daily life as life goes on . . .

Academics and practitioners are exploring the new world of COVID-19.  One of those explorations is whether healing can be done at a distance.  This is a science based discussion about ehealthcare.  Can conference meetings, data gathering and other health diagnoses be legitimate?

My mind went to Christian healing at a distance.  Is prayer/faith transmitted over a distance (virtually) able to heal the sick?  Do we need to be in the physical presence of someone to see them healed?  How do we see healing in Jesus’ name working?

My denomination has a notorious approach to healing.  James 5 (in the Bible) talks of the in-person approach – along with many other biblical passages.  We have gleaned from those narratives a sense of how Christian healing works – the actual in-person practises that promote healing.

We also play well with prayer requests for healing.  Again, there has been a long history of this approach right back to the beginning of the early Christian church.

And so, we are ready for a pandemic. 

Or are we?   A pandemic pushes us to re-examine how much we believe in healing at a distance.

Do we really understand how our “prayer” diagnosis for healing works?  Can we rightly pray healing in Jesus’ name and know with certainty that there is healing taking place – even if we never meet someone?  How do we monitor healing that happens virtually? 

Here is a thought . . .  

People truly shaped in and by prayer (the ultimate virtual conference meeting and virtual diagnosis center) may be our leaders in regaining a healthy sense of healing at a distance!

I’ve just finished auditing three online post-secondary courses in the past two weeks.  Which really means I listened to around 120 videos (each about 10-15 minutes long).

All three courses were on history, basically covering from 0 AD through 2013 AD.

What a quick reminder of the place of the “people” in history.  We seek for power, wealth, and wisdom in deadly cycles.  We seem to affirm that to kill off our opponents will bring purity.  We act as though we are God.  That doesn’t work well.

And somehow in the battles and the reigns of kings and kingdoms, we see that old phrase arise – “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  And then that next phrase, “take heed lest you fall.”

And somewhere in the midst of “reading” all this history, I catch that glimpse when I look to the periphery, that there is a God – a “beyond us” being.  Who judges, and yet loves – who knows all, and yet gives free will – who controls all, and yet hears pleadings.

I receive a daily reminder of events in Christian History over the centuries.  Today, Easter Sunday of 2020, had the following entry. 

April 12, 1944: The National Religious Broadcasters Association is founded in Columbus, Ohio, in order to represent and build the credibility of Evangelical Christian broadcasters after a set of regulations, proposed by the Federal Council of Churches, banned paid religious programming and limited broadcast personalities to denominationally approved individuals, effectively removing Evangelicals from the airwaves.

I wonder how the message of Christ resurrection would have been published in Jesus’ day?  Who would have published the headlines?  What would have been said? 

“He is risen.” 

How would this have been written – according to women, to soldiers, to disciples, to religious leaders, to the ordinary person?

Perhaps I’m asking too much.  As a person trained in archives, I know that documents don’t always survive.  The question then is whether the documents we do have are reliable.  I recognize that they may contain a bias.  But to the best of the author’s ability, is this reporting or just wishing?

Without turning this into a full-blown research paper, I go with what is found in the Bible.  Reliable and proven over the centuries through word and deed.

He is risen.  He is risen indeed.

As I was writing this post, I received word that a friend of mine had just died of a heart attack.  The post seemed to make all the more sense!  Here is what I had written.

A best seller made the way around Europe – called the “Ars Moriendi”.  The date was around 1415 and was in part inspired by the Black death (the Bubonic Plague) of 60 years earlier.

The Art of Dying (Ars Moriendi) was read by a population that had experienced a pandemic of huge proportions.  The text was put together by the Catholic Church to help Christians address their own deaths.

In this last month we have become a society that needs to consider our own deaths outside of scientifically (psychologically, socially, medically, mathematically) proposed approaches.  In 2015 a book examining the idea of the Ars Moriendi was published.  The authours wrote an academic tome examining where we are at in the 21st Century – how we have moved from art to technology/scientism in our approach to death.  [Lydia S. Dugdale, editor.  Dying in the twenty-first century:  toward a new ethical framework for the art of dying well. MIT Press, 2015]. 

While I have not read the enitre text, here is a part of Dugdale’s text that describes the original “Ars Moriendi” from the 1400’s.

“These books emphasize that a Christian can prepare for a good death by leading a repentant and righteous life.  They argue that the dying faithful should not fear death, since God is in control of every moment including death itself.  The texts warn against temptations to unbelief, despair, impatience, pride and avarice and lead the dying through a series of questions for reaffirming belief and receiving consolation. 

The Ars Moiendi texts also prescribe specific practices and prayers that might be performed by attendants on behalf of the dying – activities that would , in turn, encourage them to prepare for their own deaths”

I wonder if it is time to write another book on the “ART” of dying versus the many texts we have on the “TECHNOLOGY” of dying?