Healing Is Never a Solo Performance

“Healing is never a solo performance.” This is the conclusion of Gavin Francis, citing psychotherapist Jerome Frank. It is also my most recent experience of the God in whom I do not fully believe.

About a year ago, I posted a Perspectives article about my struggles with belief. In the article, I admitted that, for the last ten years, I had been a Christian minister who mostly did not believe in God, though I had heard God’s voice or felt God’s presence at multiple times in my life, an experience that had hinted at healing.

Watching for God’s Presence

When I wrote the article, I was five months into a short-term position as an interim minister at a midsize, urban congregation of the former Protestant mainline. Because the sanctuary felt like it might be a “thin place,” I had begun spending time there on weekday mornings when the space was empty, and I discovered that when I watched for something luminous in that space, I saw things I couldn’t fully understand or explain. Some of the people in the church started to feel luminous as well—as if God was at work in them in ways I also couldn’t fully understand or explain. Because I was willing to be attentive to the possible presence of God in those people and that space, I found myself fully engaged in ongoing conversation with a living God in whom I still did not fully believe.

Back then, I had an idea of what this might mean—that the church should create more opportunities for one-on-one and small-group conversations based on honesty about our beliefs. That hasn’t happened yet, but we will soon start several spiritual direction groups.

What’s happened instead is that something dark in me has healed.

I have always kept myself separate from other people. I’m the smart, introverted, eldest daughter of two parents who were emotionally distant, and I can’t remember a time when I haven’t worn a mask, when I haven’t had to create a character in order to exist in the world. I’ve always hidden who I really am—partly to protect myself, partly because after a while I wasn’t sure anymore who the real me was, and partly because I truly thought that anyone who knew the “real me” would reject me. I thought this through the entirety of two marriages, a disconnectedness that I now deeply regret.

But in this congregation, in the context of the love I have experienced here, I’ve been able to air out an unmasked version of myself—someone who doesn’t have to be perfect, someone willing to take risks and try new things. The dark part of me, the “real me” that I’ve always thought I had to hide, has somehow blended with the more public me to create a new person who is both more vulnerable and more whole.

When I came to this church, I was not seeking to be healed. But once I noticed that something new might be possible here, I asked for help. I started praying, and even though I was mostly praying for the congregation and its sense of God’s purpose for it, and even though the words I kept hearing in my head were, “It’s not about you,” I think ultimately there was something here that was about me—the discovery that healing is not, in fact, a solo performance but instead something that happens within a community of people who are attentive to brokenness and hold space for return and repair.

Reconsidering God’s Agency

The problem, though, as Tim Soerens says in Everywhere You Look, is that “we live and breathe in a culture that has roundly rejected the idea of God’s agency in our everyday life.” It’s hard to look at the world we live in and see the presence of the active, loving God of Scripture, so I suspect that most of us have simply given up. We may see God in a beautiful sunset, but we rarely see signs of God in the activities of our day.

However, what I’ve discovered over the last 18 months is that I am constantly connected to something I call God, and this connection is a gift over which I do not have ultimate control. I can recognize it or not, I can stay open to it or not, I can celebrate it or not, but the connection is solid. I cannot break it. And as I’ve preached about my experience here—the story of my reengagement with this God in whom I do not fully believe and the healing I’ve found as a result—members have begun to see that this God in whom they also may not fully believe is active in their lives as well.

We can talk about the purpose of the church—the why, the what, the how—but what I most want my members to see is the antecedent to conversations about purpose—that this God that some of us may not fully believe in, and that none of us completely understands, is in our midst nevertheless and loving us forward. I think if we all “got” this, if we all kept our hearts open to this, if we all risked believing this, then the church would become the ultimate shared performance of healing—God-with-Us—in the healing of ourselves, our communities, and our world.