Is Faith a Factor?
By Kayla Webley
Medill News Service
January 23, 2008
At age 26, Debra Barford confronted the sudden reality of her own death.
Her doctors diagnosed her with lupus and she faced kidney failure. In treatment, Barford said she struggled with how to move forward with her life rather than dwell on the past.
After a few years, and some additional medical setbacks, she turned to St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Chicago to help take control of her life and her illness.
“I met my illness in the same context as my religion,” she said. “What is God telling me? What is my illness telling me? What are the things I need to look at and transform?”
Almost 30 years later, at age 54, Barford is the healthiest she has ever been – and she credits her faith.
“I wouldn’t have learned any of this without reorienting my life,” she said. “It taught me to not try and control my circumstances, but to develop an active listening and discernment process.”
Barford is one of many churchgoers, religious leaders and doctors who think faith is a factor in the healing process. Though different religions have varying ideas about healing, many faithful feel it is important to use spiritual teachings to show people that illness is not punishment – that, unfortunately, bad things happen to good people.
“People ask, ‘Why did this have to happen to me?’” said Rev. Bryan Siebuhr of the Midwest Buddhist Temple in Chicago. “In Buddhism we turn to the teachings of impermanence – that no one is immune from death. This will happen to all of us.”
Lifting up the sick
An important element of healing in many religions is the companionship and help a congregation can provide. Members of the Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation on Chicago’s North Side practice bikur cholim, which means visiting the sick.
“When someone is ill they shouldn’t be left alone. We must share the burden,” said Rachel Kohl Finegold, the programming and ritual director at Anshe Sholom. “This is something we take to heart – when someone is sick, you visit them. Studies have shown people with a community network do better healing and coping.”
Similarly, in Catholicism and the Episcopalian religion, the ill are prayed over, part of a healing ritual of anointing them with oil and laying hands on the sick person.
“We pray for the person to draw their strength and courage from God and that they will see Christ as a brother – someone who is there to support them,” said Rev. Valerie Balling, who leads a weekly healing session at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in New Jersey.
“The church community can really support somebody,” she said. “When faith is involved, their strength can be doubled, tripled, quadrupled.”
Healing the whole person
Dr. Ray Bianchi, a family practice physician at Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital in Luke Zurich, asks his patients whether or not they are spiritual.
That is because he believes in healing patients holistically, Bianchi said. He calls it the trinity of healing: addressing the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of the patient’s life.
“There’s this tendency to confine healing simply just to the physical healing, but really healing is much more than that,” he said. “We need to eat right, exercise, take prescribed drugs and medicine, but it doesn’t stop there. If you grow on all three levels, I promise you, you will be healthier.”
Bianchi said in his 19 years as a practicing physician he has come to know that some things might be out of his hands.
“As physicians become more experienced, they begin to see the bigger picture of their work and see things they can’t explain,” Bianchi said. “People can get caught up in the reasons why spirituality matters. We may not know the reasons, but the reality of it is there are definite health benefits.”
Doctors who support the benefits of faith and religious leaders agree that spirituality is just one part of a larger process of healing.
“I’m not saying if someone comes to get prayer that they will instantly be healed,” Balling said. “The prayer is not that God is going to come in and use a magical eraser to fix everything that is wrong.”
Read the story on the Medill News Service’s website.
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