Healing Marks. Bruce G Epperly
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Praise for Healing Marks
Healing Marks is truly inspirational, timely, insightful, and wise. Epperly shares his breadth and depth of knowledge in deft and accessible ways. He invites us to broaden our understanding and experience of spirituality by bringing together faith, health, body, mind, in ways that are relevant for everyday living as well as tackling the big questions of life. Through the lens of the Gospel of Mark, Epperly pushes beyond false divisions between mystical faith and rational thought and guides us into a greater knowledge, experience, and practice of hope, healing, and wholeness. This honest and challenging book engages hard questions rather than offering up disruptive theological platitudes or pathways of avoidance. Healing Marks is deep, profound, and useful. Individuals and groups will be rejuvenated by the experience.
Edwin David Aponte
Vice President for Academic Affairs
Dean of the Faculty and Professor Christianity and Culture
Christian Theological Seminary
“It has been said that theology begins where the pain is . . .” Hand in hand with the healing stories in the Gospel of Mark, Bruce Epperly begins where the pain is, and ushers us into the heart of the big questions surrounding illness and pain. Is the disease our fault? Is it God’s will? Are we powerless in our pain? What role does faith play? Most theologians who try to deal with these difficult questions leave only more questions. We need an adequate theology that can embrace our pain without feelings of guilt on the one hand, or feelings of powerlessness on the other. No theologian I know deals with the difficult questions of faith and illness with more clarity and insight than Bruce Epperly. The healing stories of Mark suddenly become our stories, bringing us into contact with a new way of understanding what healing really means, one which brings about both emotional well-being and spiritual liberation.
Dr. Epperly deftly challenges the Calvinistic notion of an all-controlling God--popularized today in the writings of Rick Warren--in favor of a relational God of love and creative transformation. He sees Jesus as one who desires our active participation in the healing process. “We are not all-powerful, nor can we create our own realities,” says Epperly, “but our decisions shape how we experience life and can lead to liberating hope and equanimity in the most challenging situations.” Epperly does not just “theologize” from the ivory tower; his own personal experience with his son’s cancer allows him an intimate look at pain from the inside. Epperly writes as one who understands; he also writes with a holistic view, offering us healing practices or “healing marks” to help unleash the healing power within. As a Reiki master teacher and one of the finest process theologians of his generation, he possesses the unique gift of uniting biblical text and theology with holistic healing practices, and doing so in an accessible, clear writing style. Healing Marks is an important book for those suffering illness, for pastors, and for all who love the stories of Jesus.
Patricia Adams Farmer
author of The Metaphor Maker and Embracing a Beautiful God
Without skirting hard questions and with extraordinary insight, Bruce Epperly shows how healing texts of scripture connect with the contexts and broken texts of ordinary people’s stories to create transforming spiritual experiences. Healing, he demonstrates, is multifaceted in the Gospels and now: Jesus’s touching dirt-poor sick folks and well-heeled tax collectors bids us to spiritual practices and social justice using scientific tools.
Kent Ira Groff
Denver, Colorado
Retreat leader, spiritual guide, and author of Honest to God Prayer and Clergy Table Talk
HEALING MARKS:
HEALING AND SPIRITUALITY
IN MARK’S GOSPEL
BRUCE G. EPPERLY
Energion Publications
Gonzalez, FL
October, 2012
Copyright © 2012 Bruce G. Epperly
Scripture quotations are taken are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U. S. A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Cover Design: Henry Neufeld
Cover Art: © Loveliestdreams | Dreamstime.com
EPub Edition
Print ISBNs:
ISBN10: 1-938434-13-7
ISBN13: 978-1-938434-13-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012951594
A WORD OF THANKSGIVING
This is a very personal book. It emerges from nearly thirty years of living with the healing stories of Jesus. I discovered these stories in a life-changing way as a young college professor, seeking to make sense of the growing interest in complementary and alternative medicine. My interest in personal and global healing increased during seventeen years as a chaplain and professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine, where I was among the first persons to teach courses on spirituality and medicine at a major medical school. Over the years, I have embraced Jesus’ healing ministry as a pastor, professor, reiki teacher, and spiritual guide. I have wrestled with the meaning of Jesus’ healing ministry and God’s role in healing and sickness the hard way as a pastor, friend, child, spouse, and parent – with fear and trembling in hospital rooms, hospices, gravesides, and healing services. I have heard testimonies about the power of God to cure illness, but I have also sat at the bedside of dying friends and congregants, who have done everything right, according to the principles of their faith traditions and philosophies – personal and intercessory prayers, positive thinking and affirmations, meditation and diet, complementary medical treatments, and visits to faith healers and energy workers – along with the best modern medicine has to offer in treatment and palliation.
Along the way, I have benefited from a variety of healing companions, from whom I’ve learned much about healing in shared healing ministry and creative dialogue, whether in person or print: Morton Kelsey, Susan Trout, John Harvey Gray, Mary Jane Pagan, Larry Dossey, and Dale Matthews. I am grateful for their insights and guidance in the areas of healing and wholeness.
I am grateful to my publisher Henry Neufeld and editor Jody Neufeld for their support and editorial assistance, respectively. I am thankful to Bob Cornwall, a faithful and insightful pastor, for introducing me to Energion Publications. I am thankful beyond words to two friends, both of whom have faced health challenges, Anna Rollins and Patricia Adams Farmer, whose reading of the text reminded me that the pathway to healing goes through the valley of the shadow and not around it!
My life has been enriched by two faith communities, concerned with healing and wholeness, Georgetown University Protestant Ministry and Disciples United Community Church (Lancaster, Pennsylvania), as well as several congregations and denominational groups with whom I have led retreats and taught classes. I am grateful for their generosity along with the insights of my students at Lancaster Theological Seminary and Wesley Theological Seminary.
My faith has been challenged and strengthened by loving relationships with friends and family facing serious and life-threatening illnesses with whom I’ve practiced healing prayer, reiki healing touch, and personal and communal laying on of hands. From them, I’ve learned that love is at the heart of healing. Through it all, I have grown in spirit, love, and insight with my partner in life, ministry, and parenting for over thirty years, Katherine Gould Epperly.
May everyone who reads this text be blessed with God’s healing touch in body, mind, spirit, and relationships. May we all discover God’s abundant life in every moment of living and dying, and experience God’s healing touch that transforms cells and souls, and enables us to experience healing even when a cure is no longer possible. As scripture proclaims, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Epiphany 2012
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