Sacramental stories – the recap.

You are listening to the GoHealth podcast. The GoHealth podcast seeks to explore stories of how people have found healing and how we can learn from them, from their stories of human flourishing – some ordinary, some extraordinary. I’m Gillian Straine and I run the Guild of Health and St Raphael.

Welcome to the final episode of season 1 of the GoHealth podcast.  

My name is the Revd Dr Gillian Straine and it has been my absolute privilege to host the GoHealth podcast and the conversations from season 1. Thank you for listening with us, we’ll be taking a brief break in August but will be back with season 2 in September so you won’t have to wait too long for new conversations and stories about health, healing and faith. Do make sure you’ve subscribed to the podcast to make sure you don’t miss when season 2 begins. 

But we thought in this episode we could take a listen back to some of the highlights from our conversations this first season.  

And what a season it has been, we’ve been to the mountain top with Richard Tiplady, under the Niagara Falls of grief with Lucyann Ashdown and drinking tea with Professor John Stackhouse. And all of the conversations throughout the season were recorded in the context of Covid, a theme that understandably surfaces in all of the episodes.  All the episodes can be listened to in full on our website gohealth.org.uk or wherever you get your podcasts.

On our website you will also find information about The GoHealth community – if you have enjoyed the podcast, you will love the community where we are committed to flourishing in the faith. SO what does that mean – well, you get a monthly bundle of resources to support your faith journey on a monthly theme. You will also get access to the learning to heal online learning course worth £50, plus reductions at all events and pile of other stuff on the website. More than this, and I feel this is the best bit, you join a group of people committed to making the world a better place, joined in hope and prayer, motivated by the idea that faith in God makes a tangible difference to our live, health and approach to difficult times. All this for just £4 per month which also helps us run the whole shebang. Visit www.gohealth.org.uk to find out more about the GoHealth community  

So back to this episode 

We begin by hearing again why we called this series ‘sacramental stories’ – it’s taken from my conversation with Wendy Lloyd and Graham Fender Allison in our pilot episode and where I also share my own story of healing. We’ll then hear about the hard yet healing process friend of the GoHealth community, Azariah France-Williams, went through when writing his important book Ghost Ship: institutional racism in the Church of England, and finally in this first section we’ll hear sculptor Peter Walker share some incredible stories about the healing power of art. 

Gillian Straine: And my experience has been that when stories of suffering and healing are told then healing happens, not only for the person who is telling the story but for those who are listening to it. Because sometimes when the hear the story of another person it really feels like we’re entering onto holy ground, having a moment of true grace. 

That moment of holiness is sometimes called the sacrament and one my favourite definitions of sacrament is this fancy word, but it’s an outward sign outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible grace. 

And I love this, this is this almost exactly describes what happens when we tell our stories, when we tell the inward and invisible stuff that we carry around with us all day, the stories of when it’s gone wrong, what happened, how it got better, our experience with the world. 

When we tell all that inward, secret stuff it changes becomes an outward and visible sign, not only of who we are but of God, and hearing this stuff., experiencing this stuff feels like experiencing God. 

My story is that I was diagnosed with advanced lymphatic cancer when I was 21. But actually the hardest bit was after I went into remission, because what I had realised at the time, the experience of facing a life threatening illness at a young age with all the suffering that that goes with in the psychological suffering of having to think about my own death. Social suffering of being isolated from friends and family, from my own body, you know which had let me down, had actually changed who I was at a really fundamental level. 

And when I went back to my old life, my old friends, my old patterns, I discovered I didn’t fit anymore and that the more I tried to shove myself back into my old life, I didn’t fit anymore. And the more I kept ramming myself trying to fit back in, the more I was hurting myself and I got very depressed and was probably acting into self destructive ways. So I realised that although my body might be better or there is no cancer anymore, I certainly was a long way from being healed. 

Simone Weil who was a French philosopher, she talks about suffering a multifaceted suffering. Suffering that is sort of social and psychological and physical and she called that affliction, and affliction is the type of suffering that I think the Christian faith can particularly help with. 

