That feeling of goodness, which I believe comes from God, informs us that this feeling is authentic and valid and holds a truth that God wants us to honour. It is hard to explain but through this process of mirroring, validating, and especially twinning, healing happens. It is interesting that the final interaction between Jesus and Bartimaeus is the following: "Jesus said to him, 'Go Bartimaeus; your faith has made you well.'” What did Jesus mean when he said that Bartimaeus’ faith made him well? The gospel of Mark indicates that right after this pronouncement from Jesus, Bartimaeus was instantly healed. From my experience, healings don’t instantly happen. They happen over a period of time, in this case, the healing dynamics were occurring during the entire time Jesus and Bartimaeus were interacting with each other, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe longer. I suspect many healing moments and insights happened during that entire interaction that ultimately led to Bartimaeus finally being able to see again. I read a book this past fall titled Cured written by Dr. Jeff Rediger that was published in 2021. Rediger is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, and leader in groundbreaking neuroscience research. He also has a Master of Divinity which means he is receptive to religion and spirituality. He claims that medical science does not believe in healing miracles. However, when such mysterious healings happen, they are labelled as spontaneous remission, a healing that occurred without any medical explanation. Since there was no medical explanation, this meant that these healings occurred through something else causing the person’s body and immune system to naturally heal itself. Strangely, no one has ever chosen to studied scientifically these spontaneous remissions to see if there is anything we can learn from them. After researching these types of healing for almost 20 years, Rediger discovered that there were four factors that affected the body and our human immune system. One involved healing our diet. Another focused on healing our immune system. A third centered on healing our stress responses, that is, healing our traumatic memories that are at the foundation of our stress responses. And the final factor, which Rediger saw as key to all the other healings, was healing our identities, that is, healing how we saw and experienced ourselves. The healing story of Bartimaeus does not tell us how Bartimaeus became blind. But we are told how Bartimaeus was healed from his blindness. Jesus tells us that Bartimaeus’ faith has made him well. Through his interactions with Jesus, Bartimaeus’ faith had changed, shifted, transformed… which opened the door for this miraculous healing to happen. This suggests that Bartimaeus’ blindness had a psychological or faith root to it. When I did some research to see if there can be a faith root to blindness, I was surprised at what I found. I discovered there is actually a medical category in the most recent DSM-5 for people who are blind, but there is no medical reason for it. It is called “conversion disorder”, a mental condition in which a person has blindness, paralysis, or other nervous system (neurologic) symptoms that cannot be explained by medical evaluation. The only known way to heal this form of blindness is through psychotherapy and spiritual care. Something happened in the interactions between Jesus and Bartimaeus that led to Bartimaeus’ faith changing, a change that Jesus noticed and proclaimed to him, “Bartimaeus, your faith has made you well” and with that realization, Bartimaeus discovered that he could now see. How I wish we had a verbatim of Jesus’ healing session with Bartimaeus to understand how Bartimaeus’ faith changed. Clearly the dynamics of mirroring, validating, and twining were significantly at play allowing a deep and intimate healing relational field to form between Jesus and Bartimaeus. Nurturing this healing relational field is the essence of effective spiritual care. One could see this healing relationship field as the place where we, spiritual care providers, help people discover their connection to the vine of God that all humans are connected to. As we deepened this healing relational field through mirroring, validating, and twinning, we help clients move more deeply into the present moment where they are able to abide and connect more intimately with the vine of God. It is here when our client is abiding in this special divine place that they discover the spirit of God abiding in them. This intimate connection to the vine found in the present moment allows our client to experience all the aspects of God’s spirit in response to what he or she is experiencing in that moment.
Through such sacred experiences, we, as spiritual care providers, begin to notice our client’s faith changing, sometimes quickly, often slowly. And when we do, we reflect this observation back to them so they can realize this truth and thus internalize this truth to a deeper level. This is how I would practice Jesus’ words to Bartimaeus, “Go, your faith has made you well.” Today, I have tried to help you see how my Christian faith flows into my spiritual care ministry. In doing so, I hope I have also helped you realize how these healing stories of Jesus have huge relevance still in our time. The role of spiritual healing is as important now as it was then. Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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