Soul-Sized Healing
HEALERS are not all created equal. In The Wounded Healer, his 99 page book published first in 1972 and reprinted countless times since then, the Dutch priest-psychologist Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) dismantled some myths we nurtured about healers. After the demolition, he offered a profile of an authentic healer that changed the way many of us thought about the subject forever after. Nouwen exposed the fallacy of the healer as the one who cures. In fact, the one who offers the quick fix or rapid remedy is the most shameful poseur because her ego is out of control and her bravado elicits false hope from the most vulnerable. Nouwen wrote (and spoke) about the difference between caring and curing and placed the true healer alongside those who care. With profound respect for modern medicine (Nouwen’s father is a retired physician in Holland), he understood the limits of the belief in cure that too often promises to take away the pain by making it all better.
A superb diagnostician, Nouwen understood that the fundamental diseases afflicting and often paralyzing us were not the kind that could be detected in stress tests or managed through angioplasty or bypass surgery. He knew about a heart problem even more acute than any detectable by EKG machines because it threatened the spirit as well as the body, and not only the individual but society. He identified its early stages in rootlessness, fatherlessness and convulsiveness in the younger generations that exploded into full blown loneliness and despair with age. Whatever other ailments trouble – migraines, back aches, intestinal turmoil (all, incidentally, currently reported at record highs in the U.S.), Nouwen’s flawless intuition bumped him back to square one and illnesses of the culture that seep into our blood streams and stand in need of nothing less than the balm of Gilead.
Who heals these soul-sized ailments? What kind of a healer is up to the task? For Nouwen, it had to be a healer whose own woundedness allowed her an honest look at her own exhaustion, confusion and mortality. She would need to witness to the story of her own powerlessness alongside the powerlessness of Jesus at Gethsemane and Calvary and find the strength in that intersection to live by Gospel hope rather than by her own bootstraps. What’s missing from this picture is the healer with all the answers, the healer who pulls her act together so seamlessly that we cannot detect even the hint of an unravelled hemline. Nouwen dismisses such a healer as incredible and ineffective and so distant from the human condition that she has nothing to offer anyone, beginning with herself.
Still the wounded healer has his problems. He needs to attend to his own wounds but at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others. He does this by living through the struggle and pain and dying that are all part of what it means to be human, rather than by yielding to the temptation to distract himself and others from loss and grief and even from death by denying the inevitability of these things. “Healing doesn’t mean taking away the pain but rather understanding it so that we do not have to run away but rather accept it as an expression of the basic human condition.” What the true healer does is to relativize the power of the inevitables, and to mirror a rootedness in Christ whose presence gives just the amount of light we need as we cringe in dark corners too scared to budge.
A favorite image for Nouwen in describing healers and healings is hospitality. He based the virtue of hospitality on a hunch “that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveler.” The traveler he has in mind is waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to open his life or her home to the stranger. The host does exactly that. He pushes aside his personal agenda, his full life, and even the woundedness that certifies him as a bona fide human person, and he pays attention to the visitor. He gets out of the way so the stranger can come, will come and will stay on his own terms just as he is. The host creates a fear-free environment where the unexpected visitor can feel at home, touch base with the real and taste kindness.
Safely surrounded by compassion and human warmth, anything can happen to a tired traveler – enlightenment, acceptance, forgiveness, healing.
Especially healing.
