The hard part is choosing to change.

You can't heal your spirit unless you want it.

Hochhalter, Cara B. Just a Touch, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

Ancient Testimony:

Now there was a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians and had spent all that she had, and she was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Immediately her flow of blood stopped, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my cloak?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’ ” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

- Mark 5:25-34

Modern Testimony:

Robert Downey Jr: It's not that difficult to overcome these seemingly ghastly problems...

Oprah Winfrey: You are saying that it's not that difficult [to quit drugs]?

Robert Downey Jr: No, what's hard is to decide.

- Robert Downey Jr. discussing his sobriety on The Oprah Winfrey Show: November 23rd, 2004.

Why did all these people Jesus healed have it so easy? Just one touch and bam! Their sight is restored, their leprosy is gone, or they’re back from the dead. I wonder if Jesus could restore my receding hairline, or return my 22-year-old metabolism - that would be a miracle.

Biblical tales of divine spectacle do a lot of things (FYI: I don’t take biblical miracles literally, though I do believe these stories have much to teach), but we don’t often talk about the entertainment value of these stories. Narratives of godly miracles viscerally connected with their audience as much as our modern special-effects-aided spectacles do today. Conversely, fantasy films where people yield magical powers or science fiction television featuring strange new worlds can do the same thing as biblical narratives; they open up our imaginations and our hearts as they give us the chance to examine our own lives and societies in a world not our own. If I tell you, “You need to accept your parents for the flawed creatures they are,” or, “Stop thinking you are so useless,” you’ll likely say, “Yeah, thanks buddy,” and walk away. But in these tales of Jesus healing the sick, of God liberating his enslaved people, or Cain denying his role as his “brother’s keeper,” we can start thinking about how these themes relate to us because they are freed from the baggage of our own lives and culture. 

What I need to be reminded of in these tales-not-about-me-but-really-are-about-me are lessons about healing from trauma and getting my shit together. Though I’m no longer terrific at getting fired from jobs nor embarrassing myself at parties with crude jokes, the inner work is never complete. I still struggle with shame, fear, and being a self-involved snit whose favorite phrase is “I don’t wanna." As far as I've come, I still struggle to love and accept myself for who I am. Most stories of Jesus’s healings focus on the physical kind. In first-century Judea, where disease and injury made life shorter and nastier, this makes sense; however, able-bodiedness is not a one-way ticket to happiness. Of course, there are physically fit people who are miserable, pretty people who don’t think they are sexy, or intelligent people who doubt their abilities (I know that one!). The goal of these stories of healing is to inspire us to make the soul-changing adjustments that rearrange our psychological and spiritual nature to bring us greater joy, gratitude, calm, and a deeper connection with God. A story of Jesus making someone forgive their parents doesn’t seem as punchy as giving sight to the blind, but tales of miracle healings can inspire inner restoration.

I heard a lot of these types of stories in 12-step meetings, nothing grounded me like hearing others with problems like mine, and problems different than mine. These groups were my source of spiritual formation between my loss of faith in middle school and my spiritual reawakening at 35. I am in twelve-step groups for work as well as interpersonal issues (I never had problems with substance abuse). Changing your relationship to work or relationships is different than kicking booze and pills because you can’t abstain from what's killing you, you have to change your relationship with it. Working each of the twelve steps and attending meetings created a new spiritual foundation for me that supports a life free from the destructive patterns and behaviors that brought me to my knees. There are a lot of these groups but they are all connected by the notion of turning our lives over to a higher power (which doesn’t necessarily have to be God), but how does that healing power come to us?

In the Bible story, we are presented with a woman whose physical ailment has robbed her of her health and savings. The text implies that she’s frequently menstruating, which is a symptom that could be caused by conditions like endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), or uterine fibroids, which come with other uncomfortable and painful symptoms. Today, someone who has the same condition and access to modern medicine could likely find a treatment. But in the early decades of the first millennia, this woman's quest for relief only resulted in poverty and continued illness. To put it simply, she was desperate.

In twelve-step, we talk about the “gift of desperation,” that is, many of us will avoid taking actions that are good for us unless we get so wracked with pain and anguish that we relent. These moments of “hitting rock bottom” may happen several times, and some will even live with backbreaking agony for decades until they choose to do something about it. It was desperation that made me willing to take a job seriously and become more responsible (something I had never done before). For this unnamed woman, the gift of desperation drove her to do something unthinkable: touching this great rabbi, in public, with her ritually impure hands (Leviticus 15:25-30), hoping for a miracle.

