Healing vs Curing

The following article was shared with me by one of the men in my church.  It is found on the Wacotrib.com website and was written by Michael Attas on February 9, 2010.  It was so powerful I wanted to share it with you.

The Rev. John Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest and a particle physicist in Cambridge, England.

Along with Steven Hawking, he is considered one of the leading nuclear scientists in the 20th century.

A leading voice in the efforts to reconcile science and religion, I heard him tell a powerful story 15 years ago.

He recounted the tale of a close colleague at Cambridge who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

His friend learned that he had six months or less to live. And when shared this devastating news, he asked friends and colleagues to pray for his healing.

And they did.

They gathered faithfully every morning and prayed for him.

Six months later, he died.

At his funeral, his wife called Polkinghorne aside and said what may be the most powerful and haunting words in medicine:

“I want you to know,” she said, “that my husband died healed.”

The patient’s wife knew intuitively that healing and curing are not at all the same.

Yet people use them interchangeably, resulting in a morass of misunderstanding and pain for numerous patients.

Curing is about biology. Healing is about something fundamentally different.

To understand this concept, we must look to the origins of the words “to heal.”

One is haelen — an Old English word. It means to bring fragments back to wholeness; to restore.

Another origin is Latin: salvus, the root for salvation. It has nothing to do with cure.

But it has everything to do with our journey to completion, our home in the fullness of creation.

And that is what the widow of Polkinghorne’s colleague knew — that the parts of her husband’s life that were broken, wounded or incomplete had been made whole again.

He was not cured. The biology of the disease took its inevitable course, as it often does.

Yet it did not have the final say.

In his journey toward death, he made peace with colleagues and family.

So what does that mean to us? What does it mean when prayers for healing are met with a profound silence?

Could it be that we have misunderstood the nature of healing and the power of prayer?

Too often we offer our prayers to God as if he were some sort of cosmic Santa Claus. So when they are not answered, we think there is something wrong:

“I’m a sinner; God is punishing me for something.”

“I’m not good enough to be healed.”

I have a whole host of sayings like this I call BBT: bad bedside theology.

Unfortunately, they color not only our expectations of the health care system but also shake our faith.

The effectiveness of prayer cannot be measured by a sort of celestial batting average: Bat more than .330 and you’ve had a good prayer season.

It is not about winning and losing and the number of prayer requests that are granted.

It is about transformation from brokenness to wholeness.

It is about the mystery of healing and the power of moving into a relationship with the divine.

It is always about healing and rarely about curing.

By understanding this crucial difference, it liberates both our prayer life as well as our expectations of our health care system to engage the journey of suffering in a new way.

Suffering then becomes not something that defines us or limits us, but a crucible that heals us and moves us back into relationship with God as well as those closest to us.

We say yes to life, even in the midst of the dark valley of the shadow of death.

Dr. Michael Attas is a local physician, medical humanities professor and Episcopal priest. Contact him at Michael_Attas@baylor.edu.