Since the heightened awareness of the healing ministry generated eight years ago by the publication and debates around A Time to Heal, many parish priests have moved or retired. The early ‘adviser’ model pioneered by Bishop Morris Maddocks, which involved each diocesan bishop appointing a Bishop’s Adviser on the healing ministry for his diocese, is gradually being replaced by the new model which I have developed. This model consists of a diocesan healing ministry support group appointed by the diocesan bishop working with a diocesan-wide team of advisers, who work in pairs to support one or in some cases, several deaneries. This new way of developing the healing ministry provides appointed contacts, expertise and support at local level, where it is most needed, through people who are locally based, respected and well-known. These lay and ordained deanery advisers are the local ‘champions’ for the healing ministry.

A key feature of the role of deanery adviser is the promotion of good practice. Ten years ago there were no widely recognised guidelines for good practice in the healing ministry. Since 2000 the House of Bishops’ top ten guidelines for good practice in the healing ministry have been widely circulated and the House of Bishops’ guidelines for the deliverance ministry (1975) reaffirmed.

Canon  Paul Nener writes:

Our vocation in this ministry is largely to convince the fearful and the reticent that each local church community has not only a vocation for healing, but also all the necessary tools for such work. Our hope is to assist ordinary people, ‘earthen vessels’, to realise in themselves the potential to be Christ-bearers, and thus ministers of his healing gifts. Healing Services are an important part of the life of the local Church. They are times when we meet together simply to concentrate on the great themes of our common life, and the gifts of Christ our Lord—times of Holy Communion, oases of prayer, arenas of simple touch and personal presence, and silent moments where seekers can find time for confession and unburdening of hearts and minds.

In the deserts of the 4th Century the monks helped their visitors to find themselves, in all the precariousness of their humanity. In the modern world so many live in similar frailty, and find themselves to be wandering in deserts of hurt, pain and doubt. Surely local churches can muster the resources to pierce this world, and by their life and love and knowledge open themselves to the living God. Some, a few, do it well, and they grow and live. Many do it half-heartedly, but at least they try. Many have little or no sense of the fabulous call of God, and the rewards that come with a willing response.

The Revd Dr Russ Parker writes:

The Acorn Christian Healing Foundation is celebrating its Jubilee year and, as if in prophetic comment on our journey so far, our Founder, Bishop Morris Maddocks died. In a wonderful Memorial Service at St. Michael Le Belfry’s church in York we were stirred and challenged to renew our commitment to Christian healing in the sermon given by the Archbishop of York, the Most Revd John Sentamu.

During the course of his address he shared a personal healing story. As he lay very ill with a particular disease, not knowing if he would recover, he related a dream vision in which he was spoken to by David Watson who himself was dying of cancer in St. Luke’s hospital in London, many miles away. David Watson said that whereas God was calling him home to heaven, John would recover from his illness as God had much more for him to do. It was from this moment that he did recover and was completely healed. John Sentamu concluded by encouraging us to press on with being serious about healing in all of its forms from prayers with the laying on of hands to the grace empowered skills of the health professionals.

Sitting in the congregation I felt as if God was saying that the baton had been well and truly handed on to us from our Founder and that however different our practise may be now, it is the same commission from Jesus to heal the sick, to restore the fallen and comfort the distressed that we pursue. Bishop Morris had a number of core principles that he gifted to the Christian healing ministry and which Acorn has endorsed at the heart of its many activities.

He saw Christian healing as a servant ministry which gives full respect to the other and resists imposing unnecessary agenda upon the one seeking healing, save only that their needs are fully attended.

Christian healing is at the heart of the Church’s mission and not some eccentric extra of a particular individual. This takes the focus of healing away from the gifted individual and places it squarely on the shoulders of the community of the faithful with all of its variety of skills, charisms and natural abilities. It also saves us from obsessional practices of Christian healing by placing it alongside the other imperatives of serving society with the proclamation of Good News, carrying our cross and living in wholeness in a context of a fallen world where we do not get all we would like.

Morris always encouraged the practise of Christian healing as including the therapeutic disciplines and skills of health professionals.

Mary Tschiersch writes:

David Foster—in Deep Calls to Deep we find him saying: ‘Intercession is a sign of love. It not only expresses our concern about others, but it is also a proof of God’s love for them in Christ. The difficulty is that our hearts are narrow; but the poverty of our love God can transform. He takes our human love and turns it into a vehicle of his divine love. This is how we come to share in the priestly intercession of Christ. The more closely we are united with Christ, the more profoundly will we enter into his prayer for all people, and the more palpably will our lives express, in prayer and action, the generosity of his saving love.’

Then he adds a new dimension, in that ‘. . there ought to be an element of protest in our prayer—this ought to be your will; why are things not like this? Intercession includes a struggle’.

