Table Talk: Healing Hands

     As a minister making hospital calls, I feared a patient might be healed miraculously when I prayed with them. I admitted this in a discussion group with laypersons. When asked why, I confessed that I assumed it would ruin my life as a plain and ordinary person and my career as a liberal minister. I’d hate to be a faith healer in a church of rationalists. One woman in the group, Shirley, said, “But, Phillip, you have Reiki hands. I knew that the moment I met you.”

     I wasn’t sure what Reiki hands were, but I did understand that she assumed I had some kind of healing gift. Shirley couldn’t imagine why I didn’t want to use it. The image of myself as a healer was almost overpowering, an assault on my pragmatic upbringing and liberal education. I thought it appropriate to leave healing to the medics and for me to support patients in related issues such as dealing with health care systems. I helped parishioners to confront their religious questions and, in general, to clarify their attitudes towards and acceptance of their medical therapy. I prayed with patients that God would enhance their natural ability to heal.

     Now, even as I do bodywork, I keep hoping people won’t assume their healing is a direct result of a special power I hold. I recall the phrase from some novel about a character who had hands with “palms as hot and sweaty as a faith healer’s.” My palms get hot during massage. Perhaps it was the heat that alerted Shirley to the possibility I could be a healer. But to me, my hands seem to be simply part of who I am. I don’t want to be a faith healer.

     “Those hands.” It’s the compliment I have most often received from teachers, friends, and clients. “Wonderful hands.” “Healing hands.” I gave up protesting and now simply thank people who remark about my hands. They are my main tools, and I am thankful that they are effective in my work. Certainly they are a gift since I did nothing to earn them. I felt like a client put me on the line over my reluctance to understand myself as a healer. She told me about a tumor she had discovered on her back, at the base of the neck near the spine, and asked me to put my hand on it. I did so, placing my hand over the spot she indicated. I could feel a slight protuberance, cupped my hand over it, and left my hand in place for several minutes. When I finally moved it, she asked, “Was it your hand or my skin that was so hot?” I reported that her skin had felt cool to my touch.

     Then she asked, “Did you feel malignancy in the tumor?” I didn’t have a clue what I was feeling, except my own discomfort at her assumption that I’d know anything. It seemed one thing for me to place my hand on someone’s body and quite another to imagine I could make a diagnosis from doing so. I told her I didn’t know what I was feeling there. I meekly excused myself on the basis of inexperience.

     While I do not have any inclination towards intuitive diagnosis and have received little training in healing energy work, people still want me to place my hands on them. I touch people in the healing context of massage. I am not a Hindu healer, but some of my clients see brilliant colors when I place my hands over their chakras. I am not trained in Japanese Reiki methods and thought, but when I am around such healers, they assume I am one of them. Certainly, I am some kind of healer, and bodywork modalities from other religious backgrounds are encouraging me to integrate my own healing tradition into massage.

     Being a Reiki healer herself, Shirley understands the complexities of healing. She knows how the laying on of hands may not take away a disease but simply bring perspective to one’s attitude toward it. Like any minister, she believes that emotional releases may pave the way for a deeper healing of the psyche or the body. Shirley knows the kinds of success and failure I have sought to sidestep through my objections to healing work and my reluctance to enter into it.

     I avoided this work as a minister, but I cannot avoid it now as a massage therapist. I may be impeded by my own attitudes of suspicion, doubt, and fear, but I am willing to lay my hands on someone’s body where they feel pain or suspect some other malady. If there is power, it will do its work. I doubt that it is my power, but if the heat from my hands does have an effect I do not understand, I am willing to let that energy heal. Expect something good to happen in the massage; I do. But please don’t expect a diagnosis or a miracle if you get a massage from me. 

Oh Divine healing, may we reject the temptation to turn your work into a moralized commodity that we deserve or not deserve but want anyway. May we steer clear of turning your great mystery into magic that we can control and use. We bow before your ultimately unknowable power with humility and awe, and sometimes are bold enough to ask you for a miracle. Amen.

    

Paintings by P. Hoyle Extension, Hand and Foot 7, Hand and Foot 19