Can a Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry Be an Answer for Today’s “Healing Pilgrims”?
By the time we reached the Middle Ages, healing played a smaller and smaller role in the life of the church. By the 7th century, Western civilization had deteriorated significantly. Barbarian invasions sacked cities and dispersed, tortured and murdered the people. Survival became a daily struggle and people looked to God and the “saints”, those who made it to heaven, for their healing needs. Saint Gregory the Great, leader of the Christian world, viewed illness as a discipline sent by God. One could only hope for a better life in heaven. He taught that miracles had to be a sign of the “end times.” However, he believed that saints could heal and encouraged people to remember these saints as “friends at court” in heaven so that they could intercede for them.
This teaching laid the foundation for pilgrimages to the burial places or “shrines” of saints. Saintly people were revered since they were in heaven and could pass through the veil of this existence to help others. Pilgrimage meant traveling dangerous paths. Since few people could afford to stay in inns, they would try to walk to the nearest abbey or monastery for shelter during their journey. Here, within those walls, monks and nuns attended to their healing needs in body and spirit.
Compassionate healing became the main focus of many monastic orders. Monks and nuns practiced the healing arts that included surgery, laying on of hands, healing herbs, essential oils, and other holistic treatments for wayfarers traveling on pilgrimage. The church, however, in an effort to separate spiritual healing from physical healing in the 12th century, prohibited monks from performing surgery. They were to be soul healers only.
An outstanding Christian healer during this period was Hildegard of Bingen. She was a mystic, visionary, herbalist, scientist, composer, author, artist, and consultant to kings and popes. All the Benedictine Motherhouses in Europe would send representatives to learn from Hildegard how to treat all kinds of physical and mental illnesses. Her abbey became a meeting place for healers from all over Europe.
The nobility in the Middle Ages all had their own private doctors and healers, but the commoners had to rely on each other for healing. They used “wise healers” who were knowledgeable about herbs and had vast experiential knowledge about women’s cycles, childbirth, and how to cure common foods. The monks and nuns of the abbeys and monasteries also had vast experiential knowledge. They practiced compassionate healing in the name of Christ and in the tradition of the early church Fathers and Mothers.
What can we learn from this piece of history about healing the body/mind/spirit? Can a healing ministry help restore both soul and body to wholeness? Many think so and are making “modern pilgrimages” to seek alternative and complementary healing practitioners, especially those with a Christian focus.