Miracle Cures and Healers

If no human being had ever experienced a miracle, faith healing, or the operation of some kind of strange, inexplicable power, I am sure that we’d still have religious practices, but they would all be of the variety we know as the worship of the collective. All rise. And now some celebrity will sing the National Anthem, possibly in a way we don’t even recognize. Three soldiers stand down there with the flags. And many people have a hand over their heart. State religion. Patriotism. Play ball.

We carry within us a vague intuition that all this stuff around and about us isn’t the be-all and the end-all here, but when we encounter the transcendental up close and personally, then we really know something. Then we take it seriously. And nothing gets our attention more swiftly and fully than hearing about cures. It is an astonishing fact—but nonetheless a fact—that great healers keep appearing among us, not many, but they keep appearing, and they do so no matter what stage of culture we have reached. When they do arise, a cult will invariably form around them either within the bosom of some established church or external to it.

Solanus Casey (1870-1957), a healing saint and a Capuchin priest, is one such figure in my own neck of the woods. As the author of the brief Wikipedia article about him puts it: “Many miraculous cures have been associated with Father Solanus’s intercession, both when he was alive and after his death. Pilgrims from around the world continue to make pilgrimages to the tomb of Father Solanus.” Casey is on the way to sainthood, having been given the “Venerable” designation by the Vatican. He is an example of a healer whose cult is embedded in a church.

Another modern example is the German Bruno Gröning (1906-1959). He was a carpenter by trade and later earned his living as a factory and general laborer. He emerged from obscurity in 1949 and became a very popular faith healer; his powers caused him to become embroiled in controversy. Controlling elements of the medical community opposed him; the state eventually forbade him to engage in healing activities. Thanks to the efforts of Greta Häusler, one of his early followers, the Bruno Gröning Circle of Friends has become a global organization with footprints in many countries. We find the same patterns wherever we go, never mind the locally dominant religions. Hopeful believers visit the graves of many famous Muslim saints with the same expectations—and occasional miraculous healing experiences—as they visit Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish figures.

The fascinating aspects of this phenomenon are three-fold. The healing power flows through a person, comes to be associated with a fixed place—hence pilgrimages to grave-sites or regions where the figure was active—and cures continue to take place after the individual passes away. It is also evident that the powers of the healer, and most likely the power of the person to be healed, both arise spontaneously. In the healer the power comes first; alignment with some religion or independent activity follows. Neither Casey nor Gröning were intellectuals. Gröning had very little formal education; and Casey, although he graduated from seminary, was ordained a “simplex” priest; this meant that he could neither hear confessions nor give homilies: his superiors didn’t think he had the intellectual capacity for such tasks. One smiles. The power in the person healed manifests, it seems to me, in response to the stimulus of the healer—but the healer need not be there. Otherwise post-mortem healings would not take place.

I have no doubt that some kind of energy does flows from or through these saints—but I suspect that it is always all around us. They manage somehow to concentrate and to direct it. It flows through them with great strength perhaps because something in us that normally blocks or weakens it is absent in them. It is very difficult to credit that the healing power is associated with a geographical location—easy to assume that it is everywhere. Casey lived decades in New York before he arrived in Michigan. But location—a grave-site, for example—may have bearing on the person to be healed. The healing may be a process in which receptivity to the “current of healing,” to use Gröning’s phrase, must first be stimulated. This receptivity may be enhanced by faith. Being at the place where the saint is buried or where he or she spent a life may heighten the receptivity.

There is ample evidence from many cases that the “faith” required to be healed is not something intellectual. Complete unbelievers are actually healed. But how great, really, was their disbelief? They went to see the healer, after all. This coincidence of intellectual doubt but contradictory action of the will illustrates how complex we are. What we think is often not even half the story. And many of us are far from sufficiently integrated.