Do You Want to be Well?

Full of rebellion, I would die,
Or fight, or travel, or deny
That thou shouldst have anything to do with me.
           O tame my heart; 
                It is thy highest art
To captivate strong holds to thee.
George Herbert, Nature

“Do you want to be well?” Jesus asked of the man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5. It’s a curious question in the truest sense, bringing to the surface a host of other questions.

Why does Jesus ask before acting on the miracle?

What is healing in Christ’s ministry meant to reveal or accomplish or communicate?

What happens after physical or mental healing? 

How does emotional, relational, and spiritual healing happen?

What prevents our desire to be made wholly well?

What of the ailments, disorders, afflictions, and ongoing suffering which do not receive the resolution we long for?

The body and soul are wrapped up in various ways in the gospels. One teaches the other. When Jesus heals, it is often (though not always) both he is healing. The desperation relieved, a touch of mercy felt, we hear echoes of “Go and sin no more.” 

But the destructive lot we’ve settled into can get comfortable. Perhaps the unknown of change gives rise to fear. Perhaps we do not trust his hands. Still, do we want to be made wholly well?

Blessing and (Seeming) Curse

There are no Psalms without something to weep about. There are no memorable encounters with Christ in the gospels without individual encounters with pain.

Moments of tragedy and periods of grief emit shockwaves. We have all lived them, or will go through them soon enough. We cannot call evil or pain good, but what tragedy or grief often do is break through the fog of spiritual apathy. They slash the veneer of self-absorption and self-sufficiency. Everything urgent or meaningful comes to the fore. Trivialities fall to the wayside. There is only the present moment, the intensity in tending to whatever has broken the spell of life’s usual hum.

The gift of tears can, paradoxically, be just that. 

These moments are uniquely affecting, probing the heart and testing the soul in ways, until then, unknown. In ways large and small, things of heaven press in more acutely and rattle a person into awe. The spiritual veils seem thin enough to allow for mortals to once again look for angels doing the bidding of the Lord, humble enough to feel the breath of the spirit. 

I’ll admit that everyday life has enough cares and worries and logistical stressors for all of us. We do our tasks and carry out responsibilities as faithfully as we can. If we’re not careful, though, this soon slips into autopilot, an unexamined life. Perhaps it is the too-comfortable or too-preoccupied life. Survival mode, even thriving mode in the modern world, can end up muting the given world.

In a limited sense, certain mood disorders and mental afflictions can be experienced in a similar way. My own recurring condition is akin to a mini earthquake and apocalypse that arrives over and over again. It both shakes stable ground in the worst of ways and yet manages to bring at least some honest revelations to the fore. The simultaneous darkness and unveiling brings me to the end of myself in a way I do not naturally muster up in the course of smooth days and peaceful wellbeing. 

Something profound happens when you’re forced into vulnerability, into a more honest account of the soul. Something profoundly needed can come from the humiliation of being emotionally and spiritually splayed out. Need invites hospitality and desperation welcomes receptivity. These are profoundly basic concepts to the Christian, and ones I fear we are losing any concept of when it comes to the bodily life.

I have become curious about what there is to be found in my own particular experience and cross, wherein something that ought to be outright seen as bad is a catalyst for needed conversations, needed probing into crevices of my heart. Nothing is left untouched, and thus, truly every facet of life is highlighted in the darkness. 

Mental affliction and mood disorders are difficult in that while reality and honesty can feel intensified as the veil thins, so, too, can lies. To distort reality is part of the nature of these experiences. One of their threats is to slip in distortion alongside a sensitivity to true things. The sideways blessing mixes with a curse. It is in this warring where an offer of presence points the way where rational arguments no longer reach.

Sarah Clarkson writes in her book This Beautiful Truth:

We are answered not with argument or angry demands for obedience but with the presence of Immanuel, God here with us in the shadows. What beauty reveals is the intimacy of the divine in our grief. God gives us beauty, not as his argument but as his offering - a gift that immerses us in something that allows us to touch hope, to taste healing, to tangibly encounter something opposite to disintegration and destruction.

Where suffering has made God abstract and distant to us, where brokenness leaves us with unanswerable questions, beauty allows us to taste and see God’s presence as he breaks into the circles of our inmost grief to remake the broken world.

My own cries of inner grief come out most honestly, most acutely in times of recurring mental anguish, where I reach for consolation in ways not otherwise felt as necessary. How fitting that the relationship between beauty and pain seems to be a cyclical one: We need many forms of beauty to endure suffering. We need suffering in order to perceive beauty–and wholeness–apart from the logic of the world.

And who but the Lord is the pinnacle and fount–indeed, Beauty itself? 