She says that affliction leaves a trace upon one soul. That’s what I realised that happened to me when I went through cancer.  It had left a trace upon my soul, and I had to go back and figure out what had happened, how it changed, through faith had found some healing to that type of affliction. Not a sticking plaster, not a bit of therapy to get over it, but I had found deeply that I was, I hadn’t been alone. I’d been with Jeff and God had been with me too through my suffering and I’d emerged out the other side. 

And that’s why I think the healing ministries is so much more than just inverted commas ‘helping people get better’.  It’s about helping them to find a purpose for life. That’s why we often slip into well-being language, which is just beauty and perfection. But actually Christian Healing Ministry knows just the fact that we’re all going to die at some point and actually what it’s all about. How to live well

Which I think we’ve all three of us are described as to live well. Realistically, given what we’ve been through and actually. 

Azariah France-Williams: One other thing for me is that I learnt when I was 35 that I’m dyslexic and dyspraxic and so as a neurodivergent I struggled when I first began writing this, but because I was trying to write it in the style and using the template that others who’d written on this sort of topic had before, which was something more academic, something perhaps more theoretical and I struggled to fit that template, which actually is, is the issue of the book. If you’re black and brown, you’re expected to fit a template of a well heeled white chap, generally you know and if you can fit that template, well you may get by, you’re never going to flourish because you always feel, there’ll always be the obvious difference there. 

But perhaps you can climb the class ladder enough to be able to to hold your own, but you never quite ever at home. 

All of that was in place. I want you to write a book that I would enjoy reading and book that I hoped would be accessible to people, so trying to avoid specialist language or trying to describe things so that the average reader will be able to engage with the thoughts and the ideas. I think that’s quite important that this is the story of a black person within a white institution. It could be a black doctor in a medical society, could be a black journalist. It could be a black academic in the university, you know, so I want the personal to be universal as well. 

In terms of my own healing I, I’m very grateful to to friends, as I began to write this book some friends and my wife feel quite nervous and quite worried about about this, but the truth is that I was suffering in silence anyway, I was suffering because of what I was going through and I have been silenced. I have been asked to to keep things to myself. 

I have been told you lots of content creation with no destination as in the example that you refer to and so time and time and time again I poured out my heart to those for whom had a level of pastoral care, and that simply wasn’t met. 

So with a good therapist that helped me through, and knowing that the book was coming, I engaged my therapist again. And so I’m back in therapy now because I knew I’d need it. So it was kind of pre-emptive therapy, not because it hit a crisis, but I thought it might hit one. 

Gillian Straine: Very wise. 

Azariah: And having some some great friends around so I can think of…there’s a chapter that never made the book where I went into detail describing situations, locations and people and their conversations and the…whatever the intention we have to read the impact as well as intention. So often people say I didn’t mean anything. You know you’ve been oversensitive, or what have you. But if the impact of our words triggers something very negative within somebody, we need to be aware of that and take responsibility for the things that we say. 

And so I went on a bit of a writer retreat at the home with some friends. I remember writing this chapter and and just sobbing as I wrote this and as I revisited the difficulties in some of the things that were said in the ways they were said. The tone in which they were used, I felt you know, so degraded and humiliated. And then when I spoke to my publisher about this chapter and and sent the publisher the chapters to have a look at the response was you know, probably this will be pulped because those in power will have the legal teams, they’ll have the the ability to to squash this and so we need to to rethink giving so specific examples as you have done. And so that made me go back to the drawing board and in fact I think the book became all the better for it because I had to delve beyond the personalities, the philosophies behind those who held those ideas. I had to go more to an archetypal level and begin to to have people who hopefully more people could draw, instead of looking at particular personality, they could get the sense of of what was going on. 

Peter Walker: So I do think when it comes to something like healing, I can think of a couple of examples, we did a project called Imagine Peace. It’s quite hard to explain how we do indoor Son-et-Lumiere, but essentially if you imagine the inside of a cathedral – the whole interior is lit, with multiple sound pieces going on and it’s really quite overwhelming at times. 

