Healing and the Wonder of Warts

[Anonymous]

It is a basic medical truism that often we cannot be cured of an illness unless we go to a doctor – or someone else who can heal us or teach us how to heal ourselves. In order to be healed, we need to expose the problem that is troubling us to someone who can recognize it and offer assistance that will alleviate our suffering and cure the issue. As my father used to say, “Warts won’t go away unless they are treated.”

In spiritual terms, we accept Jesus as the ultimate healer, but I have come to believe that relatively few members understand fully the promises we make when we agree to take His name upon us. We often translate this as “being Christians,” but “Christ” was only one of his titles – only one of the names by which He is known. It is a title, not necessarily a communicable name. There is not room here to discuss the full implications of this promise, but there is one name that we can assume – no matter our circumstances or limitations. It is Healer.

We promise to assume his role of Healer specifically when we promise to mourn with those that mourn and comfort those who stand in need of comfort. Just like any doctor, however, we simply cannot do this unless we are “open” to the sick and afflicted (either to their visits or through our own house calls) – unless we are aware of someone’s pain and suffering – unless we know why they mourn and what comfort they need – unless we are able to see their warts. We might “fellowship” with each other on Sunday, but if we only see each other at our Sunday best – warts carefully hidden beneath white shirts and ties and well-placed mascara – we completely miss the opportunity for the depth of full fellowship that allows us to act in the place of Jesus and serve in His stead as healers.

I am struck by how Jesus healed. He didn’t say, “Lock yourselves in your rooms and ask to be healed.” He didn’t say, “take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” Rather, He said, “Come unto me.” Healing was not an impersonal event; it was full of touching and blessing and communicating and real physicality.

Think about it: To whom do you feel closest in your ward or branch? Is it because you know their joys and their pain – and they know yours? Is it because you have seen their warts, and they have seen yours? Perhaps, is it because you share a common type of wart – because you have shed a tear together or held each other as life seemed to shake around you? Is it because you have held their hand, embraced them and touched their lives in real and practical and powerful ways?

Now, think of someone to whom you don’t feel close. How much do you really know about them – of their joys and pains and sorrows and stress – their warts? Have your lives played out on parallel tracks – ever in proximity but never in true contact? Finally, has there been a time when you felt completely alone? Was it because there was no one close by with whom you could talk – no one who could share your struggles and your pain – no one who could see your warts and accept you anyway?

We can be blessed greatly as we endure to the end – but I believe we can be blessed the most and truly endure well if, and only if, we endure together. We sing, “In the quiet heart is hidden sorrow that the eye can’t see.” I wonder how many people need help as they struggle to endure, see us each week in our Sunday best, and feel even more inadequate and unable to endure. I wonder how many people struggle to pray daily as an individual and feel debilitating guilt because they are “failures” in this important thing – without realizing just how many other members, even some in leadership positions, share that particular struggle. I wonder how many women (especially) feel overwhelming stress and guilt as they exhaust themselves in the unselfish effort to raise righteous children – without realizing that many of the women they admire and put on a pedestal share that exact same stress and guilt. I wonder how many people think their own warts are unique and/or repulsive, without any recognition that the people all around them in the pews have warts that appear just as hideous as their own.

The most terrible, agonizing moment in the life of the Savior appears to have been when He was on the cross – when His Father withdrew His Spirit and Jesus was left alone to exclaim, “My God. My God. Why hast thou forsaken me?” He had no warts that mattered, but he felt isolated and alone and abandoned and, perhaps, unloved and unaccepted. If that can happen to someone without warts, is it any wonder that it happens to us?

Few of us struggle so openly and publicly. Our own fears and pains are not so obvious; often they are carefully hidden behind a smile and a cheerful greeting – or a forbidding intellectuality – or silence or a frozen mask – or even by a false front of service. Generally, we cover our warts – and we even tend to obsess over them to the exclusion of noticing others covering theirs. Unless we open up and share in each others’ lives and risk exposing our warts to those around us, we will never know their loneliness and pain – and they will never know ours. We may continue to live comfortable lives, but I believe those lives will not be comforting in the fullest sense of that word that is available in true and open fellowship.

Thank God for warts.

[Anonymous]

Ray, how about you come and teach this to my ward in a sunday school class?

