Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Saving Mary´s Reputation (part one): Sacred Mind-Body Healing, Women, and Health Care

This is a 1,000 word piece originally submitted to Sojo.net. Rev Caleb J Lines of the United Church of Christ pointed out recently that scholars consider the translation of “virgin” in Matthew to be a mistranslation of “young woman” with regards to the “Immaculate Conception.”
Has secularism finally buried Jesus, God, and the spiritual with the uncertainties of translation? Why is a woman´s status só vulnerable to reputational issues? Founding Father Thomas Jefferson rejected the “Virgin Birth,” along with all the other miracles. Jefferson was a Rationalist who considered himself a Deist, with God little but the Creator. Religious experiences, or spiritual practices, were nothing he seemed to know much about or regard favorably. Meanwhile, the influential Jefferson promoted spiritually-truncated secularized policies. They have steadily been swamped by corporate profiteering ideology, its supportive theologies promoting prejudice and inequality, and unsustainable Science all in the mainstream. By contrast, modern high integrity lay Christians like activist Bill McKibben, unlike earlier figures like Lucretia Mott and Fannie Lou Hamer, often promote pluralism and fairness in purely secular terms, including victimized women and health care, disconnected from the sacred. ***
Jefferson´s flat rejection of miracles seems peremptory to the large numbers of us who are engaging or have struggled with the spiritual-religious dimensions authentically. Still, the Founding Father´s orientation to Rationalism benefits from an emphasis on personal effort. That has occurred because personal effort has been significantly subordinated in many church doctrines since at least Augustine who said, “I cannot not sin,” and Luther, “by grace alone.” The monk Pelagius´ emphasis on personal effort was judged a heresy.
The insights of Transpersonal and Therapeutic Psychology include the basic need for personal effort. The secular Jewish Jack Kornfield became first a Buddhist monk after a Peace Corps term in Thailand, and then an interfaith Buddhist psychologist. He has taught meditation combined wth Buddhist analysis of internal “demons” to help acknowledge emotions and sacred healing. In Christianity, it turns out that Desert Father Anthony the Great reported his spiritual growth in terms of demons like that of loneliness. Anthony was a pioneering extreme ascetic in 270 at age 20 when he followed Jesus in Matthew, “sell what you have and give to the poor.” Over 30 plus years of spiritual practice he faced those “demons” until he reached a state characterized by vitality and wisdom something like Navajo “hózhó” enlightenment, called divinization or theosis by Christian specialists. Anthony´s associate Pachomius then organized monasteries. “Personal effort” as heresy, however, persisted in many church doctrines.
For women, emerging doctrinal issues were, however, preceded by their active involvement, including assuming some leadership roles in early Christian home worship. Harvard scholar Karen L King, gives the insight that in the first century AD/CE, Paul in Romans “greets Prisca, Junia, Julia, and Nereus' sister, who worked and traveled as missionaries in pairs with their husbands or brothers. He tells us that Prisca and her husband risked their lives to save his.” Pachomius later recommended monasticism for women also, and Ambrose complimented a nun, Paula, on her Hebrew. A few decades earlier, Helena, non-noble mother of Constantine, converted to Christianity after he became Emperor. She received abundant support as she traveled vigorously in the Holy Lands, including having a pagan temple knocked down near Calgary in search of the true cross. The cross is said to have been identified by a spiritual healing.
Faith healing has had perpetrators of fraud, but it is a fallacy to make that a standard for the phenomenon. For example, African-American Mattie Cummings gave unassuming filmed testimony in 1974. about being healed of deafness as a child at the 1906 interracial Azusa St. Revival. Moreover, psychosomatics has begun to receive even science´s particular supportive light. In California in 1957, “Mr. Wright” was suffering from apple-sized cancer tumors when he heard about a potential miracle drug, Krebiozen, and begged his doctor Philip West to administer it. Dr. West injected Wright on a Friday, and on Monday found his patient up and about laughing it up. The doctor recorded that the tumors had “melted like snowballs on a hot stove.” Reading that the drug was ineffective two months later, however, Mr. Wright suffered as his tumors quickly returned. Dr. West astutely said he had the drug´s “improved version,” but injected placebo water into his eager patient. Again, the tumors evaporated. Mr. Wright was vivacious for two more months until he read a conclusive report about the drug´s inviability. In two days, tragically, he died.
In fact, lab studies have been rigorously identifying minutiae related to placebos like pills and injections. Clinical accounts go further and identify the desirability of spiritual-religious, or transpersonal, resources, as they do at Massachussetts General Hospital´s Benson- Henry Institute. Harvard Medical School´s J.D. Rediger has recognized spiritual principles in so-called spontaneous remissions. There are also individually-driven efforts like Marlene Klepees´ vision-prayer-church sequenced healing from cerebral palsy registered at the Mayo Clinic, Bill Owen´s healing from liver failure by friends praying at his hospital bed, Louise Hay´s healing herself from cancer holistically based on pillow-hitting body psychotherapy and ministerial studies, and the Catholic Lourdes´ Medical Clinic.
Sacred lifestyle factors bridge various dimensions from secular personal effort to empowered transpersonal psychosomatics and faith healing building on spiritual-religious practices and beliefs. They show a qualitative perspective and relationship that addresses the modern need to reconnect the secular and the spiritual. Clarfying Mary´s reputation, immaculate or not, and Jefferson´s outright materialism recalls Jesus´ parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke. Jesus´ legacy as Savior continues in its God-given capacity to be chosen to heal damaged integrity. For one, redeemed shame includes solidarity. Anybody´s secular identity becomes anchored by such sacred spiritual involvement. If the renown of St. Helena is applied through wisdom to Lucretia Mott´s and Fannie Lou Hamer´s activist contemporaries, spiritual empowerment is facilitated. We can then recall America´s millions with inadequate access to healthcare, and support properly incentivized co-operatives and the congressional proposals for a single-payer system by not-for-profits like Healthcare-NOW!. Jesus in Mark described his followers accomplishing “recovery of the sick,” a sacred cause with many layers.