CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
After Maggie explained to me how she was crippled from a fall, and had to be on oxygen all the time for COPD, I told her I would pray for her, and began to explain what NOT to expect from my intercessions, for, although we have known each other for 60 years, from when I officiated at her wedding to my school friend, Dave, we don’t know each other well, and I didn’t want her to think I was promising some sort of magic. But she waved me off, as much as one can wave off a do-gooder on the telephone. “I don’t care about that,” she said. “It just makes me happy when people tell me they’re praying for me.”
I think there is much more to intercessory prayer, but that part is always there, if we know people are praying for us: we are not alone in our problems and misery. We can take any pain much better if we know we are not going it alone.
I mentioned in the column of 8-29-21 the colleague group of The Academy of Parish Clergy in the Quad Cities, that cluster in IL and IA across the Mississippi River. One of the members was a Roman Catholic priest, Marv Mottet, the social action ministry director for the Davenport Diocese. As we shared our stories, Marv told about his cancer.
He was in his 40s, and the cancer got worse and worse. The doctors said there was nothing they could do, until it got bad enough, and then they could send him to M.D. Anderson in Houston, where they could use an untried therapy on hopeless patients. His strength declined so much that he was appointed to hear the confessions of a convent of cloistered nuns, since that was not strenuous, at all. There Sister Catherine told him that she would do nothing but pray for him until he was cured. He thought it was sweet but irrelevant. The cancer kept getting worse.
Finally, he was bad enough to go to M.D. Anderson. They did the intake tests and the doctor called him in. “Father Mottet, why are you here? We can find no cancer in you at all.”
He was stunned. “I was walking the sidewalk outside the hospital, unable to grasp it, when I suddenly realized that in the liturgical calendar, it was St. Catherine’s day.”
That story sustained me when, 15 years later, I got cancer. I did not know Sister Catherine, but I had lots of sisters and brothers in the faith who prayed for me. I was not alone.
Some people scoff at such stories. I mean, what could prayer have to do with it? “Spontaneous healing” we call it when we can’t understand it, as though that answers, and dismisses, the question of the spiritual dimension of healing. But it’s a given now that there is a spiritual element to all of human life, including healing, and that intercessory prayer has a part in that.
When I was doing Clinical Pastoral Education with David Belgum at the U of IA hospital, Larry Den Besten was Chief of Surgery. In those days, patients spent the night before surgery in the hospital. Larry called on each one the evening before their operation and prayed with them. The nurses said, “Most of them, they could home right then. They didn’t even need the surgery anymore.”
But, some protest, often people pray for healing and it doesn’t happen. Well, of course not. We also use chemo and surgery, and often they don’t produce healing, either, but we don’t stop using them because they are not 100% effective.
No cure lasts forever. Everybody dies. Even Marv Mottet died, in 2016, at the age of 86. Indeed, death is the final cure.
We probably should not use “healing” and “cure” interchangeably, the way we usually do, the way I already have in this column, for there is a difference between cure and healing. I think it is Bernie Siegel who says, “Not everyone will be cured, but everyone can be healed.”
Maggie is 80. She doesn’t need my prayers for cure. But she needs my prayers for healing, and I need to pray them. Both the one who prays and the one prayed for receive a gift in prayer, the gift of healing, which is the gift of knowing that we are not alone, we a part of life and death together.
John Robert McFarland
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