Healing Service

This coming Sunday we will have a healing service at our church. There will be a special litany in place of the Prayers of the People, and all will be invited to come to the side altar after receiving communion for prayers and the laying on of hands. When we did this last spring, our retired priest was at the healing station. Afterwards he told me that I need to be there next time. So this Sunday he will preside and preach, and I will be at the side altar. No doubt it will be a trial for me to have someone else in charge, but at least that’s a good trial, one that I should experience from time to time.

The side altar is the church’s original one of ancient wood, replaced many years ago by an elegant marble-faced high altar. In front of it is a four-foot-wide kneeler that I found in storage. It is where I pray Noonday Prayer with a thurible of incense smoking on a nearby windowsill. As I kneel I pray for all whom I have encountered that day, and think of the generations of people and priests who have worshipped there before me. It is little wonder that the retired priest felt so much power at that healing station last spring.

Prayers for healing I’m familiar with from childhood. It’s the physicality of the healing service, the typically Anglican embodiment of our words in laying on hands, that is new to me. We sure didn’t lay on hands in the Lutheran church of my youth! Faith was more cerebral, with well-ordered arguments and well-crafted words, than anything so personal as placing hands on someone else’s head. Only at confirmation did that happen, which undoubtedly made the rite more powerful. (There was power enough that it was my father who confirmed me, a man whose chief form of personal contact was a welcoming handshake backed by a beaming face.)

I haven’t decided whether I will anoint with healing oil on Sunday. Those raised in the Roman Catholic Church might worry that I am giving them last rites, and the staunch Protestants will have no idea what the oil is about. I used to be in the latter category. I suspect that the Reformation threw out anointing as a reaction to all things Romish, in this case not returning to Scripture to recover the original healing use of oil. Or perhaps it disappeared because it was recommended in the letter of James, an epistle that Luther despised. For whatever reason, I had to get used to having a little container of bishop-blessed healing oil as one of my priestly possessions.

In praying for others I will also experience healing myself. God’s power can’t help but affect the channel through which it flows. That will be good. This has been a hard series of weeks, with diocesan work taking me away from home and funerals of beloved people in the parish. For someone as cognitively oriented as I am, sorrow flows underground, unseen, where it is reached only by the penetrating love of God in Jesus Christ. Yes, I think this will be a good Sunday to have a healing service at our church.