"Healing Where it Hurts"

If you had mystical experiences that stripped you of doubt

        about what you were doing with your life,

                mystical experiences that brought 

                        ecstatic moments into your day

                                and poured inspired prose into your journal,

                                        you probably wouldn’t want to give them up.

That is the dilemma that the cloistered nun must resolve

        in "Lying Awake,"

                a recent novel by Mark Salzman, 

                        and the decision is urgent.

Dangerous epileptic seizures are causing her mystical experiences.

 

Despite the medical situation in her brain,

        Sister John is reluctant to be cured.

"For three astonishing years she had lived and prayed

        from the inside of a kaleidoscope,"

                Salzman writes.

"Everything fit into a design of feeling,

        a pattern linking all souls and minds together.

She felt God's presence in the design,

        and nothing seemed out of place.

Every person was like a piece of glass in a giant rose window."

 

Her dilemma asks the question, what is healing, 

        if it takes away the experience 

                that makes life whole.

Sister John will need to look at the meaning of her vocation

        and the ordinary spirituality of her life

                if she relinquishes her ecstatic vision of God.

Perhaps it would be better to burn out

        in a blaze of enlightenment

                than languish in boredom.

The cure does not always heal.

 

In another recent book about neurological distress,

        author Anne Fadiman explores the clash 

                between western medicine

                        and a Hmong refugee family from Laos.

Her family views an epileptic child's life-threatening seizures

        as a form of possession.

"The spirit catches you and you fall down,"

        is how the Hmong people describe epilepsy.

According to Fadiman,

        the Hmong people are ambivalent about it.

 

"On the one hand," she writes,

        "it is acknowledged to be 

                a serious and potentially dangerous condition...

On the other hand, the Hmong consider [epilepsy]

        to be an illness of some distinction...

Hmong epileptics often become shamans.

Their seizures are thought to be evidence

        that they have the power to perceive things 

                other people cannot see,

                        as well as facilitating their entry into trances,

                                a prerequisite for their journeys

                                        into the realm of the unseen."

Fadiman's book chronicles the interaction 

        between the Hmong family

                and the medical community of Merced, California.

In a frustrating and complex failure of communication between them,

        the child suffers serious brain damage.

What might have been a beneficial treatment

        ultimately makes her condition worse.

"My child is lost because of those doctors!"

        exclaims the mother.

The cure does not heal.

 

The story ends with the family employing the services of a Hmong shaman

        to try to lure the child's soul 

                back from the spirit that caught it.

They gather around her chanting, 

"Come home, come home."

What healing is possible now

        rests entirely on how the little girl's soul fares

                in a world far removed from hospitals and doctors,

                        a world, according to Hmong belief,

                                in which everything is sacred.

 

These two unusual stories tell us that healing

        is not always the linear experience

                we tend to think it is.

We lose something,

        then we find our way.

We get hurt,

        then we get fixed.

We go astray,

        then we go to recovery.

Underlying this concept of healing

        is our expectation that wholeness is intermittent,

                a state we resume after various things happen to us,

                        and then we go back to normal.

 

Whenever something goes wrong in my life,

        I clean my house.

It's my way of invoking the gods –

        the house is clean, 

                come home, come home! –

                        to restore my life to order too.

I buzz around with Windex,

        do loads of laundry,

                sometimes even come close to trying to place the furniture 

                        at perfect right angles to each other,

                                or arranging all the books by color.

It's pathetic, 

        especially since I am already a fastidious housekeeper.

But I do it and I accept it,

        because I know it's my way 

                of simulating wholeness 

                        when I do not feel whole.

Not until wholeness returns,

        is real order is restored –

                inside, where it really counts.

 

This notion that whether we are whole or not

        comes and goes with the ups and downs of our lives

                is not all wrong.

It's just that it's not all there is to say 

        about the relationship between healing and wholeness.

Things don't just snap back into place

        as if some hurt never happened.

We can heal, 

        but we are not the same as we once were.

 

Still, even after a big loss, 

        we do eventually go on.

