I do not want to be "healed"

The sermon at the church I attend last Sunday was on grief, and one of the leaders did not know what to say and about how we should pray in response to what had been spoken.

I asked if I could say something. I spoke about my own experiences of grief and it is an emotional subject, and perhaps therefore not the wisest of subjects to speak about off the cuff - there is that danger of speak first and repent later, even if you are praying that you will say the right thing.

I got to be passionate about what I was speaking about, and I said that "I am a broken person in a broken world with a broken Saviour and I did not want to be healed." Sometimes it is right to feel the pain, we cannot love without opening ourselves to the dangers of being hurt. There was an interesting comment on The Trap - What happened to our dream of freedom that a survey of mental illness said that a high proportion of people suffered from mental illness. The problem with the survey was that it had the opinion that we should not feel depressed or upset and therefore did not ask any questions about the interviewees circumstances. When if it had it might have found out that being depressed was a natural consequence of sadness or genuine pain.

We live in a world which struggles with its emotions. Being British we often speak about a stiff upper lip and that the British are emotionally reserved. However, actually there can be an honesty and a depth in that. We can avoid emotional intimacy and truth whether we show a lot of emotion or whether we show very little, what matters is that there is an emotional honesty. There can be a silent and shared truth that does not have to be shouted about, and there can be an open and emotional dishonesty. Shows like Trisha or the Jerry Springer Show for all their emotional head of steam do not necessarily take us any closer to the truth.

We live in a world that may no longer subscribe to the stiff upper lip, but does expect to be almost continually happy, and prozac is just one lifestyle drug you can take if you are not. The problem is that we end up living in the land of the bland. We have to be flat, not too happy, not too sad, and not too human.

Society offers a form of "healing" but the problem is that we are not actually healing just numbing the pain, and the pain exists for a reason.

For instance, in grief pain is the loss that we suffer when we connect to someone and give ourselves and enter into intimacy and then because of death we lose that on this earth. We are confronted with the fact that we have lost that person on this earth, we will not hear their words, feel the warmth and joy of their presence, feel the happiness of a shared joke with them, or the comfort of just sitting and chatting over a drink. It is gone, it is lost, and we hurt.

The answer if we want to avoid pain is therefore to avoid love, to become hard, to stop feeling. The problem is that we become less human. Jesus wept, and at Gethsemane - He struggled. He did not just say I'm okay, I have the resources, I can cope, Praise God! Looking to the future he felt the pain, and he wanted to have his friends around and in that vulnerable place, he asked them to stay awake and pray with Him, and when they did not He shared his pain. Jesus was the Son of God, and yet He was no plastic every smiling saint. He was real, and He calls us to be real too.

It feels sometimes that in the modern world we have given up on intimacy and love because they are too dangerous we might get hurt, and if we are not careful the dominant thinking of the world because the dominant thinking of the church. The problem is that God is committed to love, however much the modern world may deride it.

If we become the kind of plastic ever smiling self-sufficient dare I say it smug plastic saints, then we deny the intimacy that we would have if we truly shared how we truly felt, or perhaps going deeper if we truly allowed ourselves to feel. Instead we can live in a land of spiritual denial, everything is wonderful, great, Praise God, but this is not the truth. Deep down we know and we feel that things are not right, but we do not want to admit it in case we are not accepted, in case it is seen that we have let the side down. Of course things are not right here. We are called to be strangers and aliens. This is a broken world and it bears the scars of sin, Satan is still alive and well on planet earth. The battle may have been won, Jesus is Lord, but we live in the time before the final defeat of the enemy. Not only is the world fallen but we ourselves are fallen.

What worries me most about the I'm all right attitude, is that the truth is that we all struggle and we are called to stand with each other and pray for each other and support each other in our struggles. The problem is that we are all so "okay" that instead of dealing with our emotional and spiritual garbage we just sweep in under the carpet, and therefore we never deal with it.

Instead of exhibiting the emotional openness of the Psalms, the Prophets or Job we accept a closedness, and we close our hearts not just to our own pains and failure but to God and to one another.

Rather than seeing sadness and pain as an enemy, difficult as they can be, we should see it as a resource. We should feel pain and sadness as we look at the lost going headlong into hell, but we should not just sit around feeling depressed, or taking happy pills or their churchey equivalent we should use the pain as a springboard to action. We should weep over the lost, over the broken, over the hurting and set off to find the lost, set out to hold the broken, and to seek to bind the wounds of the hurting. Perhaps also the sadness is the message that we need to give ourselves a break, to deal with our issue, to find a different way of being.

The idea that we pray and the pain goes away is wrong on so many different levels. One issue that concerns me is that of course if people are easily healed then we do not have to walk with them through the sorrow. It can become an opt out, we pray that God will heal so and so, when perhaps what they really need is the healing touch of people giving them time. To listen to their pain. A good point of the service was the emphasis on spending time with the hurting and learning to listen. The problem is spending time with the hurting is a long term commitment, and we really struggle with that.

If we are going to be truly alive then we will feel pain, and if Jesus makes us truly alive that will probably be more pain rather than less.

The main threat of both Aldous Huxley's dystopia in Brave New World and in George Orwell's 1984 is that we become dead to feeling. In Brave New World it is the Soma, Aldous Huxley's prozac, and a whole society based on the denial of real emotion, for Orwell it is the deadness of a totalitarian state. There was research where half the children were brought up by individuals and half the children were brought up by anonymous carers, it is said that some of the children even died mainly because they were not attached to anyone.

Yet we live in an impersonal world, and yet we were created to be personal, personal with God and personal with one another. We should "rage against the dying of the light". If we do not accept pain, if we do not accept the reality of feelings then there can be no success or failure any pleasure, but in the end we become mediocre, in the end we become a mere shadow of what we could be, what we were created to be.

I do not want to be "healed" I want to still feel the pain, because if I do not I am less alive, and I have less of God. God did not remain happy in heaven, he felt the pain of the world, and moved by compassion came and dwelt amongst us and died for us. We have a broken saviour, broken for us upon the cross, and we live in a broken world, and we need to be a broken people if we are ever to reach the broken world.

When I was younger we used to sing regularly, "Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me... break me, melt me, mould me, fill, Spirit of the living God fall afresh on me."

It is not just that to truly live we need to come to God in need of Him, but if we are truly to live we need to come to each other in need of one another. Communities are based on interdependency not self-sufficiency.

The aim of many people is to self-sufficient happiness, but what is more wonderful is to be connected to one another and to mourn with those who mourn and laugh with those who laugh (see Roman 12v9-21).

The Act of Love by Roger McGough tells the story of a sexual encounter after a party, the next morning "It's cornflakes and then goodbye"

So often church can be like that we encounter God, we encounter one another, but afterwards we just get on with the mundane and try to pretend that nothing really happened, and perhaps that is the truth. Perhaps nothing much really did happen, as Jeff Lucas puts it, "We are moved, but we are not changed." Or perhaps "It's coffee and then goodbye" and we never go deeper, indeed we feel embarrassed by the intimacy and try to pretend that nothing has happened.

We live in a dead world but we are called to be alive, the irony is that perhaps we do need healing. Perhaps we need to be healed so that rather than saying "Praise God, everything is wonderful" when clearly it is not we need to be healed so that we can acknowledge the pain, the failures, and the problems. Perhaps we need healing so that we can start hurting where we need to hurt, and crying where we need to cry. Perhaps I do need to be healed, perhaps I should still want to be healed.