Caring, Curing and the Role of Healing in Spiritual Direction

At some point in our SD ministry, we will encounter these requests and assumptions, and should be ready to discern how to respond. This post is only a brief introduction to compassionate, thoughtful responses to questions like these. Ultimately, we must each determine for ourselves how God would have us engage in this conversation.

Disability as Faithlessness
“I have prayed and prayed that God cure my cancer, but my faith just doesn’t
seem strong enough. The tumor has grown.”

In my first blog on ableism, I discussed how damaging it is for people with illness and disability to hear from others or believe about themselves that their illness or disability is their fault, through sin or faithlessness. These ideas need to be brought to the surface gently and compassionately with the reminders that our God loves us unconditionally, and while She is our constant source of comfort and companionship throughout our human lives, She is not the instigator of life challenges. Life seems to
happen independently of one’s prayer life or history. Blaming oneself for a disability only adds unnecessary shame, and despair to a challenging situation.

Caring, Healing
 “Jesus healed Jairus’ daughter, could you please pray that He cure my sister’s paralysis?”

In circumstances like this one, we need to carefully discern what our role is in the SD process and speak with honesty and integrity—whatever form that takes. We can be guided here by two understandings of how to enter this conversation: we can enter through the lens of caring, and we can enter through the lens of healing—and they are related because caring heals.

As Susan Phillips beautifully points out, spiritual directors are called to care in a world
focused on “cure.” 1

While science, reason, and democratic legislation have carried us far in addressing differences, an orientation toward cure has eclipsed the place of care. The practice of spiritual direction lies in the domain of care. It is a practice that involves creative, imaginative skill guided by ethical and theological consideration within a community of discourse, discipline, and discernment. It is an art of
serving rather than fixing….(167) She advises us that the act of caring itself is built on relationship and the degree to which we are in tune with our directees—this comes from attention, fluency in the language of the person with the disability, responsibility, and compassion. Caring, in spiritual direction, is a foundational process of “healing.” As spiritual directors, we are called to care and not cure. It is the first posture that contributes to “healing.”

My Own Demand for a Cure

When I was first diagnosed with mental illness, 30 years ago, I spent a week in the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital. All I could pray for during that week was that God would miraculously take this huge burden from me—“God, cure me of this, instantaneously! I know you could if you just WOULD--like you cured the guy with a Legion of demons—you said the Word and the evil spirits left him.” (Mk 5:1-20.) And God did not
do this. And has not done this in subsequent relapses of depression and anxiety. Like the Apostle Paul, my disability remained even after fervent petitioning (see 2 Corinthians 12:7-9). What I have gotten instead from God was the process of “healing.”

Once I stopped demanding that the only thing that would satisfy me was an absolute cure, I could begin to feel the multiple ways God was weaving together my healing. Today, healing looks like this: a wonderful, supportive psychiatrist who will hold hope for me when I have none, a compassionate, patient, faithful spiritual director who can point out God’s love even in the bleakest time, a bounty of amazing friends who love me and support me, medication, exercise in nature regularly, a good, healthy diet a spouse who
has stayed by me and loved me through 30 years of relapse and recovery, poetry, art, a sense of humor and so much more. This is the process I hope to be a part of in someone else’s journey with disability and disease. I hope that I will be part of the life-weaving of healing threads in someone’s life to share their burden with them, though they might, like me, fervently pray that the “cup might be passed” from them (Matthew 26:39). I hope that eventually, I can offer the kind of grace to others in pain that has
been showered on me in such abundance. I am grateful to God for my healing.

Conclusion
As spiritual directors, I think we need to give thought to caring, curing, and healing.
What people want and what they might receive can be two different things. So, we ask
ourselves, “Where is God in this response to prayer?” Knowing that our responsibility is

to sit with a person struggling with disability or illness reduces the idea that we need to
be able to do something more than accompany others who hurt. From my own
experience, that companionship has been life-giving, though I am not “cured.”

~Emily Askew, PhD, second-year student in WTC's School of Spiritual Direction. 

Missed part 1 or part 2 of Emily's blog posts? Read them here:

When “Amazing Grace” Isn’t So Sweet: Uncovering Ableism Part 1

Ableism and Inspiration Porn Part 2

1 Susan Phillips, 178.