Back in July (2023), I found myself sitting beside my wife Valerie in a hospital Emergency Room, doctors totally stumped with what was wrong with her. She was mentally confused and had an extreme high fever. After blood work and urine analysis ruled out sepsis, a systemic infection, a spinal tap pointed to a form of meningitis. The doctors quickly started heavy duty antibiotic and antivirals, but little change happened at first and so we feared the worst. However, forty eight hours later, a shift happened and Valerie’s health begin to improve quickly. Some of my people in my support network began using the word miracle, that God had answered their prayers. But I was troubled by connecting the word miracle to my wife’s healing. In this blog, I want to unpack this healing journey more for it has caused me to rethink what a miracle really is. As a Christian, I am well aware of the many healing stories and other miraculous events in the Bible. As a pastor of twenty-seven years in the Mennonite Church, I have preached on these stories, trying to explain how and miracles happened. The answers I was given at seminary and church were straight forward. God was the source of all miracles. And the reason miracles happened here and not there was because of God’s will. Prayer was often seen as trying to influence God in causing a miracle to happen. But now thirty-years later, the simplicity of those answers no longer satisfy me. The connections between God’s will, miracles, and prayer began to break down early in my pastoral life. The reason for this is that I watched my two brothers die of HIV/AIDs. As I supported my twenty-four year old brother Jamie during his dying journey from HIV/AIDS in 1992, many people around him prayed for God to do a miracle but a miracle never happened, at least not a physical healing miracle. After that death experience, my understanding of miracles began to change. I remember doing a lot of research asking the why question and it led me to facilitating a community workshop on that topic. The whole point of the Why Workshop was to try and understand the dynamics of God’s will around sickness and death and miracles. In doing so, I began to see the gift of physical and emotional pain and how death is a necessary and essential aspect of human life so that emotional maturity and spiritual growth could happen. The book “Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants” was instrumental in that faith journey. I began to see miracles more through this lens, the healing that happens as one encounters the presence of God’s spirit interacting with one’s suffering that leads to spiritual healing and growth. When my brother Jamie died, I was quite angry at God and my heart was emotionally numb. But at the beginning of Jamie’s funeral, a miracle happened to me. As I entered the sanctuary with my family for the funeral, I saw many people in the pews weeping, and I realized in that moment that God was weeping with me through those relatives, neighbours, and friends. I realized that God was in as much pain as I was, that God saw my brother’s death as wrong as I did, something that should not have happened, but did. This realization led me to sobbing deeply then for I sensed God's presence again. God had not abandoned me like I thought. This same painful dynamic was evident when Jesus died on the cross with all the women, Jesus disciples, and crowds beating their chests in grief (Luke 23: 27, 48). These weeping people were expressing the pain that God was experiencing that day. God was in as much pain as they were watching Jesus be crucify by the religious people, leaders trying to be faithful to following God’s law, a faithfulness that was distorted by their false perceptions of life and God. This death should not have happened, but it did. When my second brother Kevin died of HIV/AIDS five years later, I was no longer praying for a physical healing miracle. I no longer believed that was how most miracles expressed themselves. I was praying for a different kind of miracle, the one I experienced in the end around Jamie’s death five years before. And Kevin’s funeral was even more powerful than Jamie’s in the sense that the dynamic of gratitude was even more present in midst of our grief, gratitude for who Kevin was and how he left a profound mark on all our lives. Yes, we were very sad but we were also very grateful for the thirty-two years that he was in our lives. For me, the experience of Kevin’s funeral was a miracle. Many people left that funeral touched by God’s presence. Over the past 30 years, I have done a lot of thinking about miracles and how God’s spirit interacts with our earthly world, especially as I ministered twenty years ago to palliative care clients for the Community Care of York Region as pastoral counsellor (part-time from 1997 to 2006) and now as I do similar work as a spiritual care provider for Lisaard and Innisfree Hospice and the Home Community Care Support Services of Waterloo and Wellington Regions (2020-2023). This history shaped what I experienced as I sat with my wife Valerie in a Hospital Emergency wondering if she would live or die. Let me share some insights I have learned about miracles 1: The emphasis on physical healing miracles within our religions can lead to much pain. All of these palliative and church experiences has shown me how many people have been hurt by the church and religious people who espoused a faith in a miraculous God who heals physically those who are faithful. They struggle with questions like:
I have found that trying to explain how God’s will is tied to why someone is sick or has died does not provide any comfort to anyone. Furthermore, I am now convinced that the reason some people get physically better while others die has little to do with God’s will. Physical miracles are rare. Instead, people are often angry at what is happening to them or their loved ones due to their illness and the reality of death. That is the common experience. To help people process their anger at the unfairness of life to God, I get people to lament and express their anger at God. I have found it important to help people howl, like a wounded wolf howls at night, around the pain they are experiencing. I have discovered the importance of using swear words, for swear words, even the “F” word, captures the experience of anger and pain better than other words. Ann Lamont wrote a book on prayer where she taught there are 3 essential prayers, the “wow” prayer, the “thank you” prayer and the “help me” prayer (Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, 2012). I still remember the day when I preached on her book, and I suggested to my congregation that she missed a key prayer, namely “the God damn this” prayer, a prayer that we utter when we are angry at life and need to complain and lament to God. We actually practiced this “God damned this” prayer in worship that Sunday and many people appreciated it. The angry response to the lack of miracles struck me clearly that day as I visited a person from my palliative care ministry while Valerie was still in Hospital Emergency waiting for the antibiotics and antivirals to work. In one of those visits, a wife was furious about the unfairness of life that took her perfect husband away at the age of 60. I knew she had no mental space for hearing about my hope for a miracle around my wife’s physical health. She needed a different type of miracle, and I think it happened for her as I gave her permission to lambast life/God about how painful her life was with the death of her husband. I helped her realize that God was as angry as she was at the unfairness of her caring husband dying so young. God totally understood her rage. 2. Physical miracles don’t happen as often as we want due to our misunderstanding of God’s healing power. I have come to see how my past theology that believed God was almighty and all powerful, as many of our Church hymns preach, is not true, at least not true in the way I had commonly understand it. My understanding of God’s almighty powerful nature was that God’s power had no limits. But if that was true, then are we not seeing tons of divine miracles in the world? The common answer that I was told in seminary came down to God’s will. God, because of his/her unlimited power, could do miracles all the time, but due to God’s will, God chose, for various reasons, not to. Based on the lack of physical miracles in the world, it seems that God was choosing most of the time to withhold his healing power. During this time that my wife was in hospital, I learned later that Valerie's relative’s stepson was struck by lightning while golfing. For about two weeks he was in hospital struggling to live until he died. How does one reconcile a powerful God that could have save his life, but didn’t, while in my case, my wife surprisingly after a couple scary days, took a surprising turn to the better, and ended up leaving hospital a week after she was first admitted. I want to suggest that theologians are wrong in saying that God can choose to exercise unlimited power in this way. To do so would go against the very character of God, that of unconditional love, a love that has no limits which is at the core of Christian teachings about the character of God. As I have worked at unpacking this tension between God being all powerful and God being an unconditional lover buried in the notion of miracles, I have come to realize that my notion of Divine Power was wrong. I had always conceived this Divine Power in terms of having power over other things or people or powers including illness. This is how power is understood within the earthly realm and why everyone seeks to get this power for this type of power is limited. Only one person can be all powerful and for this happen, all others can’t have this power. Seeing this truth around earthly power should make us suspicious of connecting this concept of power to God. Within the Diamond Approach, a sacred psychology based on the insights of religious mysticism and different psychologies, it sees Divine Power different. Instead of have unlimited power over everything including illness and people, Divine Power is seen as having the power or ability to be who you really are, in all of your fullness. This means that if God is an unconditional lover, then God’s almighty power is expressed through God’s ability to manifest his/her unconditional loving character in everything God does. However, Divine love never forces one’s will upon another nor can love change something that is beyond its control. When you see Divine power in this way, you realize that there are many forms of physical suffering that are beyond the influence of God’s Spirit stopping them like natural disasters and many types of illnesses. Furthermore, there are other forms of suffering that God’s loving spirit could transform, like the suffering of wars, human injustices, poverty and homelessness, even possibly illness, etc. but this Divine transformation can only happen through the process of human incarnation, which leads me to my final insight around miracles. 