And the idea of Imagine Peace, the Dean in 2018 asked me to taken the soldiers home 100 years on. So we did a piece in the nave which was almost this journey from the battle field to wherever it might be…it was almost this journey through poppy petals blown around, doves flying and then almost this beautiful white sky emerging – just really, really quite moving.

One of the areas that I wanted to create, because I knew it would have a different emotion, was something around…Tracey Emin had done ‘The unmade bed’, it’s one of her most famous works, I actually think that is a really healing work. I think it is a healing work because she’s expressed her life through art. And, a lot of people don’t like it and I think that’s because it says something to you, it makes you…Van Gogh did his bed as well, that’s a really beautiful painting – the emptiness of his life is a bed and a chair. And also when you go to the Institution where he was for his health later on in his life, in Provenance, and you go and see that room he was in – even though those were different rooms, one was in his yellow house and the other in the institution, they are completely different rooms – there is just the sense that the bed quite an important element in life.

We did a made bed, which was before the chaos, and then next to that…you couldn’t sit on it, it was the most beautiful bed, just made with a table with two lights on, almost the most perfect bed you could go and sleep in. And then next to that there was a bed that was to do with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, we just let people sit on there and pick up pillows with a word on. Which were things like faith, hope, imagine, peace and a few others. And then behind it we had just a cloud – so it was just to create this dream space.

There was a chap who was working here on an icon for the cathedral, who came, and really always joyous, and he came and he sat on the bed and he cried. This is a story that one of the guides who was working there said, he came up to him and said actually, he was bombed when he was younger, he was in a bombing incident, and this is the first time it had opened it up for him and it reminded him.

And then we had people in their 70s and 80s saying ‘when I was a child I was in London and this is the first time I’ve been able to connect, just by sitting down in a cathedral on a bed.’ And I tell you what – the debates about whether I could put beds in a cathedral! What would people do, what’s going to happen.

And there was another lady who’d lost her husband three years before, and she sat on there with her two daughters. Smiling at first, picking up…and then she just broke, and she said ‘this is the first time I’ve cried, I didn’t cry at the funeral, I’ve not cried in front of my daughters’, and she just was thanking us and thanking the volunteers, this has opened the door.

And I think what people often get confused in, is that art can be more, and is more, than the picture that you have on the wall at home, or the picture that you see in the gallery or you see in Habitat or in the Supermarket on a print – art is a much broader subject that cuts into nearly everything that we do in daily life. And the practitioners of the art are not the crazy, bohemian, Parisian you know, living in the garrets necessarily that we think – that the world paints that picture of, the reality of art is actually – they are individuals who fall into a career because one, it’s natural to them and sometimes it’s worked at, but they are trying to express something from themselves to others. And I think if you are lucky enough to engage that in a place like a cathedral, or just in a white wall gallery you can open up healing experiences through that. It won’t necessarily be the intention of the work but it doesn’t mean…and if I can just share one more experience…my first ever exhibition in Cornwall where we were living for a while. I’ve got a piece called Icarus and it’s a bronze sculpture 30cms. That was my first exhibition – didn’t sell anything, everything was far to expensive and everyone goes to Cornwall to buy pictures of boats and landscapes and I’m doing mythological characters and some really quite dark, challenging art work. 

But we had this great private viewing and just then the curator came up to me and said will you just go and talk to the lady over there, she wants to talk about the piece of work. So I went over to talk to her, I was very shy then, I’d never have spoken like this. And she just turned round and said to me, ‘that piece of work, I want to tell you – you’re the only other person beyond my husband – it reminds me that I was abused as a child and I want to tell you that because now that I feel, by looking at that sculpture it’s let it go. And she said, ‘I’ve looked at it and it’s gone now – I just don’t feel the…’ and she was actually a really good friend of ours then for a while with her husband, while we lived down there.

People think an artist just wants to sell work, you do that because you need to live, actually, that will probably always stay with me because it was more important, that work actually allowed someone let a load go from their life and that is quite important.   