While this woman’s problem was relieved in an instant, I find that changing three and a half decades of self-centered and destructive behavior is…harder. The need to use faith and seemingly radical action to find healing does ring true, though. This brings us to the 2004 interview Robert Downey Jr. gave on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I saw it sometime between early 2018 and mid-2019 when I was in my first year at the job where I learned to work responsibly: to come in on time, to do my job, to acknowledge difficulties without resentment, and to drop the edgy jokes. (That last one was harder to kick, unfortunately.) Achieving these goals was both simple and anxiety-inducing. Getting up on time was a slog, I'd beat myself up for small mistakes, and an air of drama and severity hung around me ("Would I pull it off this time?"). I was in a world both ordinary and alien, living a life I had never experienced before. When I heard Mr. Downey say, “What’s hard [about quitting drugs] is to decide,” I found a refreshing way to see my struggles. The real problem was choosing this new life, not living it. This became both a breath of fresh air and a war cry in this time of spiritual rebirth. It was not a miracle cure–I still struggled–but I believed in myself a little more, and every little bit counts.

As for our unnamed woman of first-century Judea, what I found remarkable about her recovery is twofold. My favorite phrase from the passage is, “Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him,” as in Jesus knew his divine powers were being used but he was not controlling them. A sick, broke woman, someone near the bottom of the social hierarchy of her day, commanded the power of God of her own volition. We don’t have to wait around for God to come to us, we can come to God because her gifts of restoration are freely available whenever we need them. When we engage with rituals of healing and renewal (which for me is as simple as doing the laundry), God’s power to heal is ready for us. The other part that stands out is when Jesus tells her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.”** Our healing does not come solely from outside of us, it also comes from within us, without a commitment to recovery and change, no intervention or therapy can save us from ourselves.

However, there seems to be a contradiction between Jesus feeling his power flowing from him and the woman’s faith that made her well. Which was it? Christianity often deals with pairing opposites, like Jesus being both human and divine and the notion we are both saintly and sinful (don’t get me started on one-god-in-three-persons). In the tradition of spiritual contradiction, I take a “both-and” approach: both the woman’s faith and God’s power healed her. It’s as if Jesus were a sort of spiritual enzyme. For those of you who forgot High School Biology, enzymes are a class of molecule that facilitates chemical reactions in cells that would happen far less often otherwise, like breaking down sugars or copying DNA. It was the woman’s willingness to get better, her faith in a greater power, and her conviction to act which opened her up to God’s healing spirit, and it’s as if Jesus merely provided the catalyst for all of that to come together. It does not mean he was passive and without merit at this moment though. The woman’s faith in Jesus came from his active spiritual leadership and giving heart.

The healing power of God is not solely found on a mountain, in a monastery, or in the wisdom of a spiritual leader. The power of God is inside you always and forever–you just have to connect to it. All human religious and spiritual systems point us to this basic truth. My problem is that I don’t want to do anything. I like waiting around for my willingness to come to me, for the time to be right, or for me to be healed of my worries first. Unfortunately, this strategy has an exceptionally low success rate. Instead, I need to be like this once-ill woman, this once drug-addled actor, and simply decide to be ready to change and then take action. It is that combination of faith and works that can heal the sick, soothe the anguished, and connect us to a new way of being that is both completely inconceivable and exceptionally ordinary. Let’s face it, keeping a job is a pretty normal thing, but to me, it is a gift of both God’s making and my own. Through my faith in something bigger than me, my decision to change, and my willingness to act, I’m renewed with God’s spirit. Hopefully, the next time I’ll need to change, I won’t have to be as desperate as the last time to decide to do something about it.

**I know for some of you, stories like this have been used to make you feel unworthy in your spiritual communities. Attributing healing to how much faith someone has can imply that people who have not been healed do not have faith, which is utter bullshit. Some have made peace with their disabilities while others long to be healed. As someone with ADHD, my ability to do things or behave appropriately doesn’t always match my desire to or understanding of. All my life I have experienced a lot of confusion and shame around “not trying hard enough” vs. “this failure is not your fault” whether it’s a basic task or a complex one. However, as someone who struggles with self-destructive behaviors, this line is inspirational in the sense of “Don’t sweat the screwups, your commitment to getting better is enough; if anything it was the hardest part.”