It’s been a long day. Yet the 67-year-old Episcopal priest—tanned, freckled, and lithe from daily workouts with her two shelties—is still electric with energy. She’s talking about how the priestly mandate to heal those who knelt before her at the altar rail of this simple church some 6 years ago led her to reinterpret the ancient ritual called “laying on of hands.”
She is not timid, this priest. When women in Indianapolis were being battered in unprecedented numbers, she organized one of the first battered-women’s shelters in the U.S. When those who opposed the ordination of women threatened her life back in the ’70s, she donned a bulletproof vest, quieted her knocking knees with prayer, and became the second woman ever ordained in the Episcopal Church.
And when those in the tiny parish church where we now stand came to her in pain and misery, she showed the same kind of get-the-job-done courage. She gathered them together on Wednesday nights to pray and celebrate the goodness of God, then threw open the doors of an unused room in the church’s education building, hauled in a massage table, and those who hurt to come forward and receive God’s blessings.
They did. There was the woman with breast cancer who is now in remission. The man with end-stage liver disease who now walks around as though he has a new liver. The woman with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis who was able to decrease her medication.
One by one, they were healed.
Does God Really Work This Way?
The Reverend Natalia Vonnegut Beck is an ordained Episcopal Priest.
The notion that a priest or rabbi can use touch with someone who is suffering, praying for healing, and act as a conduit for God’s hearing energy is an ancient tradition reflected in just about every major religion.
A close reading of the Talmud suggests that rabbis used touch to heal more than 2,000 years ago, says Simkha Weintraub, rabbinic director of the National Center for Jewish Healing in New York City. Christians have honored the tradition since the time of Jesus.
Nevertheless, as a dues-paying Quaker, I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable when someone says that God has empowered him to heal me in one way or another. For one thing, how do I really know that God is signing the healer’s paycheck? For another, as a spiritual descendant of those radicals who felt that God actually listened to what they had to say, I tend to believe that God has the ability to heal me without any go-betweens—miracles do happen, and enough of them have happened in my own life that I no longer have any doubt about whether they occur or who’s responsible for them.
And, third, I can still remember how uncomfortable I was as a child watching those popular ‘50s television programs in which a perspiring televangelist grabbed someone from the studio audience, yelled at God, yelled at the sick or injured person, and practically scared them back to health. Did God really work this way? I had my doubts.
Can Touch Heal? We All Have the Ability to Heal
To help answer my questions, the Rev. Beck—or Tanya, as everybody calls her—has arranged for me to have a healing at The Pilgrimage Institute for Integrative Healing, the nonprofit organization that grew out of those Wednesday night gatherings in the church’s education building. Located near the church, the institute is now housed in the back of a single-story building, a stone’s throw from the intracoastal waterway at Clearwater, FL.
The building is a simple white stone structure, with pale peach carpets and walls, soft, overstuffed sofas, afghans, and books. It’s staffed by a director, a receptionist, and more than 85 volunteer healers who come and go as they’re needed. Some are doctors, others are nurses, therapists, and massage therapists. But some of the healing is done by accountants, filmmakers, and housewives.
Most have been trained by Tanya and Marilyn B. Gatlin, PhD, a member of the Wednesday night group and a counseling psychologist now based in Santa Fe, NM. Their partnership began when Tanya developed the idea of a healing center. They hit a turning point early on in their relationship when they realized that they could create a better circle of healing if they prayed and did the laying on of hands together. (Originally, one person did the laying on of hands while the other prayed separately.)
“The difference was amazing,” recalls Tanya. “It amplified everything.” The sense of God’s presence was intensified, and its effects on the people touched seemed to be more powerful.
Excited about the possibilities, Tanya and Marilyn began working together as a team and encouraging others to do so as well. “God is within every one of us,” Tanya explains. “So it’s not only a priest’s hands that can heal. We all have the ability to heal. All it takes is human compassion and the desire to focus your total attention on another person.”
A Personal Pilgrimage
As the number of people who came forward to work as healers steadily increased, Tanya and Marilyn began to experiment with a wide variety of touch therapies such as Reiki, a Japanese form that uses a gentle touch to enhance the flow of energy through the body, and therapeutic touch (developed by an American nurse), which doesn’t involve touch at all but theoretically works on the “energy field” surrounding the body. Those therapies that didn’t seem to do much were dropped, while those that seemed to increase the effectiveness of prayer and touch were included in what has no come to be called the “Pilgrimage Healing Process.”
To show me how this modern-day laying on of hands works, Tanya has asked Diane Love and Carole Butler, both members of Pilgrimage’s healing team, to give me a healing.
A tall, down-to-earth woman of 52 with dark hair and an irreverent sense of humor, Diane is actually a massage therapist by trade. Carole, a small, blonde woman also in her 50s, teaches yoga.