3. Miracles manifest in our earthly world through the process of Incarnation. There is a notion within parts of the Christian church that God created the universe from nothingness, like magic. This “God creates from nothing” theology causes us to see miracles as arising from nothingness, as God answering our prayer through entering our physical world and transforming illness immediately into health. However, the Christian tradition teaches that God’s spirit manifests in our earthly through the process of the Incarnation. Our physical universe came into existence through the Incarnation. The Bible, through a creation myth, teaches that our universe began coming in being when the wind/spirit of God swept over the chaotic waters of the depths. As this spirit/chaos interaction happened, an evolving structuring process unfolded leading to day and night, land and waters, plants and animal, and eventually, male and female human beings made in the image of God. (Gen 1). We see a similar incarnation process around the birth of Jesus. Mary was told by an angel, “God’s spirit will come upon you, and power of Most Hight will overshadow you, and as a result, you will find yourself pregnant with a child” (Luke1). The father of Joseph, also, had a similar angelic encounter involving dreams. Here, we see God’s spirit interacting with the spirituality of Mary and Joseph leading them to be parents of Jesus, who would help raise him up to become what people would later call him as “the Son of God”. The Christian doctrine of Incarnation is not about God creating something from nothing but rather about God’s spirit interacting with the dynamics of physical/psychological/spiritual reality within the earthly plane. Through this interaction, the incarnation happens leading to what could be called miracles, miracles in the sense that without the presence and influence of God’s spirit, such healing dynamics would not arise. Back in my February, 2023 blog, I discussed the book "Cured" written by Jeffrey Rediger, a Harvard medical doctor who studied spontaneous remissions, the scientific term for healing miracles that cannot be explained my medical science. In his study, he discovered that there is a relationship between spontaneous remission and healing one's diet, one's immune system, one's response to stress due to past trauma, and one's experience of self. In that blog, I highlighted how these spontaneous healings were due to interactions between the Spirit of God and the physical/psychological/spiritual realms of our human being. This is how the process of the incarnation happens in our earthly world between heaven and earth. However, the dynamics of Incarnation are limited by the openness of the subjects that God’s spirit is interacting with. Mary and Joseph could have easily refused to raised such a spirit-filled child. Even Jesus, through his own egoic resistances within his soul, could have resisted the influences of God’s spirit, and led a very different life. In fact, through the stories we do have of Jesus, there are times when he wrestled with the dynamics of his own egoic structures. When we notice the men and women who followed or interacted with Jesus, we see the incarnational aspect of God’s spirit at work through insights arising for people along with emotional and physical healing. However, we also see places where the incarnational dynamics of God’s spirit were thwarted due to too much internal resistance and lack of openness within people’s souls and institutional structures. In my psychospiritual therapy ministry in palliative care and through the ministry of my psychospiritual therapy interns to their mental health clients, I see these two conflicting dynamics at play. Everyone, at their core, has a deep, often unconscious, longing to connect with the loving, gracious and transforming nature of God’s spirit. As a spiritual care counsellor/supervisor, I am trying to help my clients or my interns to become open and trusting enough to surrender themselves to this Divine Spirit so that healing can happen through this incarnational activity between their soul and God’s spirit. When this intimate connection happens leading to healing of some form, one could say a miracle has occurred. Oftentimes, there are many egoic structures within people’s souls that resist being open and surrendering to the interactive care of this Divine spirit. This is why miracles don’t happen as often as we hope for. This reality is not about God’s loving and powerful character or will but about the human reluctance to trust in the incarnation healing process. With these understandings of miracles, let me briefly share my experience of my wife’s scary illness and healing. On the Sunday following my wife’s scary encounter with potential death, I sat in my church’s worship sanctuary. My pastor Kendall preached on these verses from Philippians 4. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." These words of scripture struck a chord with me except I would change the word “rejoice” to “gratitude”. For me, the experience of that week when Valerie was in hospital involved the dance between anxiousness, gratitude and peace. There was no doubt I was feeling at times anxiousness, but I was amazed at how much gratitude I kept experiencing throughout each day.
When Valerie left hospital one week to the day she went into Emergency, the doctors sat down with Valerie and her sister and told them that they really don’t know why Valerie got sick. All the cultures from the spinal tap came back negative…no bacteria and no virus. No explanation for why the white blood cells were there in the spinal fluid…but clearly the body’s immune system was fighting something. They downgraded the minor meningitis diagnosis to viral encephalitis. All antibiotics and antivirals were stopped and Valerie is now recovering well at home and planning to return to work as a part-time Care Coordinator in a few weeks. Clearly, Valerie was healed, and I am grateful for her returned health. Was her physical healing a miracle? I would say yes, but only in the sense I have described in this blog. This is not a case of God’s creating a miracle from nothing, a miracle that should not have occurred but mysteriously did. No, this miracle reveals how God’s spirit brings about healing of many different types, emotional, mentally, physically, spiritually, if we are open to God’s spirit interacting in our lives and bringing about transformation and healing. Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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