Second Day healing – prayer, worship, therapy and medicine

Many Second Day People practice the spirituality of healing with medicine and therapy. While some traditions frown upon Christians who resort to these options and prefer to turn to more prayer, Bible reading, and worship services for healing and wholeness, God can work through all these means. Faithful people may approach prevalent accepted practices for healing people as spiritual disciplines that help persons to live in fullness despite depression. In Jesus’ time, washing the skin and applying ointment was a prevalent healing practice, according to Robert E. Webber (1996). If Webber is correct, then when the woman from the city, in Luke 7:36-50, washed, dried, and anointed Jesus’ feet, she was doing what was common practice for healing and preventive medicine in her day. She was curing hurt feet or preventing feet from being damaged when walking in sandals or barefoot. Similarly, when the Samaritan poured oil and wine on the wounds of the man whom robbers left half dead in Jesus’ parable (described in Luke 10:34), he was probably disinfecting with the wine and using the oil as a healing ointment. Remember that they did not have all the scientific advances of medicine that we have today. And yet, the gesture of anointing with oil is essential to today’s Christian healing services. We imitate the gestures and ritualize them to practice our spirituality of healing. Christians today may follow the traditions of their ancestors in the faith. One way to join these healing traditions is to imitate what they did, not necessarily the exact gestures, but the idea of taking a common medical practice and ritualizing it to add it to our spirituality of healing. For example, theologian Monica Coleman has reflected on the sacramentality of taking medication for depression. In her blog article “Sacrament,” Coleman shares her struggle to accept her need to take medication to deal with her depression and encourages the reader to have faith in God and medicine. She states that “… lay and medical personnel alike are aware of what many religions have long taught: your mental and spiritual approach to your body and healing make a difference on how you heal. And who’s to say God doesn’t work in and through medication?” God and salvation are in the elements and the rituals. God is in the anti-depressant medicines and the daily ritual of taking them. God is in the therapist and in the recurrent ritual of showing up for therapy. Coleman’s insights help people of faith expand the spirituality of healing through accepting medicine and therapists as God’s means to heal from depression and enjoy life in fullness in their Second Day.

By Lis Valle

... when the woman from the city, ... washed, dried, and anointed Jesus’ feet, she was doing what was common practice for healing and preventive medicine in her day.