Moving Mountains

My wife is able to move mountains.

Mountain moving itself is more a matter of will than of any sort of miraculous gift, save that the gift be a miraculously resolute will. Though she stands in height at but 5 feet even, and towers therefore over only the smaller things in the world, which are used to being towered over anyway, she nonetheless casts the shadow of a Goliath, stretching from tiny toe to far horizon as if the sunlight were ever inclined to slant in her favor.

Part of the trick with displacing large mountains from from one locale to another is in not worrying about the mess that may result in the process, for there is, after all, bound to be a big hole in the one spot from which the mountain has been lifted, and then an over abundant pile of rubble where the thing is set down again.

But, you see, the main point in moving a mountain is for the mountain to be moved. One must let nature itself take care of at least some of the ensuing tremors and landslides and other earth altering manifestations. The point is to get the main thing done. Much of the rest has its own way of falling into place. Soon enough the land will give back to itself, and become just as permanent as it had seemed before--changed, different now, but permanent still (until the next 5 foot Goliath comes along).

You sweep up the edges, put some plaster in the cracks, plant some roses, add water, and the rest is already there. Before long, you don't even remember the beginning. This is simply where you live.

Faith Healing for the Faithless, Part III

There are, perhaps, as many styles of faith healing as there are churches, or pastors, or scriptural interpretations.

My first healing was a little bit like a lynching in that there was a character of aggressiveness to the thing. There was shouting and pushing, shrill threats made against the devil, and demands made of God. The truth was stood upon (so to speak), promises and guarantees cited. The stocks of belief had been brought for redemption. God was read His rights. Deliver!

My second healing, received this time at Calvary Church, with no finger foods, could not have been more different from the first. There was no shouting, no pushing, no jumping, no gesticulating. It was corporate in the sense that there were other people present, but these people kept their seats, deferring to the power of authority, i.e. the pastor, on the strenght of the notion, as I would suppose, that Satan could call upon 500 demons as easily as Christ could summon 500 angels--a number, in any case, which would easily overwhelm the small congregation.

This was so quiet, so subdued in fact, that I could barely hear what the pastor was saying. He spoke almost in a whisper--a mumble on top of a whisper--with a thick East Indian accent. These are the sort of things that only God can understand. And I was happy enough to let Him do so.

The very next day I talked to my neurologist on the phone. We spoke for a long time, not only about MS and the treatment of MS, but also of the theory of evolution, Cromagnum man, submicroscopic cellular response to disease and to drugs, disease processes in general.

He has his own ideas. His own faith. The promises he embraces come wrapped in statistics, and the only guarantee he stands on is that there is no guarantee. His best advice was that I start Copaxone, which, we are told, reduces the chance of new relapses by 30 percent.

How very far we have traveled, and in such a short time, from Arise, take up your bed and walk.

In any case, I did not mention God, for He seemed, and so very sadly so, perfectly besides the point.

Faith Healing for the Faithless, Part II

I will make a deal with the Lord. Yes, this is the sort of thing usually reserved for that other deity (he who is called the God of this world), and yet a common enough tactic on the lips of men. We say if and then, forever in command of our own destiny, even as we ask someone else to be.

If you will keep me from further bodily damage from MS, then I will be content to live without complaint with damage I have already suffered. Heal me therefore from this time forward. It is a fair proposition.

Is this not the way we think? Is it not the natural way of the natural man to negotiate and bargain? But there is no bargaining in faith. Rather we come before the throne naked and powerless in order that even the simplest things may be bestowed upon us, at what is either the whim or the will of God. We cannot receive from His richness until we truly know our own poverty.

And yet these are still ideas--mental reckonings that ultimately succeed only in obscuring the face of authentic faith, for faith, as the scripture says, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Heb 11:1). Our request therefore, rightly expressed, is to experience the will of God in the sureness of knowledge, to cross the boundary between flesh and spirit, earth and heaven, and enter into the life that is hid in Christ. This is the ultimate answer to prayer and the healing of all illness, and the resulting transformation is itself the substance of faith.

I am healed. I always have been.

Faith Healing for the Faithless, Part I

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.
--Mark 9:24

Yesterday I received my second faith healing. I say received in the sense that I was there. Whether I received in the sense of being miraculously cured, I do not know.

I suppose that one problem with this is the almost automatic inclination to think of such a result as miraculous rather than expected. At least in my mindset, a positive result attained to by nothing other than request seems perfectly doubtful and unlikely. My mind, therefore, becomes my enemy, in that healing is not a matter of the mind, but of faith.

Take a close look at St. Paul's prayer to be delivered from his thorn in his flesh. Three times he pleaded with the Lord that it might depart from him, and yet it did not. The impression imparted in these few words (2 Cor 12:7-10) is that if Paul was surprised at anything, it was at the fact that he had not been healed. Three times he pleaded, Paul says, as if to underline his perplexity at not immediately receiving the affirmative response he had anticipated.

People seem to be standing in line to heal me. I say that this was my second faith healing, but I mean the second in a premeditated, staged sort of way, where pastors, brothers, and sisters had gathered for this very purpose--a corporate effort at slaying the the dragon. Apart from that, however, I have been healed more times than I can count on both hands.

Those who believe are eager to see, feel, touch, witness the manifestation of their belief. eager for theory to become experience. Therefore it is said Lord, I believe; help my unbelief. Faith itself needs sustenance.