Gillian Straine: incredibly moving stories of how art can provide that space for healing experience…we’re so delighted to be partnering with Peter Walker in his ‘leaves of the trees’ exhibition that is travelling around the cathedrals of England (it is only England isn’t it?) this autumn and winter (peterwalker sculpture.com) . An exhibition to convey both the grief and the hope from the covid-19 pandemic. 

These next three episode extracts are from our conversation with Bishop Jan McFarlane, where she shares very honestly about her experience of having breast cancer, a number of you got in touch to share how helpful you’d found this episode either because of your own experience or that of a loved one. We’ll hear of Bishop Jan’s experience of being  anointed with oil for healing by her colleague. 

We’ll then hear a fascinating description of what Christian healing means to the former chair of the Guild of Health and St Raphael, Lucy-Ann Ashdown, this is taken the conversation where she shares profound insights from her painful and personal experience of childlessness, a conversation that is well worth listening to in full. 

And then we hear from the president of the Guild of Health and St.Raphael, Professor Jim McManus, on what he thinks Covid-19 has taught us and what opportunity it provides for the Church and the healing ministry. 

Bishop Jan McFarlane:

Well there was a week waiting for the results on the scan on the liver whether that was…that was just the very worst time of all of it. That was make or break, really.

Gillian Straine: And can you remember what helped during that period of profound liminality and waiting?

Bishop Jan: I’m a very strong introvert so I tend to kind of hold stuff in and process it internally rather than kind of go ‘bleah’…you know, and involve lots of other people.

I talked a lot to very close colleagues, I’d told family by then, journalling – writing it all down, how am I feeling about this? But just needing space, y’know work wise I just went underground, I was still working – I could do other things without interacting with people, I was alright on the computer. Because I just needed that headspace just to be coming to terms with it.

And hold on to – so what does it mean to be a priest who stands at funerals and who talks about the hope of life beyond death and resurrection. What does that mean to me when I’m faced with my own mortality?

And I felt like two people, there was the me who was very human, very scared, I remember saying to somebody – ‘I’m not actually frightened of dying because I do wholeheartedly believe that when we die we go home to be with God, but it’s too soon and I feel a bit like a kid who is playing out on a sunny evening and your mum is shouting you to come in to go to bed while all the other kids are keeping playing. It’s not that you don’t want to go home, it’s not that you don’t want to go to bed, it’s not that you don’t want a big hug from your mum – you just don’t want to do it just yet! And that’s how it felt really. It’s kind of y’know, we’re all going to die but it just feels a bit soon. I’m 50, I don’t want to die just yet. Too much that I still want to do.

One of the most profound things was sharing the news with my immediate colleagues at the beginning of a staff meeting and bless them, they were all men they didn’t quite want to talk about breasts. They were a bit squeamish about that but they just rallied round and were superb. They prayed for me and anointed me with oil, and I’m not – I’ve never really been a very sacramental Christian. You know, I’ve never bothered much with oils for healing and things like that. And if I’m being really honest, I think I let them do it because they wanted to do it, which was a big thing for me to be ministered to, but actually they prayed for me, for healing,  healing in the widest sense – death is the ultimate healing – but as, it was the Bishop of Thetford, and as he made the sign of the cross on my forehead and on my hands I was just overwhelmed with the most incredible sense of being prayed for and held by the church. Not just those Christians who were gathered around me, but by the church throughout the centuries, because you know it’s in the bible about praying for one another when you’re sick and anointing one another – and actually people have been doing this for 2000 years, so it was as if the church through the centuries was praying for me and as if the church across the world was also… you know…suddenly feeling part of this massive Christian Community, past and present and worldwide, and being held by them through the medium of this symbolic oil.

It was really really profound, and I remember for the rest of the day feeling like almost as if, where I’d been anointed, was burning,  it was almost burning, it was tingling. And at that point, combined with Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, the next day – and you know going into the Cathedral you have the ashes put on your forehead – ‘remember you are dust and to dust you will return.’

And I was like ‘yeah – you know – OK.’ So this kind of weird mix of being very human and on one level ‘I don’t want to die just yet’ and at the other level, this really sense of calm, of d’you know it will be OK no matter what, even if I die it will be OK.

