Where is Gilead?

Where is Gilead? The question flows effortlessly for anyone familiar with the haunting Negro Spiritual “There is a Balm in Gilead.” Remember the text? “There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul; there is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.”

For many believers, wounded or sin sick, Gilead is a nearby church, synagogue, or mosque. Houses of worship and the public prayer opportunities that they provide anoint the suffering with the healing balm of humanity, community, forgiveness, and hope. This essay explores several dimensions of pain and suffering including diminishment, isolation, guilt and despair, and proposes that prayerful worship can lessen their power over caregivers and care receivers alike. First, what can be said of pain and suffering?

Pain Management
In the early 1980’s, it was my privileged ministry to work as a hospice chaplain. During those years I first explored the emerging medical field of “pain management.” Had you asked me earlier in my life to assess the pain of a patient, I’m quite confident that I would have focused my diagnosis almost exclusively on physical symptoms. How astounding it was to learn how the diverse aspects of pain, social, psychological, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical, how these many components joined forces to attack the over-all well being of the suffering person. Even when physical pain could be wrestled under control, suffering could still persist in life with those who suffered retaining negative attitudes and behaviors. Simply put, a person did not easily “get better.”

Two events during this time deepened my convictions about the vast landscape of pain. Shortly after our marriage, my husband and I learned that an extraordinarily close friend of ours had been diagnosed with AIDS. This was years before the arrival of multi-drug cocktail therapies led some folks to reclassify AIDS as a chronic illness rather than a terminal one. At that time, continuing to share life entailed a commitment to share the dying process as well.

One day at brunch, Vincent spoke at length about an insight by the author Susan Sontag, quoting her on the dehumanizing effects of pain and disease. I remember the conversation vividly, but have been unable to find the exact citation. Vincent described how pain has the potential to rob us of what most makes us human, and reduces us to primitive selves. But then came the day my second son was born. He had already been named “Benjamin,” child of my sorrow, child of my joy. While Benjamin was still growing within me, Vincent was growing weaker and more ravaged by his illness. Death and life were interwoven over those days.

Just shy of two weeks after Vincent’s death, Ben was born by caesarean section. As I lay in the recovery room, a drug was administered to me that reversed the effects of the general anesthesia I had been given for what had been major surgery. An error in timing led to this drug being administered before any post-operative pain medication.

What a horrific passage over the border of pain. As I lay writhing on the gurney, unable to get the attention of the recovery room nurse who was instructing a trainee, I suddenly knew in every fiber of my body the ravages of dehumanization. Of all human gifts, I think I cherish language the most. Reduced to incoherent groaning, I was no longer self, body, mind, and spirit, but diminished… a physical organism reduced to a sub-human level. It was a reality that even the immediate joy of the birth of a healthy son was not able to alleviate. To this day, my comprehension of the dehumanizing potential of physical pain remains vivid.

I do not claim as extensive knowledge of the other dimensions of pain, although all have made our acquaintance. When my husband was “downsized” from his job in the late 1980’s, our family experienced the isolation that follows when neighbors fear contact, as if somehow job loss could be contagious. Though Irish, I seldom experience the debilitation of guilt, but grappled mightily with it when diagnosed with diabetes several years ago. And I struggle to allow myself to be embraced by hope. The focus of my day-to-day ministry is the renewal and expansion of lay Church ministries, and we are in a period of retreat from some of the visionary horizons of the Second Vatican Council.

The Balm of Worship
We pray anytime, we pray everywhere. So what is distinctively healing about our gathering for public worship? When we come together for worship, our prayer is communal. I like to say that all prayer is personal, insofar as we bring our whole unique, unrepeatable selves to it whether we are alone or with others. But in worship we are members of a larger body made up of many members. And we believe that each comes with gifts and needs, and that none is superior to any other. Belonging in a faith community is something that we do not earn from week to week or month to month. It is not bestowed as a result of achievement. One of my colleagues speaks, rather, of “receivement.” We are each beloved of God, loved and invited. Titles of physician and patient, therapist or client, fade away as we gather to hear God’s word spoken to all. For those suffering any type of pain, and those who accompany them with their own burden of fatigue and worry, religious worship restores participation in a common humanity.

Secondly, worship and the pastoral care that flows from it diminishes the isolation experienced by the suffering. To hear oneself prayed for aloud is a humbling realization of not being alone, no matter what. And when visits are made to the homebound or those in hospitals or care facilities, the faith community extends its physical presence beyond the bricks and mortar of the usual place of worship. The assurance is powerful. “You are a part of our faith family even though your current situation prevents you from being present with us as we gather. The prayer that we share here is not separated from that offered in Church, and we offer you ‘communion’ with our church family as well as with the Body and Blood of Christ.”

From its earliest days, the Christian Church made provision for designated ministers to serve the sick in this way, bring communion in its many senses. It occurs to me that our terminology for pastoral care could be expanded. Instead of speaking of care for the sick, which so many interpret to connote physical disease or injury, how we might be challenged to think of pastoral care of the suffering. This expanded concept could enable us to understand the outreach of the worshipping community as even more needed and inclusive.

Worship offers forgiveness, a deep form of healing. In order to avoid the mystery of randomness, the terror of not knowing why or how affliction has come into our lives, a very common strategy is to assign blame. How often is the temptation to blame oneself? As burdensome as guilt is, the not knowing can be even more traumatizing. But in worship, the community and its representatives offer true forgiveness, both for authentic and misplaced guilt. Openness to healing is the only prerequisite. The grace of the present moment is powerful enough to engulf the past and its burdens, and to release the participant into a transformed future. God can be encountered as being present in the moment, accompanying the sufferer in the midst and not only beyond the suffering.

In an extraordinary book Preaching Justice, edited by homiletician Christine Smith (United Church Press, 1988, 6-25), Kathy Black writes of the need for preachers to come to a new understanding of disability and healing. Her insights are greatly needed when far too many congregants confuse healing with cure, and the lack of cure is blamed on inadequate faith. Healing, as the readers of this journal so well know, is accessible to all those who suffer, no matter what the diagnosis or prognosis. The “self” can be well when the physical body is failing. Worship can offer this healing and forgiveness to the suffering and offer an experience that is far less tangible in personal, non-public prayer alone.

And lastly, how does worship offer hope to the suffering in the face of despair? Suffering itself can be accepted, though not sought after, as a source of meaning. Within worship, the love of God is seen to encompass the victory of life over death. Christians believe that at the time of death, life is changed, not ended. And everything that we experience in the here and now can become an opportunity for bringing about the reign of God. In other words, there is no need to be preoccupied with the life to come, but to remain aware of God’s presence even in whatever is being asked of us. When people seek to experience the awe and transcendence of worship, I think in large part it is to experience the potential for the sacred in all the other settings of life… the treatment, the procedure, the test results, and, if it be God’s will, the restoration of physical health. With these beliefs, hope is not validated by miraculous cure, although that is not ruled out. Hope is validated by the gift of loving presence of the community that is promised without threat of withdrawal.

Those of us who suffer, and those of us who care for the suffering, would be well reminded to go to Gilead, a place of the community gathering to worship, to give praise and thanks and to encounter the loving God. In Gilead, our wounded selves may yet become whole and we will be offered healing for our sin sick souls.