I love it!

[Anonymous]

Ray (this is one of those times I wish we had a clapping smilie over there on the right)

I hope you are collecting up stuff like this for publication in some way at some time!!!! Good essay and so true.

So, here is a wart for you to deal with.

I hate, and mean that word completely, once more with feeling HATE, the Sunday school manual for Gospel Doctrine class. I think it is an insult to all adults in the church. I think that the fact that they are going to go through the teaching cycle for a 4th time using exactly the same manuals is a travesty and I think that it indicates that there is little if ANY inspiration in the curriculum departement of the Church or whatever they use as a substitute for that, and it makes me question the wisdom, inspiration and calling of every General Authority in the Church (yes I know that is essentially irrational but there it is anyway, they all go to Sunday School at some point they MUST sense just how boring and repetitive and deadening it is to members to have to endure each lesson and then have to go home feeling guilty because the way they feel must be their own fault because we are bad people yada yada yada). AND just to cap it off, if they would skip building just one temple they would have enough money to produce a new Gospel Doctrine manual for each cycle of teaching, looking at different chapters, different aspects, broader spirituality, more diverstiy, but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, the old manual was good enough for 12 years they may as well go for 16 years.

There, that is a wart. It is red, it is festering and I am pounding the keyboard way too hard as I type this (sorry keyboard it isn’t your fault).

[Anonymous]

So, Bill – your wart is that you can’t look at the manual without rage. How can you treat that?

1) Expose it – which you have done here.

2) Ask for help treating it – which you can do here in a separate post specifically about that wart. (Focusing on your wart, not what you perceive to be the Church’s wart.)

3) Focus on treating what you perceive to be the Church’s wart in your own sphere – your own home and your own ward – by encouraging deeper conversations in the class(es) about the material provided.

I am rushing off to church, ironically, but those are the first treatment methods that came to my mind. They key, imo, is to identify properly your OWN wart and work on it – since it’s too easy to excuse our own warts and rail against the warts of others, when the treatment for those is out of our control.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Ray

You do have a way with warts I must admit. I too will be off to church fairly soon, and I will be teaching a Sunday School class, having composed a lesson based on that manual and I do hope that it will be thoughtful and engaging to my students. You can check out the lesson plan here: http://www.youthgd.blogspot.com/ which is a blog I am working on to develop lessons for the Youth class that I teach.

With your permission I will move my rant and your suggested treatment over to a new post this afternoon and get started on wart removal.

Thanks. 😯

[Anonymous]

Great thought, Ray! Actually it is rather important, beautiful insight.

I posted it somewhere else, but the methodology you are proposing is actually the exact methodology built around the addict anonymous programs. People who have gone through them with appropriate purpose, have reaped several lifetimes worth of experiences in help, giving help, receiving help, feeling help, loving help, sharing help, and the same can be said of health, and love, and charity, and tragedy, and struggle.

Life is to be lived, and it is to be lived together. Whatever that means to the individual. Together may mean as a couple, as a family, as a ward, as a community, as a nation, or as an inspiration between the one and the higher power.

Together also means “together”. Sharing, loving, being loved, caring, being cared for, helping, being helped, it’s all part of together.

I heard someone else use this very similar analogy, Ray. Should church be a hospital or a museum?

[Anonymous]

There is a beautiful post by Kristine at By Common Consent entitled “Three Kinds of Wards”. It can be found at:

http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/07/08/three-kinds-of-wards/

I HIGHLY recommend it to everyone. It provides a great counterpoint to some of what I wrote – a sweet explanation of why most of us can’t expose our warts yet and how that’s OK for many.

I also LOVE the final line.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Ray!

That is a wonderful essay and indeed a great last line that person has a lot of talent and a lot of compassion. It does go well with warts discussion as well, so I guess we are definitely in the hospital ward here in warts discussion.

[Anonymous]

I am bumping up this thread from five years ago as a response to the question of how we can become the water and how we can be a lake and not a glass.

I hope it helps someone who was not around five years ago when I wrote it.

[Anonymous]

Fitting. Thanks for the bump. Now I don’t know whether to continue my thoughts in this thread or the other.

[Anonymous]

You must have done this for me today. Thank you.

[Author]

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