The Lord Our Healer Part I: Harry Caray Sings a Song

This post is like an episode of Seinfeld. Like Seinfeld is a show about nothing, this is a post in which about the subject I know absolutely nothing. I’ve been thinking recently about healing. People getting sick, people getting well, that sort of thing. I hear stories about people who know people who have some miraculous experience and I don’t know what to think about it. Obviously, I’m happy for whoever got better; I’m happy for whoever told the story, but I never know what to feel after that point. Most of the time part of me thinks the miraculous gets a little too much emphasis in the story (I know that sound heretical, but it’s honest). Here I stand; someone who claims a supernatural God yet who cannot find it in himself to believe the supernatural healing. So, I decided to pay a visit to my good friends the charismatic church; witness myself a real healing service, and I did.

For those of us who are not exposed to this sort of thing on a regular basis, we have a preconceived notion as to how the whole process works. We see a man standing in front of a large crowd with a line-up of people in front of him waiting to be smacked in the head, fall down, to be picked back up again, and to be healed. Essentially, this is not what happed at this particular healing service.

The service was held on a Sunday evening in a small sanctuary with approximately 30-40 people present. There was a box of tissue in every Bible rack on the back of every pew in the sanctuary. If you’re preparing to use that much tissue at one time during a service, you’ve got more than the Holy Spirit moving through you (try a few million microscopic bacterium). Guess what else was in the Bible rack along with the tissue. If you guessed a Bible, you’d be wrong. There wasn’t a single Bible in the back of any pew. They’d all been replaced by tissue boxes. I guess when people started blowing their noses and wiping their brows with Psalms and Proverbs, the church got the hint that tissue was a little more of a commodity than God’s word. (Just for the record, I’m not saying every church needs to have Bibles in the back of their pews; I’m not even saying churches need to have pews. But, I found it peculiar that where Bibles usually are, there were tissues.)

The service started out like any North American church service would start, with upbeat, somewhat repetitive praise music. Now, if you’ve ever seen footage of Harry Caray leaning out of the press box at Wrigley field leading the North Chicago crowd in a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch at a Cubs game, then you have a pretty good mental picture as to what the lead pastor of this particular church sounded and acted like. (If you’ve only seen Will Ferrell’s portrayal of Harry Caray on SNL, you’ve got a pretty good mental picture as well, and a pretty hilarious one at that.) Honestly, if you gave the guy a pair of big, black rimmed glasses and stood what little hair he had up on its end, you couldn’t tell the two apart. So, at least that was entertaining and if I lost it in laughter, I’d have plenty of tissue.

After the mandatory, Spirit-lead praise music, some guy came up to preach. He wasn’t Harry Caray and, to my knowledge, he wasn’t someone who regularly attended the church (made me wonder why they didn’t ask me to preach), but rather some guy who, since he kept asking if he’d told this or that particular story before (no you haven’t! Just move on! (It wasn’t annoying or anything)), I can only assume had been to this church to speak before. He talked about John 5 and the man who would wait by a pool that was sporadically stirred by the angels; when it was stirred, the first one in was healed. His point was that the man was good in his desire to be healed, but his method was a little off. Instead of seeking for the pool to heal him, he should have been seeking Jesus. Now, I agree that Jesus can heal people (it’s mentioned a few times in various texts), but if someone doesn’t know that Jesus can heal, why would that person seek him out to be healed? This then tied in of course to everyone who was at the service to be healed. It was used as an encouragement to say you’re in the right place.

Now, it should be understood that the room wasn’t full of people on stretchers, people with missing limbs looking for them to be reattached, but rather people with aches and pains looking for relief, older people looking for relief from different ailments. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to see any blind people see or deaf people hear or lame people walk. So, after the preacher quit his preaching (It should be noted that the preacher was looking for healing as well. He had pain in his shoulder.), people were invited up front to be prayed for by the pastors and elders of the church that were present. This is where the show took off.

I had never found the formula for healing in all my Biblical studies (this is not to say there were or are a lot of them, that is Biblical studies, but there were some), but apparently it goes a little something like this. Healing = a smearing of oil on the forehead (anoint the sick with oil can be found in the Bible somewhere) + putting hands on the afflicted area (this would prove a problem if the ailment were prostate cancer or breast cancer or something) + shouting ‘hallelujah’ at the top of your lungs whenever you feel so inclined (shouting ‘Jesus’ at the top of your lungs would also suffice) + shouting some tongue-like language also at the top of your lungs (Imagine Harry Caray singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on Novocain) + More yelling of anything that comes to mind (‘Look how loud I can yell!’). Calling upon God for the removal of the ‘spirit of infirmity’ is a popular method as well. What is a ‘spirit of infirmity’? In all seriousness, is it suppose to be some kind of demon? At any rate, this is what healing looked like for this particular healing service. And despite all the obvious distractions, the band continued to jam through the whole thing. As if all the shouting and the yelling weren’t enough, there was a little background music in case it ever got awkwardly quiet.

To be completely honest (and you know when I do that, there’s going to be trouble), after attending the healing service, I had no idea what the hell I had just done. Is this what healing is? What really gets me is that this event that just took place would never leave the walls of the church. No one who acted like they did in the service would act like that around other people they know. No one’s down on his knees with his hands over someone’s foot yelling at the ‘spirit of infirmity’ to get out. If they are, people think they’re mentally deranged and they throw change at them. So, that leads me to the question: what does healing look like? Can it look like what I saw that Sunday night? Does it look like something different?

To Be Continued . . .