Spiritual Hiccups - Illness, Denial, and Healing

I was reading my daily meditation from Richard Rohr this morning (click here to get these meditation via email), and I was struck by the closing line, "You cannot heal what you do not acknowledge."  That is certainly true from a medical standpoint.  Most of us know someone who has ignored a medical symptom for months or even years.  But denial is a poor medical practice, and often such folk have let an illness progress so far that it is no longer treatable.

Rohr was, of course, not talking about cancer or other maladies, he was talking about a different sort of healing.  He even used the phrase "defects of character."  And this was mulling around in my mind when I read today's gospel verses from Mark, where friends bring a paralyzed man to Jesus, lowering him through the roof to get him past the crowds.  Curiously, Jesus' first move is to forgive his sins.  Telling him to get up and walk seems to happen only as a way of validating Jesus authority to forgive sin.

Regardless, there is an interesting pairing of sin and illness in this story.  Perhaps that is simply because people in Jesus' day presumed that debilitating illnesses were brought about by sin.  The people who saw Jesus in action would have assumed a linkage between illness and sin, and hence healing and forgiveness.  Now personally I think it is a good thing that we no longer tend to blame people for their illnesses (though we're still learning on this one, with AIDS, alcoholism, and other addictions as cases in point).  But I wonder if we might not do well to think of sin, personal failings, greed, and such as sicknesses, as things that need healing.

And here I can be a lot like someone who ignores her medical symptoms.  My selfishness, my desire for the things a consumerist culture says I need, and the ease with which I can feel contempt for someone I disagree with don't seem all that bad to me.  I'm "normal" with regards to such things, not needing any treatment.  I don't need to go to the great healer and say, "Jesus, my captivity to a consumerist culture is keeping me from following you as I should.  Heal me!"

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