Archbishop Rowan Williams takes the same stance in his chapter on Intercessory Prayer in Open to Judgment. He refers to Genesis 18.23-33 and Ephesians 6.10-24 as being full of the imagery of struggle and conflict. ‘Two different kinds of conflict; but both battling against the limitation of God’s grace and love. Both pushing out the frontiers of grace as far as they can go. We do not think often enough of our intercessory prayer as a battle . . . the whole of prayer and spirituality is penetrated with warfare, with the struggle for freedom and vision. The prayer of intercession at its simplest is thinking of something or someone in the presence of God.’

He suggests we try to see how intercessory prayer can be a battle and a struggle by trying to imagine ‘how do we think of Jesus and, for example, a hundred children massacred in central Africa? Jesus and the senile, the dying, the dead, the mentally ill? “This present darkness” is often so dark that it seems empty formalism to put the name of God beside some appalling atrocity . . . the effort seems only an increasingly hollow gesture against despair. You have been praying for two years, say, about a friend going through a breakdown . . . and nothing is happening and things get worse. Then it is a struggle all right.’

Dr Harald Walach writes:

Healing is completely different to everything we are used to thinking about. It is not an influence that comes from the outside, like the radio waves that carry our mobile phone chatter. It is not something you can wilfully direct like the beam of a sun ray in a mirror. It is not changing God’s mind to heal someone whom he has just dumped previously. It is not sending something or doing something. It is about being. About being in unison with the real nature of the world, about being in connection with Everything. A medieval definition of God, which the great German mystic and scholastic writer Meister Eckhart gave at the beginning of his commentary on St John’s Gospel is: ‘Esse est deus’—‘Being is god’. You can turn it round and it is equally true: ‘God is being’. Healing is about being. Period!

Let me finish with a story. I once met and interviewed one of the grand old ladies of healing in Germany, a lady who is now nearing ninety and who has conducted many healings. I have seen some of her cases that look impressive. She has a reputation especially with crippled people. I asked her what exactly she does. And she said: ‘I imagine how it should be, and this is exactly, how it then becomes’.

The Revds Stanley and Elizabeth Baxter write:

As our ministry developed, we discovered that most of the people who were drawn to stay with us were suffering some form of loss (of a partner, job, health, dignity, status, etc). Some of the problems presented were very complex, and many of those presenting them were very vulnerable. This made us more determined than ever that whatever help we offered our guests should be professional. In the area of counselling and psychotherapy, we abide by the code and practice of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, which is the largest counselling organization in the UK. The Association is engaged, with others, in negotiations with the UK government about the introduction of a statutory register. We are also a member of the Association of Therapeutic Communities, which is another professional organization.

Many of the people who stay with us have been wounded and, in some cases, almost destroyed by Church institutions. Our chapel services have been a means of drawing these people gently back to a worshipping community. We are often confronted by what can only be described as abusive theology that produces overwhelming guilt in those that are already ill, either in mind, body or spirit. Some of this comes about because of the dualistic approach to healing that has often been seen in parts of the healing ministry of the Church. It is interesting that most other world faiths do not have this problem. This dualism has often produced fear of the ‘other’, or an unwillingness to learn from other faiths. We often find in centres of healing a fear of any complementary therapies, particularly if they have their origin in the East. It is interesting that if we are having surgery, most of us seem unconcerned about the belief system of the surgeon!

This is my last edition of Chrism as editor after twelve years in post, and it is appropriate that it should be devoted to looking back to see how the ministry of healing has changed and developed over that period. You will find much that is familiar in the pages that follow, but also some trends which perhaps could not have been predicted. But that is how God so often works.

I also have some personal looking back to do. Being editor of a journal like Chrism very quickly becomes a personal pilgrimage in the different encounters it brings with it. The ministry of healing has its own challenges to faith, both in the way that it enlarges one’s expectations of what God can do, but also in the questions it so often raises—questions which do not yield to facile answers. I thank God for the depth and honesty of so many of the contributions I have received. They have become the stuff of my spiritual journey.

And then there are the people. ‘I am glad God connected us’, a woman priest in the USA e mailed me, after I had asked if I could use part of her article on Art and Healing, which appeared in a journal which came to me unsolicited over the internet. Many of my encounters with individuals have been of this kind, but that hasn’t lessened the inspiration I have derived from them. The pages of Chrism are crammed with the personal stories of people who have shown the most extraordinary faith and courage and sacrificial giving of themselves in all kinds of situations—and I thank God for the way they have touched my life too.

And then also it has so often been just so interesting. Interesting to learn about ‘hearing dogs’, ‘the power of music to heal’, ‘genetic engineering’, ‘dementia’, ‘the deliverance ministry’, ‘AIDS’, ‘ME’, ‘coping with stress’, ‘Helen House’, Burrswood, and a whole host of other topics, as well as the fresh insights that have come my way through the many articles on the theology and practice of the ministry of healing itself. And I have been able to indulge my interest in graphic design into the bargain! So much to be thankful for.

