healing faith
Yesterday I went to church for the first time in many years. I am not a religious person. I have many reservations about the way that organized religion functions and the true motives of those who "organize" it. But I went, for my mom. Her pastor had called a few days before, and he wanted to perform a "healing" service on her and have the congregation pray. She didn't ask me to go. She knows how I feel about these things. But I went because I knew how much it would mean to her, and I wanted to be among the ones who prayed for my mom's healing.I have such mixed feelings about the service. The first half hour had me blanking out much of the time, as the pastor said the types of things that have driven me away from religious services in general. He was full of ego, talking about what he and the church could accomplish, if only they made the commitment to do so (translation: put more money in the collection plate). He condemned other faiths, Muslims specifically, Catholics obliquely, and even judged those who had left his church to attend another. He read from emails he had received, people claiming that they felt the power of God in him, and that he had and would continue to change, even save, lives. Something about it was eerily reminiscent of what I've heard of the antichrist. But maybe that's just me.
Then he lapsed into his message, one that I've heard expressed secularly many times--we get what we expect/ask for. If we are content with unhappiness, it's all we'll have. Simplistic, but I agree with the fundamentals that you have to welcome change and demand more of yourself and the world in order to stand a chance of getting it. He employed some humor, a little song, and so that part was a fairly easy pill to swallow.
Then came the altar call (after, of course, the collection plate). My mom and sister went forward, while I stayed in the pew with my dad and hubby, all three of us skeptics, but skeptics who desperately love my mom. The pastor called my mother forward, laid his healing hands on her, and my dad and I wept. We held each other and I felt my dad's body shake with grief. I have never seen or heard my dad cry like this--only a few tears here and there over my lifetime, a watering up, but never like this. And I know that as we wept we were both thinking the same thing--how much we wished the pastor's ego were warranted, how much we wanted this "healing" to work, and how little faith we had that it actually would. And then I wondered if my very lack of faith might keep it from working, if somehow our skepticism might be responsible for the lack of healing. And so we cried.
I know that logically healing is possible--through medicine, and through my mother's own positive attitude. I know that the real value of yesterday's service is that it gave my mother something to have faith in, and that we, as a family, supported her faith by being there. But oh, how I wish I could believe in the power of those hands that touched my mother's back, that I felt some truth in the booming claim, "Healed!"
posted by lit lover at
7:58 AM
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