Healing 2

Dear All,

Yesterday we met in the new office, 5 Hillside Avenue. Thank you all for showing up in such numbers!  You warmed the new space with your presence.

Starting next week, there will be two meetings per week:

Tuesdays at 11am and Thursdays at 5pm. 

All are welcome.  The themes will be similar, with more talking Tuesdays and more silent meditation Thursdays.  Do bring your friends along, and let me know if someone wants to read these emails but is not yet in this email group.

We have begun to meditate the healing in Mark 10:46-52.  We used as our text the image of blind Bartimaeus throwing off his cloak and leaping up (Mark10:50).  This utter readiness is a precondition for the healing in question.

Later in the same story, Jesus says, "Your faith healed you."  "Faith" is another expression of upward trust or abandonment to heaven.

The healing proposed is not perhaps the one we most naturally want: physical or emotional healing and relief from its attendant suffering. Rather, healing is a reconnection to one's own root in the heavens.  The blind man does not actually ask to "receive his sight," (10:51), but literally, to "look up." 

This kind of healing only comes when we are also willing not to be healed, even willing to die.

In every tradition, most of those who are miraculously healed eventually die.  Healing does not seem to have the aim of physical perfection, then.  Rather, it centers on the stance or orientation by which we can be healed.  This orientation matters, regardless of the apparent outcome.

Next week, we'll continue with this story in Mark 10, and focus on looking up.  Up is the direction from which, continuously, the light comes.

all blessings to all,

Michael