The process is as natural as the children's story I read earlier

        describes it:

                when mother bird dies,

                        father and baby eventually fly off together.

They do move on.

But they are never the same.

 

And sometimes we don't heal where it really hurts.

Sometimes we need to learn to live

        with brokenness,

                with disorder inside,

                        for which there is no cure,

                                there is only moving on.

We all know that we must do that in life,

        whether we must accept a disability 

                or a disappointment.

We don't heal from everything that happens to us.

But we can still be whole. 

                        

The cloistered nun, Sister John, 

        fears that healing will rob her of wholeness.

The family of the epileptic Hmong child 

        see her as whole despite her massive brain damage:

                in a world in which everything is sacred,

                        you can be whole if you heal

                                and whole if you do not.

They pray for healing,

        but her soul is already whole.

 

A friend of mine who is a college professor

        told me about a student of hers 

                who made a serious decision recently.

He has been deaf most of his life.

Then he learned that there is an operation

        he can undergo to restore some, if not all, 

                of his hearing.

He struggled with the decision.

His parents begged him to undergo the surgery.

Eventually he chose not to,

        because he felt he had too much to lose.

What made him feel whole

        was belonging to the deaf community.

 

The loss of that belonging

        was far more threatening 

                than the loss of his hearing ever had been.

Perhaps he'll change his mind some day.

It's difficult to imagine someone choosing

        never to listen to music,

                or to the sound of people's voices,

                        but easy to understand how much it means

                                to belong and to feel whole.

 

The cure does not always bring healing,

        and healing does not always bring wholeness.

Life is good when cures are discovered

        and healing follows hurt,

                but life also challenges us to seek wholeness

                        when the cure does not work                             

                                and the hurt cannot heal.

The challenge is to take a step back,

        look at ourselves

                and to see life in all its wholeness,

                        even with all that cannot be fixed,

                                or brought back just as it was.

Then we might discover that who we are

        does not consist of perfect health,

                or of everything happening just as we planned.

Who we are is whole just as we are –

        imperfect and unplanned, 

                just as we are.

 

Sister John, the cloistered nun who did not want to give up her seizures,

        must see her life differently

                once she is cured.

What had given her life an aura of wholeness –

        vivid insights and visions of God –

                had gone away with the seizures,

                        leaving her alone with her vocation 

                                and its daily doubts and challenges.    

In an exchange with her doctor,

        she tells him, "In religious life … 

                if you lose confidence in your personal experience,

                        it's hard to keep from doubting everything."

The doctor responds, saying, 

"That's true for everybody, isn't it?"

The exchange suggests that what she had taken for wholeness

        was not the real thing.

The real thing has more to do with her daily struggle

        with doubts and boredom,

                which the seizures had allowed her to escape.

 

"I nearly quit medicine during my first year of residency,"

        the doctor added,

                "because I realized I'd gotten into it

                        for the wrong reasons.

But here I still am, 

        and I'm glad I stuck with it."

Sister John could have related this confession to her life:

        perhaps entering the convent for the wrong reasons,

                and staying so that she can discover

                        what the real reasons are.

When she asks the doctor what kept him going, he laughs,

        "Finding out that everybody gets into medicine for the wrong reasons.

                It seems to come with the territory."

 

This casual exchange is what helps Sister John to see

        that the real healing in her life

                has nothing to do with the visions 

                        and the seizures.

It has to do – just as it does for everyone –

        with learning that she is whole

                even when she is not who she once was.

It is learning that she can not be defined by her illness,

        or its fluctuations,

                or its healing.

 

The healing that leads to wholeness in life

        is a process that embraces

                what is hurt and cannot be fixed,

                        what has changed and will never be the same.

It takes what hurts and holds us,

        just as we are,

                broken or fixed,

                        until we are ready to learn and to grow again.

Knowing this,

        we can heal;

                for life has already made us whole.

Sources:
"Lying Awake," by Mark Salzman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000)
"The Spirit Catches you and You Fall Down," by Anne Fadiman (New York: Farrar, Straus andGiroux, 1997)