Two duties remain to me as editor. The first is to welcome my successor, Professor Helen Leathard. Helen is Professor of Healing Science & Pharmacology at the University of Cumbria and has a long connection with the Guild of St Raphael. She will bring a new dimension to the post of editor with her professional and academic connections. You will find a fuller introduction to her on page 14 of this journal.

And then we have to say farewell to Bishop Jack Nicholls, our Warden. He retired as Bishop of Sheffield at the end of June and as is customary relinquished the post of Warden of the Guild at the same time. Jack and I go back a long way, so it has been no surprise to me that he has given himself so fully to supporting the Guild in every way possible. Those of us on the Guild Council have benefited greatly from his wisdom and experience. And for the majority of Guild members—well, who will forget his addresses at the Guild Festivals—so simple yet so thought-provoking, homely yet deeply spiritual, and always with a twinkle of humour? We shall miss him greatly, and do wish him and Judith every blessing for the years that lie ahead.

+George Hacker, Editor

Autumn and winter, harvest and Christmas are good times for relishing and reviewing. It’s fitting that we’re looking back over ten years of the healing ministry. Thanks for the past; a ‘what next?’ that, with grace and faith, becomes a ‘yes!’ to the future. I wonder if that’s how Bishop George is feeling as he says goodbye to the editorship of this magazine. . . I certainly want to pray a ‘thanks!’ and a ‘yes!’ for him. Life, Kirkegaard said, is lived forwards but understood backwards. But to understand, we must have really lived life in the first place.

I like the word relish. Maybe it makes me think of the sweet, spicy stuff in jars that adds to the flavour and enjoyment of a meal. I can almost taste it! Ignatius Loyola talks about it, reminding the spiritual director to let the pilgrim savour the experience of their own prayer: ‘Now this produces greater spiritual relish and fruit than if one in giving the Exercises had explained and developed the meaning at great length. For it is not much knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but the intimate understanding and relish of the truth. . .’ and he encourages the pilgrim to say, ‘I will remain quietly meditating upon the point in which I have found what I desire, without any eagerness to go on till I have been satisfied.’

Not much knowledge . . . but relish. How often we stay in our heads, sliding off into thoughts of the past and the future, rather than using our senses to pay attention to the present moment, where we really can ‘taste and see’.

There is a delightful, and challenging, story about the famous Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh. He is eating a picnic lunch with someone who wants to learn about holiness, when the following dialogue takes place:

‘I must teach you how to eat an orange.’

‘But I have just eaten one!’

‘I don’t think you did eat it. I noticed that after you had peeled the orange you placed one segment of it into your mouth and immediately took another segment into your hand before swallowing the first one. And when you placed the second segment in your mouth you immediately seized a third one. All the time your mind was upon the next segment; so in any real sense you never ate any of it. You were in such a hurry to eat the whole of the orange that you never actually ate a single segment of it.’

As we pray in the Collect for Corpus Christi: ‘. . . ut redemptionis tuae fructum in nobis iugiter sentiamus’ ‘. . . that we may ever perceive (literally: sense, taste, relish) within ourselves the fruit of your redemption’

I once had the chance of a trip to Bardsey Island that, inevitably, involved a rather fraught journey. In the end, all that was possible for me and the bus-load of pilgrims was to sit on the shore of the mainland and gaze across the troubled sea at the island— and just for a quarter of an hour before we had to move on. Only fifteen minutes to savour this beautiful and holy place—to open my pores, as it were, and soak up this precious experience.

So I took myself away from the crowd and sat on the hillside. And looked, and listened . . . The hum of bees and bleating of sheep; the swirling colours of the rough sea; the shape of the island crouched before me; patterns of light and shade; the feel of the prickly grass and hard stones I sat on.

I think it was Anthony de Mello who spoke of the art of ‘taking photographs with the heart’. I know it was he who wrote: ‘Many of us go through what one psychologist calls peak experiences. The pity is that when the experience actually takes place very few people have the capacity to surrender themselves to it. So they take in nothing of the experience, or very little. What they need to do is return to these experiences . . . and gradually take the experience to the full. If you do this you will discover that, no matter how often you return to these experiences, you will always find in them a supply of nourishment. Their store never seems to get exhausted. They are a joy forever.’

He goes on to make the point that in the story of our salvation history Israel goes after false lovers because she has forgotten the delight of her honeymoon with God. God comes into the world in Jesus so that we can remember. Later Jesus tells his fearful and desolate disciples to go back to Galilee, where they experienced joy with him in the past—then they will be able to receive the consolation of his resurrection.

If we relish we can review. The greatest gift of my glimpse of Bardsey is that I can return there in my heart whenever I like. Each time I can taste and see something new of God’s goodness.

* * * * *

So let’s review—really see again, and savour, all the treasures our memory holds. And relish the fruit—the truth both of sorrows and joys—in the now. Re-member our moments of healing, and the times when God met us and sat with us in our pain. For all that has been, thanks! And to all that will be, yes!