Rev. Lucy Ann Ashdown

Well, it’s fascinating because I’ve I’m we’re doing this recording just after the wonderful lecture by Ruth Harvey that Dennis Duncan and in my in my early career I did think that I had a call to healing the healing ministry. And as I’ve got older, I’ve kind of let that go,  I think, partly, I just thought that feels a bit arrogant. But actually something about her talk reconnected me with that, and I think partly because when you work in the kind of paid health professions, it’s easy to think that you’re not part of healing. I don’t know why that is. That’s nuts, I know, but there you go. 

I think well, certainly for me, although I do believe in it and I saw it when I was younger that it can mean cure and it can. There can be miracles. I think it’s so much more subtle than that. Often it can be a relationship that’s been broken, becoming some way towards healing. It might be completely healed. It might be a bridge to healing it, maybe reconnecting with yourself. It may be a deep acceptance of where you are in your illness, in your parenting, in your health, and I suppose the word I like, biblically I like shalom, I like that kind of wellbeing, which for me is not the absence of illness or or suffering. I think it’s perfectly possible to have wellbeing, to have a deep sense of shalom, peace and value in the midst of immense suffering and that this segways  into another story, stories are great, aren’t they? 

I remember going to see a really lovely man in a carehome in Essex, and it was, it was amazing. All of the care staff were coming and going and telling their stories because he prayed for everybody in the care home. So I went to see him as an end of life visit, not imminent, but you know, kind of pending in the next few months and we had a chat about what was going on with him and then it was reciprocal. 

What can I pray for, for you? 

And I find that deeply challenging, you know, and I had to do the kind of shift in me, OK, do I just kind of like keep the professional boundary, and I thought that’s dishonoring. Now obviously I didn’t over disclose or anything like that, but it was obvious to me that this man was  expressing a calling and he was he was providing peace, healing, solace to those staff. It was, it was profound. 

And so I think there is something in the core of sense making, meaning making and purpose that can be deeply healing, and that doesn’t mean that you have to be fit and active and out there making it happen. It’s about kind of knowing deep in your being you know in for me that that you are loved valued. 

And and that can happen in a variety of settings can’t it, so it can obviously and does and needs to be the absence of illness for some people. Or certainly I mean you know, for example, cancer treatments these days. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? People are living so much longer. I mean, it doesn’t come without…it’s not necessarily without great anxiety or whatever but e have got so good at helping people to reach a different level of of life and living so I think it’s so multi layered and I think it’s tied up with creation as well. For me I suppose when I read what the Bible says about salvation it’s always about healing and it’s always all of it. 

It’s people, animals, plants, you know the rivers I can’t, I can’t separate them out and that’s why I love that awareness that I saw of of women saying, oh, you know what I’m going to feed my baby and how does that impact the planet? And what about other nations and other people having babies and those sort of [questions]. 

Gillian Straine: Yeah.  

Lucyann Ashdown: It’s almost like you know the mycelium. I don’t understand it much, but I love that image of the mycelium underneath the ground, sending messages and healing and it, for me, there’s something of that. 

Gillian Straine: It’s almost like a consciousness raising isn’t it, that you suddenly felt as part of creation of what you do as matter rather than an isolated self. 

 Lucyann Ashdown: Yes! 

Gillian Straine: We’re encouraged through lots of different ways to think of ourselves… 

Lucyann Ashdown: And I suppose there’s a sort of, you know, without wanting to get all esoteric. 

Gillian Straine: Perfect. 

Lucyann Ashdown: There’s mysticism in that because there’s something about recognising that there isn’t a dualism, we are one. We’re won with our beloved divine, we are one with one another, and the planet, and, you know, we have this Celtic phrase don’t we: thin places, and I suppose, birth and death 

You have a window where you where you can kind of feel that and you can, you can feel it close. 

