Healing of Memories
In a previous post dated July 10,2012, I thought of Peter who had to live with memories of his denials of Jesus. Jesus intervened after his resurrection by assuring and challenging Peter as described in John chapter 21. This John chapter 21 encounter raises a good issue: Do the healing effects of new life in Christ include healing of bad memories?
The place to start here is with new creation theology. In 2 Cor 5:17, St. Paul NAB ). We see this in the words and deeds of Jesus as well, in John chapter 3, where Jesus tells Nicodemus that he needs a new birth. When a person converts to Jesus, all is new. The past does not matter. But how deeply into the mind does the healing light of Christ penetrate?
One fascinating response to this question comes from the famous spiritual healer, Agnes Sanford (1897-1982). I remember reading her autobiography, Sealed Orders (Bridge-Logos 1972) in 1976 when I was 20 years old. At that time I knew a few people who thought they had the gift of healing and who made prayers for "inner healing" of bad memories part of their ministry. That was not for me. But I was enthralled with Sealed Orders. It is the great story of a hopeful Christian who writes with the descriptive skills of a novelist.
My memories of reading Sealed Orders 35 years ago are of a person frustrated with Christians who lived as though Jesus never rose from the dead. She believed that Jesus is alive, and that he offers his healing touch today just as he did during his public ministry on earth - a touch that included this "inner healing" of bad memories. If Agnes Sanford had lived in the days of Acts chapter 6 I bet that she would have gone over with the Hellenists who with their free spirits and visioning of the risen Jesus (Stephen) felt constrained and limited by the Jerusalem London : SCM , 1983 [German essays 1975-83].
Here is Agnes Sanford China
It would have been easy to heal this lovely lady even as I long afterword was healed. If only some one of God's ministers had known that he himself was a channel for God's power and had laid his hands on her and prayed for the love of Jesus to come into her and lift her out of darkness into his light! All my life I have grieved that no one knew how to pray for her. But for the first time now, as I write this down, I wonder: could I myself have prayed for her and channeled God's power into her? I knew nothing about healing. …
Could I have prayed for her daily in silence and in secret as I prayed for the young man? Was that what God wanted me to do?
Perhaps the reader is thinking, “Well, of course!” But in those days it was not, “Of course.” We were fundamentalists. That meant that we believed implicitly in every word in the Bible, yet we did not believe in healing through prayer. We were supposed to obey Jesus in every word that He said. Yet, when He said, “The works that I do shall ye do also,” we didn’t obey Him, and indeed considered it heresy that any one should try to do His works.”
Sealed Orders, p. 49.
This subject is not a matter for intellectual curiosity or theological speculation. We are talking about people's lives here. After writing about Agnes Sanford I got home to find the July 23, 2012 issue of the TIME magazine on the kitchen counter, and I saw on the cover “One a Day - Every day one U.S. soldier commits suicide." In the TIME story by journalists Mark Thompson and Nancy Gibbs, they write: “The U.S. military seldom meets an enemy it cannot target, cannot crush, cannot put a fence around or drive a tank across. But it has not been able to defeat or contain the epidemic of suicides among its troops.” Agnes Sanford says about the Chinese woman, “I have grieved that no one knew how to pray for her.” And now with these children of our friends and neighbors who have served our country, do we still not know how to pray and reach out with a healing touch?