The two women escort me into one of the peach healing rooms, where I snuggle into an old-fashioned wing chair to discuss what it is I’d like them to work on. But open as they are, I’m not quite ready to reveal my innermost thoughts to two complete strangers. So I simply ask them to do what they can for my shoulder. I send so much time in front of a computer, I explain, that it constantly aches. I would like the pain to go away.
With an understanding smile, Diane invites me to remove my shoes and lie down on the massage table. Soothing music reaches out from a stereo system, and the two women gently cover me with an afghan.
Standing on opposite sides of the table, each woman takes one of my hands, holds, it in hers, and closes her eyes. No sound penetrates the cocoon from outside. I listen to the gentle cascade of music in the background and watch the filtered light through a shaded window. Gradually, my breathing slows, and I begin to relax.
Diane begins to pray. “Heavenly Spirit, hold us in a sacred circle of love and healing. Open the dark places within Ellen, fill her with your healing light….”
When she finishes, Diane asks me to listen to my breathing. “Focus on the word peace as you breathe in,” she suggests, “then focus on the word gratitude as you breathe out.”
As my relaxation deepens, she moves to the head of the table and cradles my head, while Carole moves to the foot and gently takes hold of my feet. After a moment, each woman moves to my shoulders, holds out her hands about 6 inches above my body, then walks slowly along the table toward my feet, her fingers seeming to rake the air above my body. When she reaches the end of the table, each woman shakes her hands downward as through flinging something away.
An Unexpected Result
My thoughts drift along with the music as my healers repeat this practice half a dozen times. Then, standing beside my ankles, each woman holds one of my hands and the foot farthest away from where she’s standing. The sensation is comforting, almost as though I were being held by my mother.
Each healer moves once again to my shoulders, where she sweeps her hands down my arms and legs several times, then resumes her position at my ankles with one hand on my ankle and the other on my knee. A few minutes later, the healers move their hands to knee and hip, then hip and waist, and on up to the top of my head.
The positioning of their hands at times closely corresponds to the energy centers that are called chakras in Eastern medicine, but I’m barely aware of their motions. My mind is centered in a quiet, white place. I don’t see anything, but I feel very free and as though my entire spirit was about to cascade into bubbling laughter.
Hands held above my body once again, Diane and Carole walk down opposite sides of the table several times, then pause, with Diane at my head and Carole at my feet. They don’t touch me, but I feel as connected to them as if they were. They lift their arms out toward one another above my body, and I feel as though I am cradled in their arms.
Lost in the moment, I am unaware when Diane and Carole step back from the table, until I hear Carole thanking God for the presence of the Holy Spirit, for this time together, and for the healing spirit that has bound the three of us together in its light. They touch my head and feet lightly, as though bringing me back to reality, then quietly wait until I’m ready to sit up.
I could lay there forever. I feel calm, peaceful, and deeply centered. My shoulder feels better, but it always does after I’ve lain down for a while, so whether or not the healing fixed it, I don’t know.
Something feels different, though, and it’s not until the next day that I realize what it is. It’s the chronic anxiety that has plagued me since I was 5: the fear that makes me double-check doors, triple-check alarm clocks, and throw up if my son is more than an hour late coming home. The anxiety that has gnawed away at the edges of my life for more than 40 years is gone.
Completely, totally gone.
“Whenever Two or More Are Gathered in My Name”
I call Tanya’s boss, researcher Herbert Benson, MD, President of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel/ Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Tanya became the Daniel G. Hollbrook Fellow there after accepting Dr. Benson’s invitation to develop a program that will show doctors how to provide spiritual care. I put my question to Dr. Benson directly: How can the laying on of hands heal?
“The scientific evidence supports that belief can heal,” replies Dr. Benson. Studies have found that those who have deep beliefs—whether they are marked by individual prayer, communal worship, or even nonreligious spirituality—generally live a longer and healthier life.
One explanation for this finding may be what Dr. Benson calls “remembered wellness,” or the body’s ability to recall what it feels like when it’s healthy. That ability can be invoked whenever belief is present, and scientists are now beginning to use sophisticated brain imaging scans to actually see the brain trigger the changes that promote healing.
But Marilyn believes that there’s more to what’s going on. After all, it’s faith in God that we’re talking about here.
“Modern physics reveals that the human body is a field of energy, connected to and interacting with the energy that surrounds us,” says Marilyn. “Tanya and I understand this energy to be the creative power of God. Disease can cause blockages to the flow of energy, as can feelings of depression, anger, resentment, and bitterness. In hands-on healing, we affirm the possibility that the power of God’s love may flow through the hands of the healers to help dissolve these blockages.”
That flow heals the schisms between mind, body, and spirit, says Tanya. It creates wholeness. Sometimes it results in a cure, and sometimes it results in the ability to see past the pain and agony of the instant and get on with your life. Is it a miracle?
“I don’t think we create miracles,” says Tanya. “God does that. But we do help people heal.”
Several months after her healing experience, Editor-at-Large Ellen Michaud remains fear-free, and her shoulder doesn’t hurt as much as it did.
Written by Ellen Michaud