Gillian Straine: Oh 

Lucyann Ashdown: Uhm, yeah, I can remember so doing postnatal visits and, and thinking, ah it’s closed now, the aperture is closed and also not getting…it’s challenging not getting hooked on that being open. It is what it is and it’s living that

Professor Jim McManus

I think currently, and this will probably change, that Covid is an impetus for us to rediscover the basic nature of mission which is about human wholeness, tut that has to be about the common good. And about the kind of biblical view, if you like of caring for the most vulnerable, including everybody and as well as giving everybody hope. 

Whether you choose that from Catholic social teaching or or the scriptures, it doesn’t really matter. I think there is a there is an invitation for us to go back to the Gospels and re look at the Gospels and see that the ministry of Jesus and the person of Jesus as making people whole and making wholeness and healing both at an individual level and at a societal level the front and center in our mission. 

And partly because we will come out of this with huge inequalities, the virus will have brought a wave of virus but it’s also brought with her mental ill health, financial challenges, inequality, racism. You know every difficulty and evil under the sun you could find has been at let loose by it, but it is also let loose light and glory and grace. 

And how do we use this as a kind of Kairos, moment and opportunity to renew the church? To kind of bring people hope in a real, tangible way? And that I think, means something about how we model basic Christian communities around caring for and loving and helping people. 

It also means I think we need to revisit what we mean by sanctification, you know the idea that as Christians you can’t be divorced from the church so and how do we reach out to everybody that we as a church have alienated? And coming at the end of the kind of scandals around child abuse and various other things and abuse of power, I wonder if it’s an invitation for us for a more humble church to kind of go back in and bring people back out of the kind of mindset of individualism and not worrying about others, into much more – we’re in this together. 

Gillian Straine: In these last three episode extracts we return to the dramatic rescue from a fall in the Lake District by Rev. Dr. Richard Tiplady, director of context based ministry training for the Scottish Episcopal Church,  and of the agency found in taking ownership of his healing and recovery. 

Keeping with a hiking theme we share helpful insights from theologian Professor John Stackhouse on the legacy and learnings from Covid-19 and lockdown. 

And finally we hear an expansive understanding of what the Christian Healing Ministry is from Rev. Elizabeth Baxter, executive director of Holy Rood House in Thirsk, Yorkshire. 

Rev. Dr Richard Tiplady

Very early on, both my wife and I realized that the ‘what if’ question wasn’t really affecting us, it wasn’t really hitting us at all. It was almost as if for both of us our minds are going actually there is enough to deal with here, you don’t need to deal with the what if – it didn’t happen therefore, let’s not go there. 

And I did have a rather interesting experience that I’ve not really reflected on much other than to notice, but while I was sitting there before anyone else had got to me, once I had put the call into mountain rescue I had this tremendous sense of being protected. I remember thinking I feel protected and I don’t know what by and I’m not going to delve into that, I’m just I’m just going to note it. But yeah, I just it’s quite important I don’t try to unpack that, it’s just I knew that there was a strong sense. 

The what if seems to horrify everyone else I mean, the mountain rescue guys you know, some of them are just…I mean they were surprised to find someone like sitting up talking when they got to me. You know, it is the, the location is notorious for fatal accidents. There was another serious accident in the same location in the autumn where three guys fell part way down the precipice that I stopped just short off. So it is a notoriously dangerous place, but that rather interestingly that’s never, never really come round. It’s really..I’m not consciously trying to deny it. It’s almost like the mind has gone ‘didn’t matter, didn’t happen.’ 

Gillian: That’s right. 

Richard: And I think I’m quite a pragmatic individual and I think from the very first moment and through all my recovery, for want of a better word, this has been a project. What do I need to do to try and help myself get better? From very first minute it was well, I need to get rescued. I need to get help, you know. I need to take some painkillers on the mountain, I need to get into survival bag. I need to do my physio…I used to have an amazing head for heights, I could stand next to a 2000 foot drop on the Aonach Eagach ridge in Glencoe and it didn’t frighten me at all I was just like, well, that’s a big drop. Now I’ve got a bit of a…it’s taken a while to get the head for heights back let’s put it that way now. I think that’s the brain going…’you are stupid get away from that edge. You know that’s a good survival mechanism, you know having a fear of heights is a good thing.  