The Wounding of Thorns and Crosses

In reading through Natalie Carne’s Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa, I was struck by a passage on the necessity of spiritual woundedness for perceiving beauty rightly. It brought to mind scriptures related to both Paul’s thorn in the flesh and the more universal call to carry our crosses. In bearing up under them, we are given another way of seeing and becoming:

“Human nature must be wounded (as Paul was stigmatized by blows and weakness) in order to see the beauty that it possesses (the beauty of the soul) and manifest the wounded nature of Christ (it is the marks of Christ that Paul bears).

The beauty of the soul is simply revealed; it is the non-eschatological beauty of the human person. Yet it is a beauty that is revealed only through wounding, only through bearing the marks of Christ that give one the Christ-likeness the human will eschatologically possess. The beauty of humanity is fully revealed only through the Spirit’s wounding the human into Christ-likeness, into her eschatological self. Spirit-wounding gives us a way of seeing and a way of becoming.

In holding together the glories of perceiving beauty with the distress of wounding, Gregory communicates to his reader the difficulty of perceiving beauty, the way its right perception requires a radical break from the catechesis of the world.”

To continuously break from the catechesis of the world enough to perceive this kind of beauty is, indeed, the ongoing work of a lifetime. It requires drinking deeply from a well not of this earth. This well exposes the foolishness found in earthly wisdom, showing how weakness is strength, and the last becomes first. But catalysts help drive us to the well. 

Even our burdens and adversities in this world are preparation for a crowning of glory. Christians join their wounds to Christ. We do not ignore or cast off our crosses. We do not even choose them. But we are offered His intimacy and power as we bear up under our particular crosses. How else does He do the deepest work on our sin, sickness, and sorrow?

This invitation is most intense when my flesh and mind are most faint, and most tender. I’m not confident Christ’s wounds would feel so much like the binding up of my own, were I not to feel them so acutely in the first place. It is unclear where this blessing begins and the seeming curse ends. 

This particular experience of life has been my lot, and would have been otherwise, were I somehow to have been seamlessly rid of the affliction long ago. Perhaps that will come. I do not know. It will, regardless, take a lifetime to see the place of such a thorn in guiding the ultimate shape of my life. There is grief over what the locusts have eaten. The weight of that can feel unbearable. Yet somehow, in the economy of heaven, what is lost can be restored to us.

Ours is an upside-down kingdom, patient in the midst of many kinds of loss. Its heavenly logic is offered as milk and honey for the ravenous. Perhaps our own embittered pain, pressed under the crucible of mercy, can soften into something like sustenance for others. 

Clarkson writes well of the delicate work that this is:

“I always think it intriguing that in the Gospels Jesus seems far more interested in the faith and hope at work in broken people than merely the healing of their bodies. For I think God knows there is no real healing until our hearts are healed of their fear, our minds cleansed of doubt. Broken bodies, shattered hopes, suffering minds, terrible pasts—they leave us deathly ill with the twisted belief that love can never be great enough to encompass the whole of our story. We feel that we must subtract or conceal part of ourselves if we are ever to win the love of other people or God himself. We are diminished in our own eyes by our suffering, taught to despair of our dreams, to give up our hope that God will come with goodness in his hands.

So God creeps in, gentle, and we know his touch because we are not discarded or dismissed, but healed. He comes to unravel our self-doubt, to untangle the evil we have believed, to call us back from the dark lands of our insecurity. He calls us by name and wakes us from sleep… The story he weaves for us, well, it may look radically different from what we thought we desired, but when it arrives—and oh, good is always coming toward us—we will recognize it as the intimate gift of a love whose will for us is always so much greater than our own.”

Do we want to be well?

Who can know the inner complexity of a person? The source of warring in the human heart is often hard to pin down. As for reasons to resist action toward wholeness, there is, of course, the reason to resist simply because we have been hardened or calloused. We prefer the darkness and wallowing in it. We reject mercy, preferring to go our own way.

There is also a fear of change and safety in the known. While concerns about making wounds or disorders an identity is certainly an issue these days–particularly in the psychological realm–the question of who a person is apart from a formative thorn, cross, or condition is a valid one. Is it even worth trying to parse out who the essence of a person is, devoid of the texture of all that shapes us in life? That shaping includes the experience of broken bodies and broken minds.

Where do “I” begin and “I, shaped by this mental ailment, circumstances, and all ensuing proclivities” end? Would I be the same person, or becoming another? 

In Neither Beast Nor God, Gilbert Meilaender writes of this conundrum:

We might ask ourselves whether we should regret the historical happenstance that Augustine came along too soon in history to have received the kind of medical treatment recommended by Dr. Joseph Biederman in a presentation to the President’s Council on Bioethics about the use of psychopharmacology in treating children. Had Augustine’s symptoms—his inability to attend to what he found boring, his impulsive behavior, his restlessness—been diagnosed as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) early enough, he might have been treated with Ritalin and spared years of anxiety and discontent, years of feeling that “myself to myself had become a place of misery, a place where I could not bear to be and from which I could not go.” He might have been spared the “horrendous inner sense of restlessness” that Dr. Biederman discerns even in many who are well past childhood. It is true, of course, that—compared to many of his peers—the young Augustine achieved a good bit; nevertheless, as Dr. Biederman noted, “‘dysfunction’ is a relative term.”

