The Cry of the Spirit

In A Journey of Transformation and Focusing When an Illness Threatens, Reva describes a moment of prayer experienced in the hospital the morning of her lumpectomy:

"I woke up very early and I walked down to the end of the corridor. There was a lounge down there and the window opened up onto Lake Michigan. It was very early and the sun was coming up and I can remember, I had my robe on and my gown, I guess, but what I remember doing was standing at the window... there wasn't anyone around, and opening my robe and letting the sun come in on my body and feeling in myself a piece of a prayer from long ago – a Hebrew prayer. It starts out "modeh Ani L'fanecha," "I am standing here before you." And I just asked God to be there to help me through this – Yeah, that was a very special precious moment."

The impulse to pray rests deep within our souls. Our souls rest in our bodies. Often it is those moments of crisis that evoke the cry of the spirit –our innate longing for a relationship with the Divine –to participate in the larger mystery of life. At the moment of crisis we know that healing is not something our minds can pull off by taking charge of the situation. We bring an expectant faith, a kind of passionate leap into a realm that reason cannot grasp. Prayer is a wholebodied act that surrenders control and requires the mind to be quiet and listen. Prayer is not a technique; it is an engagement of a relationship.

The impulse to pray – the longing, the fear, the hope that wells up – these are emotionally laden meanings that live in the body. Accessing these passions is the beginning of a bodily level of communication. Prayer is not really the words said nor an expression of compulsive desire. In other words, prayer is not about demanding what we think we want. Prayer invites all parts of ourselves to be present and to listen to wisdom that comes from the body that is of spirit, just as the breath and spirit originate from the same source. Prayer is an activity that brings mind, body, and soul together into a relationship with God whom we encounter more closely through our breathing than through seeing or knowing.

Let's look at Reva's ACT of praying. She walks to the window. Her body leads her to what would become her sacred space. She opens her robe and lets the warmth of the sun touch the part of her body that needs healing. Then her body gives her the prayer that she needs. Remember it is the body that carries feelings and passions. The body can also carry memories, even an old prayer. What Reva needs is to stand in God's view - to be in relationship with the Holy. As Kierkegaard said, becoming whole only happens when we recognize we are constituted by God. This prayer experience brings to Reva a calming assurance which she then carries into the surgery.

We now know that the state of calm triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, placing our bodies in the optimal state for healing – the immune system is working, the body is generating the repair of cells and the fighting off of disease. Currently science is beginning to understand that attitudes of faith and hope can contribute to healing. Physicians call this "The Placebo Effect." To speak of the healing power of prayer by applying the medical term "placebo" both illuminates and dangerously misrepresents the prayer at the same time.

We have to remember that Western medicine has built its understanding of the treatment of medical conditions upon the assumption that the mind and the body are two separate systems and that a physical symptom or illness demands a physical cure (medication, surgery, or other treatment). It is really because of this mindset that the power of faith and hope was only accidentally discovered. When physicians could no longer cure with medicine, their own human desire to bring hope took over. The word placebo means "to please." So when all medical treatment had been exhausted, some physicians, out of the need to please the patient, would give patients something that "might help" rather than nothing at all. It was the physician's hope that rekindled the patient's hope. The amazing discovery is that the body can change in response to a change in attitude. Hope or belief alone has its own healing power.

This is the illuminating aspect of the placebo effect. The potential power of faith to impact the body has been dramatically demonstrated in several research studies. In 1950, for example, Dr. Stewart Wolf was treating women who were suffering from nausea and vomiting during their pregnancies. He told them he was giving them a drug that was known to alleviate nausea and vomiting. What he was actually giving them was ipecac – a drug that is known to induce vomiting. Yet the women who took the ipecac experienced a cessation of their symptoms, not an increase in their symptoms. The results were interpreted by authors of The Wellness Book, who concluded that their belief in the effectiveness of the pill counteracted the pharmacological action of the drug.

In the past, religion knew of this connection between faith and physical healing (Matthew 9:20-23); this rediscovery of how faith can affect the body is important for Christians today. Many sincerely religious people of the Western world, especially Christians, do not understand the body's role in the spiritual life. We too have fallen prey to the western philosophical tradition that separates mind and body and sees reason as the only true reflection of the Spirit. Especially within the Christian tradition, the body has been viewed as the source of sin. It has been thought that the spiritual life calls us to transcend the body and denounce our impulses. The discovery of the placebo effect alerts us again to how our bodies are responsive to spirit.

At this point we need to thank the doctors and move on because medicine has taken this discovery and forced it back into the Cartesian model. The Cartesian understanding of prayer as placebo dangerously misrepresents the nature of prayer. Rather than looking at their phenomenology, faith and hope have become a product of reductive thinking. Viewing prayer as placebo implies that we control our thoughts to manipulate our body. It reduces the life of prayer to a cause-effect process that we control. This assumes that we can determine the desired outcome. Then the implication is that if we don't experience the desired outcome we are responsible. As Gerald May writes, the idea of mind over matter connotes willfulness; but prayer is the willingness to be in relationship, to participate in the larger realm of spirit and love that unites us all.

What physicians have missed are two important truths. First, hope and faith are not just mental ideas. They both surge up from the bowels of our bodies and have their own life beyond our control. In prayerful faith we are in God's hands. Second, hope or faith are rekindled not through a pretend pill but through the power of hope communicated through a relationship, whether it be a doctor, a friend, or the sense of God's presence.

I still remember how I felt when I was told that my nephew of 14 years had just died from an asthma attack. How can I describe the shock, the pain, the confusion, the utter devastation? I was so agitated I couldn't sleep. It was the morning of the visitation and I was beside myself. I knew I needed to pray but there was no quiet inside, no words. I usually do some form of breathing and stretching to help me find my prayer through my body. I had to force myself to begin my ritual. My breathing was shallow and I stretched, feeling my pain open out to God. I stretched more and my breathing deepened and I cried out, "Why?" I repeated the body movements and my prayerful openness. Suddenly strong, loud words came up and flowed through me: "You can't control life!" My whole body shook and then relaxed as if a burden was lifted. Those words of wisdom were a gift from God that comforted me and helped me to let go into this tragic loss and the days ahead of people gathering, grieving, and affirming the life of Josh.

First, my body worked to relax while I quieted my mind to be receptive to God. Then, in a way my body became a vessel for God's healing message to come through. Prayer comes from a place deeper than thought. Hope centers in a possibility of some goodness which does not allow the current situation to foreclose the outcome or our thoughts to predetermine. Whatever the goodness is, it is given to us, not created by us.

I hope this reflection upon prayer as placebo helps to both clarify and deepen our understanding of the role of the body in spiritual transformation. The body, is not just a physiological mechanism to be cured of disease; the body when open, becomes a vessel of the spirit moving from within. Prayer is the thread that connects our bodies to our spirit as God moves our lives forward in mysterious and unique ways towards full aliveness.