Well, I’ve heard before there’s the construct of type A and type B personalities you know, and sort of more driven versus the more calm and relaxed type. I remember reading once that type A personality, which I think I probably am, are more likely to have heart attacks, but if they have heart attacks are much more likely to recover from them and I think that’s me. I am in a sense…to the extent that one can, I took control of my own healing.  

I wanted to know what happened to me. John who I was with filmed a lot of the rescue and came to visit me in hospital and showed me the film and the photographs. So my processing of what happened started very quickly. And I’ve read a lot about mountain survival since then, and I’ve engaged a lot with the sort of physio process, I’ve tried to take ownership as it were of my recovery process and that’s given me quite a sense of agency and control. But I’ve also been very happy to talk about it. There was an enormous amount of media interest because of the nature of the accident. I mean, I was within a few days I was in the times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail. I was interviewed by BBC Scotland. I’ve been on two TV programs about it and I decided that it would be good to talk about it for my…in a sense engage with that for my own purposes. 

Because I needed, I knew it would be good to process it and talk about it and yes, sort of cement well what happened really. And I wrote it all up for myself even in hospital. I started writing notes on my phone to capture my learning, my experience and before memory faded. What happened? Why did it happen? What did I do right? What did I do wrong? What can I learn from this? So taking ownership of the situation, a bit like…as you know, a few years ago, when, as I say, I developed this chronic pain condition. Having access to academic journals, I was reading all sorts of academic articles about my condition that actually helped me enormously and also helped my doctor as I went to them and said, look, this article really describes what I’m experiencing, this one doesn’t, so this was quite helpful and he was quite happy to engage with that, so taking ownership I think was, was important. 

And you mentioned the people dimension as well, I mean, that in a way, the ordinariness of the helicopter ride and just the chat was remarkably healing actually because it just was like, no – life is going to go on here. The same with the Mountain Rescue guys, when they arrived – uterlly non judgmental “You idiot what have you done” – none of that, caring practical. One of them told me the reason he was in Mountain Rescue was that he’d been rescued himself, So it was like, you know we’re all in this together, we’re not judging you. 

Prof. John Stackhouse

I certainly am not a mental health expert, so I can only speak as a layperson in this regard, but it strikes me that in our own era, particularly, and this is going to take a sideways for a moment, the era of Prison Reform there is an increasing awareness of just how punitive solitary confinement, as we call it here is, when a prisoner, usually because he’s misbehaved or occasion because he’s in danger, is isolated from the so called general population of prisoners and is placed by himself or herself in a single cell. 

In the Christian history, this was understood to be something so difficult that only the most spiritual of people, the monks could be locked away in a cell and expect not to lose their minds. This was seen as an extreme form of personal discipline, and it is increasingly seen as an extreme form of punishment in the prison system. 

So for us to lockdown society willie-nilly…I I really have almost never heard a public health official connect solitary confinement with what they’re expecting of us here, so it seems to be the psychological experts need to talk to each other about this because there’s something…I’m afraid something really serious that’s going on now. That’s been going on now for months, a day or two is one thing, but even a week or two in solitaries, is apparently a significant sort of punishment. How about months on end? 

At the same time, the great message, I think of the Christian Gospel as one traces the good news through the Bible, is that God becomes closer and closer to us as the Bible opens. God meets Abraham and occasionally meets Abraham or Abraham at from time to time through his very long life. And then God descends to actually dwell with the nation of Israel in a travelling tent as Israel tents its way from Egypt into the promised land and then God dwells permanently, so to speak, in the temple that Solomon puts up and everybody can go see God go visit God in his house, so to speak. There’s the sense in which he is right there, even though of course the Israelites understood that God was also in heaven and also above the whole world. But in the New Testament we see God becoming a human being and living among us in Jesus and that’s pretty great coz now you can actually see God and listen to God and watch God walk and talk and do things. But then Jesus says to his disciples – I’m going away and something even better is going to happen and what happens is that Jesus goes to heaven where he rules the world and he sends the Holy Spirit of God to literally dwell within us. And as one of my friends likes to say, you can’t get closer than in. 