Despite his achievements relative to those of others, Augustine may not have been able to use his “intellectual ability to the fullest.” Given that, in Dr. Biederman’s words, “academic progress is a fundamental passport for a good life,” perhaps with treatment Augustine could have lived out his life in Rome as rhetorician for the well-known and powerful, rather than in Hippo, carrying out the thankless duties of a bishop in the struggling African church. But then, of course, we would not have his Confessions. How easily we forget that one may become a philosopher through loneliness or discontent.”

Where do the sheer, tragic effects of the fall begin and any merciful wounding end? What do we do with the confusion of their mingling?

Truncated definitions of healing and wholeness tend to avoid certain forms of bodily suffering, inconvenience, aging, and vulnerability. In siloing the body from the soul, we short-circuit the formation long seen as necessary for the Chrisitan life. This can, though not always, tamp out tender soul growth coming up alongside the painful weeds and thorns. 

Would I rather have the change which comes only this way? The growth which comes by way of nearness to the Gardener doing pinpointed work, not blasting the pain from a distance with proverbial Roundup? 

I have come to see this process within body, mind, soul and relationships to be more like tending a garden than keeping a linear chart or ledger. It’s more akin to the push-and-pull tension of a dance, or even a novel—watching characters develop in the way they need to in their story. 

There are weeds of sin or hurt which my thorn in the flesh has been tasked with helping reveal, however incompletely. How this benefit is wrapped up with the tragic effects of the fall, of desperation to be wholly well, remains a mystery to me. There is no ledger for systematizing the problem of pain. 

Of course, there is often no way to speak of suffering (mental illness and disorder in particular) without accusations of callously glorifying it, of plastering platitudes on brokenness, or of downplaying the mercies found in various healing and helping professions. There is no way to get the theological barometer on every excruciating experience of hardship just so. No, most of us are trying to get through the days the best we know how. Most of us can only be honest in small ways at a time. Many of us are simply open for ways to be well, all the while hanging on by forcing our eyes toward He who does not change as we weep and writhe in body or mind or soul—perhaps a combination of all three.

In simple terms, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote on a paper in prison, “Only the suffering God can help.” 

The Gaze that Heals

Recently described by Sarah Clarkson, such “potent, gathered attention is one of the great works of faith in our world, the great proclamations of God’s particular, transformative love.” 

Pain’s complexity can become a vicious and interwoven cycle. Swirling and cycling are hurt, sin, darkness, withdrawal, despair, shame, hurt, pride, addiction, and numbness—with the battered mind, body, soul and relationships to accompany it. Parsing out where one kind of wound or resistance begins and the other ends is a difficult task. What I know is that life itself is hard, and our responses to it can exacerbate the effect of sin’s tentacles. Interruptions of grace have been known to arrive with kind of violence, as any reader of scripture (or Flannery O’Connor) knows. 

Have you ever sat with someone in their rock-bottom moment in a hospital room? Earlier this year, a complicated crisis bridged a gap of welcome to the bedside, grueling and delicate though such meetings can be. Being there felt oddly exposing. Forced into the spotlight of intimacy in a specific place and time, with a particular person, invites a reckoning in both parties. This profound vulnerability felt familiar, this pain a type of mirror of my own, these choices a way to examine my own response to life, and the tears of suffering we all inevitably face–whether inflicting or receiving it. There but for the grace of God we all go. 

Meeting the eyes of the wounding and wounded other is difficult. Doing so feels like what Marilynne Robinson describes in Lila: “If you think about a human face, it can be something you don't want to look at, so sad or so hard or so kind.” And in Gilead she observes: “Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.”

We all desire a gaze of love in ways unspoken. Reaching the depths of a person requires the steady, patient affection it offers. Grace Leuenberger describes this encounter as having “a sort of holy tenderness to it.” It is here where the human heart is seen, heard, and wooed into a care we otherwise reject. Without this kind of knowing gaze–at once literal and metaphorical–we starve for want of love. The lack is, itself, a kind of wound.

Every time a person has shown this form of love to us, every time our own presence is offered to another, is a reflection of what I imagine Christ showed to his disciples. Certainly, it was offered in each miraculous encounter of physical and spiritual healing in the gospels. It pierces while it binds up.

The tension between seeking healing, of restoration for what the effects of the fall have stolen, and being receptive to what the master physician is up to in the meantime–well, this is where the work is. Blessed as the healers of this world may be, I love what George Herbert articulates in writing of the longed-for moment “when thou shalt look us out of pain.”

So, do I want to be well? Sure. The work of humbling I've been invited into isn’t going away. For as long as the affliction persists, healed or not, there is a gaze looking to meet my particular eyes in the midst of it.

Perhaps, in the severe mercy of God, they will not be found any other way.