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Home Page
The Rector's Welcome
Worship
Sermons
Music & the Organ
Newsletter
Schedule & Events
History
Programs & Ministries
Tour the Building
Links
Map & Directions
Monthly Calendar
Home Page
The Rector's Welcome
Worship
Sermons
Music & the Organ
Newsletter
Schedule & Events
History
Programs & Ministries
Tour the Building
Links
Map & Directions
Monthly Calendar
Fr. J. D. Ousley
19 February 2006Mk.2“Physical Health / Spiritual Health”
In the Name of God: Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.
Last December, I mentioned in the parish newsletter that my name had appeared in a recently published book. The book was The Selected Letters of James Schuyler.
Jim Schuyler was a member of the New York School of poets, a group of writers who became friends in the 1950's; the group included such famous poets as John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara.
Schuyler was brought up by his mother and stepfather in a fairly conservative form of Christianity. This early experience turned him off religion for much of his life. Then, a few years before he died, a young friend of his became an Episcopal monk.
His friend's new vocation led Schuyler to attend some Episcopal services. Eventually, because he liked to come to church early in the morning, he began to attend the 8:30 service at Incarnation.
I got to know him a little (in the letter in the book that mentions me, Jim Schuyler jokes to a friend that, "For me, it's onward and upward in the Episcopal world: on Wednesday, Father Ousley is taking me to lunch at his club.")
Sometimes, Jim would read a lesson at the early service; he joined our Confirmation Class; he was confirmed here in 1989, two years before he suffered a fatal stroke.
James Schuyler is an example of someone who grew up in a Christian home but didn't learn the joys of faith. His religious upbringing not only failed to attract him to religion; it made him think that one of the purposes of Christianity is to make people feel bad about themselves!
Schuyler was lucky that he was influenced later by someone who showed him that he could become a Christian without sacrificing his sense of humor or renouncing the joys of life. (He won the Pulitzer Prize for a poem entitled "Hymn to Life.")
Jesus himself battled against grim forms of religion. And, Christ saw his mission not to induce guilt but to healing: healing of the body and healing of the soul.
In today's Gospel lesson, Jesus encounters a man whose body seems to have been paralyzed by illness and whose soul was apparently paralyzed by sin.
It's interesting that Jesus doesn't commit himself to any theory about why the man got sick. Rather, Christ pronounces the man's sins forgiven and then, for good measure, he heals the man's paralysis! He practices a kind of "holistic medicine" — he brings healing of the body and of the soul!
Today we would be more impressed with the physical healing. To us, that would be the spectacular miracle — to see the man get to his feet, roll up the mat he was lying on, and walk home.
To Christ's audience, though, healing of the paralysis was much less of a miracle than the man's sins being forgiven. Sins by definition were against the divine law — so only God could heal the inner brokenness that's caused by failure to do what's right.
Today, while we believe that psychological illness like anxiety or stress can contribute to bodily malfunction, we don't seem to associate "sin" with sickness. If people we know seem troubled, we might try to get them to see a psychologist; but we don't speculate about their personal morality.
Yet perhaps we aren't completely different from our forebears. Perhaps we do mix up illness and sin. For there are ways that we are tempted to resort to moral language when people get sick.
We say, for example, that an unhealthy person has been eating the "wrong" things. A given food is "bad"; it has too much fat, or too little protein, or it produces too much HDL cholesterol, or it provides too little Omega 3, whatever that is!
Yet when we step back and look at such apparently scientific language, it also seems to associate sickness and sin, and this linkage is by no means clear. Of course, some food is "better" than others and there is moral decision-making involved in what we choose to put into our bodies.
One would think that the health of the body was a matter of science, not morality — that one's physical health was a matter of the physics of what happened in the body's organs.
So, we hold people accountable for the food they eat. The courts have defended the makers of fast food against lawsuits because people who eat un-nutritious things risk harming their health.
But as Jesus himself says repeatedly, healing the body is not the same as healing the soul. It's hard to imagine that Jesus would have approved of the people today who make eating the right foods into a religion, those folks who eat a minimum of calories so that they supposedly will live longer. Or people who disdain anyone who eats ordinary or "popular" food, people who mange to control their weight and therefore hold themselves above people who can't.
It's hard for me to mention these issues of physical and spiritual health without speaking personally. My wife has suffered for a number of years from the effects of multiple sclerosis. During those years, many people have prayed for her: family and friends, our bishops, many of you.
But occasionally a self-styled expert on Christian healing will suggest to my wife that she needs to try a certain spiritual technique. Or the person will suggest that she needs to have more "faith" in God's power to heal her.
While such suggestions are well-meaning, they have the unintended effect of implying that my wife is at fault for her continuing sickness, that if her soul were healthy, her body would be too. And this implication seems to add insult to injury, especially in the case of multiple sclerosis. MS isn't caused by a person's behavior nor does behavior make it better or worse, nor does it have a psychological component.
That all the prayers offered for my wife are helpful, of that I have no doubt. But they are helpful spiritually, helpful to her soul.
Perhaps then, whatever our experience, we need to remind ourselves of the complex distinction between physical and spiritual health. And it is complicated — the man Jesus healed may, for all we know, have had a psychological illness. He may have been paralyzed by guilt. But the main point is, that in the end, religion has to help us, not hurt us.
We frequently hear the cliché that we should "feel good about ourselves." This is not infallible advice: one can imagine that cruel dictators who feel good about themselves.
But there's also truth in the saying. For instance, if you don't feel good about yourself, your malaise will tell you something! That feeling of unease will tell you that you're not getting the most from your religion, that you need to be touched by the power of Christ.
That power, as many of us have discovered, comes through prayer. Jim Schuyler revealed in a letter to a Catholic friend that he had an experience where, he wrote to the woman, "I felt I was protected by the wind of the wings of your prayers."
May we all feel protected by the wind of the wings of prayer. And may we all be touched by the power of Christ.
And now unto that same God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be ascribed as is most justly due all might, majesty, power, dominion and praise, now and forever, Amen.