God literally comes to reside within every believer, so there is a sense, and yes, that God seems far away, probably from the general population. But there is also a wonderful message in Christianity that God can be right there right in your chest, so to speak, right there in your heart and wants to walk with you and the Christian way of life essentially as the Apostle Paul says, is to keep in step with the spirit as if you and the Holy Spirit are hiking friends, as if you’re walking chums. And it doesn’t mean anything particularly disparaging our silly. It’s more like, you know, he’s the senior partner for sure, but he’s setting the pace, he’s setting the direction you can know where to go and where to stop because the Holy Spirit walks with you. This, to me, is transformative vision of what it’s like to live in the world on our way to where we’re going. 

Gillian 

D’you know I love the way you describe that hiking partner and kind of the indwelling of the Spirit, 

Rev. Elizabeth Baxter

It seems to me you’re saying that you work with all these different people. And you, irrespective almost of what they have been through, you help them find themselves again. So, is Christian healing ministry about helping people find themselves?

Elizabeth Baxter: I think it’s part of that is partly what it is, Gillian, but it’s much bigger than that, because the Christian healing Ministry has to address the unjust issues of our world. Um, so it includes um how we work with the environment, how we work with food and what, what prayer is? You know, and what our theology is, it’s all those things, because it’s far bigger and we can make God very small with the Christian healing ministry if we’re not careful. We seek very…we work hard not to do that at Holy Rood House because it’s all encompassing and I think the Christian Healing Ministry is what we live and move and have our being in. Um, in the sense of the quote from book of acts, but I think it’s far more than just individuals finding themselves because just ourself – it’s not enough, we need community, we need others. So although we we do need to give ourselves permission to be selfish and say actually I need time at Holyrood House, it’s selfish, someone else has got to look after my mother, I can’t do it anymore, that’s selfish. That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. But actually we need one another, so I couldn’t do the Christian Healing ministry on my own part of a community. We do it together, but we’re not just part of that community. You know we linked up with the Guild for example, our communities are wider than that with part of the local community of Thirsk. There are lots of people doing wonderful things in Thirsk for others, and we have links and connections with part of the prayer life of other churches around here and so on. But not just that, it’s also people who we have people working with us and as volunteers here who are not, they wouldn’t necessarily come to the Chapel for a service, that’s not where they are, but they connect with our spiritual ethos. They recognise something of the holism, the holistic approach, what the healing ministry is. They also recognised that how we understand the Christian faith is perhaps broader and more open and liberating in many ways than some people might find in the institutional church. In some parts of the institutional church And I think we therefore have a greater responsibility to keep looking and keep checking keep those balances of what, what is theology? How do we understand God? What do we mean by healing? The questions you are asking, have to be asked the question so far more important than the answers, because the questions are part of a process, aren’t they? Which is what Christian healing is, it’s always a process there. I’ve given you a strap line. Christian healing is always a process and always involved with justice.

And that’s it, our first season of the GoHealth Podcast. It has been such a privilege to listen to so many stories and insights of healing and wellbeing particularly during this time of a global pandemic.  

We hope the podcast has given you insights, inspiration and maybe even helped you reflect on your own sacramental stories of health and healing. We’d love to hear from you via the GoHealth community about what you’ve found most helpful and what you’d like to hear more about or who you might like to hear from in a future episode. 

Thank you so much for listening and to all who took the time to have a conversation with me. 

We’re super excited to get going with season 2 in September and have some very honest and helpful conversations already recorded. We’ll be covering all sorts of topics from terminal illness to healing the planet and hearing from medical practitioners, theologians, patients, writers and artists from across the spectrum of health, healing and faith. Don’t forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss an episode. 

Thanks to Lofter for sharing their theme music with us for this series and I want to say a personal thank you to Wendy Lloyd who edits and produces this podcast. 

Finally, do check out The GoHealth community on our website www.gohealth.org.uk – we would love to welcome you because together, in Christ, we flourish.