Opening Meditation for the All Saints Collingwood Après Ski services for 2026, by Father Michael.
If you joined our series last year, you may remember that the theme of our readings and meditations was on the Holy Family. Tonight as part of this year’s Après Ski series we begin a series of readings and meditations on the theme of healing and Christian faith. I’ve asked our clergy team to offer their thoughts and experiences on healing, and I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say because I am very much not an expert on the subject, and, truth be told, I think that when it comes to healing I am like the man who tells Jesus “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief” (Mk 9:24).
I’ve had lots of experience with illness and with dying, as part of my training and work as a priest and as part of my own life history. I’ve had no training in healing prayer, and while I’ve met a few people who’ve told me that God has healed their medical conditions, I’ve never been sure how to take these statements. I believe that they believe they’ve been healed, but part of my rational, sceptical brain can’t help thinking that their stories are more belief than fact.
Where does this scepticism come from? Partly it comes from what we call the secular, the whole weight of science, medicine, and technology that seems to drive God out of the world and into the corners of our personal belief. After all, we believe in MRI machines, chemotherapy, psychotherapy, and all the other resources that promise us longer and better lives. At the same time we have the whole wellness industry, that urges us to improve our bodies and our wellbeing through healthy diets and healthy habits. None of these forces leave much room for God to act in our lives.
And yet, as we shall hear in the readings chosen for this series, Jewish and Christian scripture speaks with one voice to say that God can heal and wants to heal. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus gives his disciples “power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal” (Lk 9:1-2). I think many of us, myself included, interpret this broadly, so that healing the world and proclaiming the kingdom of God can be our outreach, our food ministries, our hospitality to strangers and to the lonely. And indeed these are worthwhile things to do, they are part of our calling as followers of Jesus, but God wants to do more than that, God wants to heal, and heal through us.
Last fall, Rev. Amy led a few of us through a remarkable book by an Avery Brooke, an Anglican layperson. She describes how a dozen retired women met regularly in Brooke’s Conneticut parish to learn about spiritual healing. Over time, as they prayed and laid hands on others, remarkable things happened: hands grew “hot as radiators” and “small physical, psychological, and spiritual healings were occuring”.
As Brooke described it, they learned that making “room for God … is at the crux of healing. It is not our compassion that heals, it is God’s compassion. It is not our words of prayer that heal, it is God using our words and hands and the energy flowing through us”.
I found Brooke’s advice very encouraging, because I think my disbelief is because my own ego, with all it’s learning and scpeticism and my pride in my sophistication can get in the way of God’s work. We all know that there is a time to live and time to die, and that these times, like our souls, are in God’s hands, but what if there is also a time to be healed?
My hope for this series is that we will learn to more deeply appreciate some of the good things that we already do here, like the ministry of annointing, but that we will make room for God to do more healing in the midst of us, and through us.
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