Someone I’ve never met passed away last month. She was a friend of a friend, was close to my age, a mother to three young children, and had served as a missionary with her husband overseas. When my friend asked for prayers for this young woman just a few days before her death, she included a link to the family’s blog.
Her husband had been updating the blog since the spring, just after her terminal cancer diagnosis. What first struck me was the depth of his grief--I cannot even begin to imagine it--but, as I continued reading older posts, something else also stood out. In the week before his wife’s death, he enthusiastically shared that he had gotten “confirmation of [her] healing.” Several people left comments that were, well, truthful, even if not completely tactful, trying to save him from self-delusion. His response was markedly defensive. He wrote that they simply did not have enough faith, and that he would enter into discussion with anyone about it because he believed it was part of a spiritual warfare.
As I read older posts, I could see that this husband’s thinking had been consistent ever since the cancer diagnosis. He first wrote that “God will be glorified [by her miraculous healing], and the world will be watching.” A month later, after a scan showed the tumor was still there, he expressed disappointment because he “truly believed the scan would be clear.” Again, not long before her death, another scan showed a larger tumor. He “truly believed it would be gone this time,” and seemed to have trouble coming to grips with the fact that all his prayers, and the prayers of his children, and the prayers of his friends, still hadn’t saved his wife. But he still never lost faith in the idea that she would live, and held out clear and confident hope that she would receive a last-second miracle. After all, God had confirmed it. “Sure, it might look bad right now,” he seemed to be saying, “but God is just waiting to perform an even more miraculous miracle than any He could have already done so far.”
Denial is the first stage of the grieving process, and it is understandable that anyone facing an impending and devastating loss would participate in denial to some degree. But I think this example is part of something bigger than just grief; it is an example of a particular religious culture that says God WILL heal you IF you have enough faith. Most of the people leaving comments on the blog seemed to support that thinking. They wrote not just that they were praying for this family, but that they, too, believed she would be healed. Anyone who questioned this was accused by the husband and other visitors to the blog of not having enough faith. Christ Jesus told his disciples that they needed faith-even just a tiny bit--for miracles to be possible (Matthew 17:20). But reading these comments gave me the impression that this group believes the reverse to be true: that even a mustard seed of doubt or dissention would make a miracle impossible. It was as if the husband feared that questioning God’s willingness to heal her would seal her fate. God wanted to heal her, he claimed, and it seemed like he thought it was our job to believe that--or else. He fought fiercely to believe hard enough to save his dying wife, and to convince any dissenters that they needed to believe harder, too.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with believing God can heal, or that miracles can and do happen every day. I think the husband was right to have faith, and right to urge everyone else to. What I don’t understand about the religious culture he is a part of is how someone can “receive confirmation” that a healing will occur. How does someone arrive at that conclusion? There have been many recorded instances of people who have actually been directly contacted by a visible, audible messenger of God, but, in those cases, whatever God promised to do, He did. Here, people claim to have “confirmations” that this woman will be healed, but, in the end, her body is still overcome by cancer. How did they decide that they knew what God planned to do? Did they just “feel” it? Whatever it was that brought them so much confidence, it seems to have misled them.
Reliance on whimsical and fleeting emotion to determine what God wants seems like a really dangerous idea, but in the religious culture we’re discussing, it happens all the time. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone make some kind of decision and say, “I just really feel like God is leading me to do this.“ (I can even remember saying this sort of thing myself.) And, inevitably, it doesn’t take long before the person claims God is “calling” him to something else entirely. When a person in this culture becomes dissatisfied and restless, God can be the perfect excuse to move on to the next thing. Now, I don’t think most people who behave this way are really conscious at all that they are trying to use God to justify their own will. It’s just that so much emphasis is placed on God’s individual plan for each individual person about each individual detail of his life, that the individual himself becomes the actual focus of attention. In effect, he is established as the god. There‘s also a lot of pressure on him to be able to hear what God is saying to him at any particular moment, so it’s easy to see how he could confuse the Divine voice with his own.
I think it’s pretty clear that God didn’t tell anyone this young woman would escape death. If it had been God who promised them she would be healed, then He would be a liar. Or, if His agreement to heal her was contingent on whether they had perfect faith, then He would have set them up to fail, which would mean He is cruel. Neither of those options sounds like the Most Holy Trinity to me. So, the lie had to have come from some other source--ultimately, from the Deceiver himself. In this case, I think people who have already gotten used to the idea that their thoughts and emotions are evidence of divine communication would be easily deceived into believing that their desperate hope for their friend’s survival is the same thing as God’s assuring them of it.
In any case, now that she has died, what are they supposed to think? As I mentioned above, they could choose to blame themselves or call God a liar. Or, they could recognize their error and question their ability to discern the will of God on their own. But several people who had believed so strongly that the young woman would live seemed to have difficulty accepting that they were mistaken. As news got out about the young mother’s departure from this life, a new kind of comment started popping up on the blog. One person wrote: “Praise God! She is finally HEALED!”
This person, and several others, still believing that God had promised to heal this young woman, and knowing He keeps his promises, decided that this healing was accomplished through her death. This is simply absurd.
Clearly, she is not “healed.” If she were healed, she would still be able to sit down to dinner with her family and tuck her children into bed. Now, I understand what the person meant: that this young mother was no longer suffering bodily; that she is believed to be in a place with no more pain or sorrow. But that’s not even almost the same as healing. Death is no miracle. It is a tragedy each and every time it happens.
While thankful for an end to his wife‘s agony, the husband seems not to have been misled by the “death as healing“ camp. He is dealing daily with the reality of her absence, struggling to comfort and parent his children and learn to live without his best friend. He seems to have recognized that he was in denial that she could really die, and has not abandoned his trust in God. He continues to hope--no longer for a temporary miracle, but for an eternal one.
He knows that because God the Son raised up and glorified this body after submitting Himself to an agonizing death (Philippians 2:8), He will likewise raise us up on the last day. "He hath trampled down Death by death and become the Firstborn from the dead" (Resurrection troparion in tone 3). We have good reason to hope, knowing that our soul’s departure from this body is not everlasting. For the day will come when all of creation will be transformed, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and all corruption will have passed away (2 Peter 3:13).
In the end, I think the husband was right about one thing: The miracle that is coming truly will be bigger and better than any we could yet have imagined. And, it won’t be just a temporary fix for one young lady--the entire cosmos will be freed. Death and corruption will be no more.
While writing this post, I kept hearing this hymn from the end of Sunday Orthros in my head, and I thought it would be appropriate to share along with an icon of the Anastasis (Resurrection):
"Most blessed art thou, O Virgin Theotokos, for through Him that was incarnate of thee is Hades despoiled, Adam is recalled from the dead, the curse is made void, Eve is set free, death is slain, and we are endowed with life. Wherefore, in hymns of praise, we cry aloud: Blessed art Thou, O Christ our God, Who is thus well pleased, glory to Thee."
