Washington Window: December 2007: Prayers for Healing

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By Lucy Chumbley
Washington Window
Vol. 76, No. 12, December 2007

During his years among us, Jesus touched eyes and restored sight, brought back hearing and the use of hands and limbs. He cured lepers, drove out evil spirits and bound up the bleeding and the brokenhearted.

He healed by command, by touching and by being touched. And he sent out his disciples to be healers, also.

Today, in the Diocese of Washington, followers of Jesus are still offering healing prayer in his name.

"It's a quiet ministry," said Ames Perry, a lay healing minister at Holy Trinity, Bowie, which offers healing prayer every second Sunday.

During the Eucharist, two of the church's six healing ministers station themselves at the back of the church near the font "to listen to people and respond to them," Perry said.

"If I don't know them I'll ask their names and what they'd like prayers for – or whom – and then I'll pray with them," she said. "I try not to anticipate what they're going to request."

"I always lay hands," said the Rev. Marianne Babnis, part-time assistant at Holy Trinity. "I always touch their head, shoulder, hands. I think it's really important to have touch."

Beth Carlson and Anne Harvey, healing ministers at Our Saviour, Hillandale use free prayer in their ministry.

"People do it very individually," Carlson said, adding that each experience is different, and demand for healing prayer is impossible to predict.

"It's still very much what happens that day," she said. "You can't anticipate how many people will come and what the requests will be. Each time you do it is a new time."

"Usually there are regulars and there are people who have never tried it," Perry said. "And sometimes there are two and sometimes the church is being dismissed and we're still laying on hands."

"I get them to come one by one so there is some privacy," said the Rev. Andrew Sloane, rector of St. Paul's, K Street, which offers unction and prayer for healing on the first Sunday of the month and every Thursday after masses. "I always say, ‘Do you have a specific request?' I think there's something important in the articulation."

Sloane offers an intercession from the Book of Common Prayer as well as a personal prayer, performs unction and lays his hands on their head.

"I think it makes concrete, and available to them in a concrete way, God's healing power and his desire for them to be whole," he said of the ritual. But he stresses that this more personal form of prayer does not take the place of the corporate prayer.

"There's power in the prayer of the church," he said.

While many clergy offer healing prayer, at St. Paul's, as in many churches around the diocese, healing prayer is primarily a lay ministry.

"Our healing ministry is strongly, strongly a lay ministry with clergy support," said the Rev. Margaret Guenther, priest associate at St. Columba's, D.C.

After hearing a person's request, Guenther places her hands on their head or shoulders "no big bear hugs – as impersonal a touch as we can do," holds a moment of silence and then offers a prayer for healing from the Book of Common Prayer. "Then I start praying to Jesus as friend and physician to be present to this person."

"Keep it short," she advises her church's approximately 15 healing ministers. "We don't need a sermon; Jesus knows it all. Be as specific as possible, brief." And then, critically, "don't bring it up again unless the person does."

Confidentiality is important, she said, as is the understanding that healing ministers simply serve as a conduit: "The healing minister is just there to be transparent. We're not the healers."

The team at St. Columba's quietly identifies people who are "spiritually mature and temperamentally right for that ministry," Guenther said. "It takes a willingness to hear very hard things that might surprise you. You have to be able to hear others' pain without trying to fix it or be preoccupied with it; you have to be free of curiosity. You have to be a person of prayer yourself; you have to have been a recipient of healing prayer yourself."

Babnis came to the ministry through her own experience with healing prayer.

"I lost a lung last year and then had a stroke," she said. As a young woman, she also suffered from Hodgkin's Disease.

"I think that always gave me an understanding for people going through an illness and became more so as I became a priest," she said. "I always had that – the healing ministry was part of my ministry. But when I was in the hospital, the healing ministry came to me.

"It was nice to know that people were praying for me – the diocese, the church and individuals. Now I hope to be able to give that comfort that I received to others."

Babnis believes "people want healing ministry even if they don't say it," while Perry tries "to make people comfortable with it, with asking for it."

Many people ask for prayer for others, Guenther said, but "what those of us involved in this ministry are really wanting to do is to expand people's willingness to ask for prayer for themselves.

"Jesus makes it clear: We are supposed to ask for what we need, but we get socialized out of asking for what we need. …What I would do if I could work magic would be to bring more people to that very candid place where we say: ‘I am not whole.'"

So what happens in that quiet moment of prayer?

"Something happens. It may not be what we have in mind, but something happens," Sloane said.

"God answers prayers, but sometimes we don't understand the answers very well," Perry said, adding that she tries to engender hope but not enflame it.

"I'm not a charismatic," she said. "I don't expect people to rise and walk after a healing prayer – I mean I'm not counting that out! A lot of people just need to be touched."

"Sometimes I'm very touched," Harvey said. "Sometimes I feel an energy moving through me. And sometimes I don't."

Guenther describes the experience as "Powerful. It never ceases to be powerful. It never ceases to remind me of my own smallness." But she believes it is important to turn the experience completely over to God.

"We really can't keep score," she said. "We simply can't quantify it." And, she stresses, "there's a huge difference between healing and curing."

Sometimes the patient dies, she said, but there has been a move toward wholeness. Or maybe "it's a long time down the road that the person realizes, "Oh, my goodness. Maybe something did happen."

Always, it is in God's hands.

"It's a prayer we offer in great receiving and humility," she said. "I see this as really watching at the foot of the cross. Really, we're powerless and yet we can offer this plea."

"One always hopes the Holy Spirit is working through you, regardless of how well you're doing it," Carson said. "We're instruments of it, but you always hope you're being a good instrument."

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