Healing the Trinity: Church, Human and God

[Note: This essay was crafted for a theology class, not for a scripture class.]

Healing the Trinity: Church, Human and God
by
David Bottorff

I am moved by the dynamic synergy I see between God, the church and humans. Particularly striking are parallels between the church and the individual around issues of healing. Rather than separate, I see church and the individual as two expressions of the same thing: God’s grace.

Everything I read about healing points in one direction – restoration of wholeness. This applies to the individual recovering from spiritual, physical or emotional injury, as well as to the institutional church. The centrifugal forces of modern society, which as in physics are fictitious, work to tear both individuals and churches apart. By resisting entropy, the church is better positioned to heal those in need. Likewise, the individual who resists chaos brings wholeness and spiritual integrity to the church. The binding force in both cases, the thing that brings order out of the mêlée, is God. I see wholeness through spirituality as a key component of pastoral counseling.

Gestalt Theory teaches that the whole of an individual is greater than the sum of that person’s parts. So, too, is the church greater than the sum of its discrete parts. Gestalt therapist Tilda Norberg[1] has played a key role in bringing the concept of wholeness to pastoral counseling. John Koenig, writing in Practicing Our Faith,[2] noted Norberg’s credo: The healing ministry of Jesus is still continuing in the community of faith; healing includes the whole person – spiritual, physical, and emotional; and God wills our wholeness and is actively involved in our growth. Healing, Norberg says, is not just a matter of fixing things that are wrong. Rather, “Real health, for my Christian point of view, is coming to the fullness of your vocation as a child of God. It means becoming Christlike.”

One of the paradoxes faced by Christians is that healing and new growth emerges from pain and injury. Koenig notes that the point of change is represented by the cross, whether the cross upon which Jesus suffered and died before being reborn, or the cross roads we encounter in daily life, sometimes in the form of crisis or injury. Unlike the patient-physician paradigm, Christians understand healing as something much larger: restoration to wholeness, including right relationships with God, family, friends, and neighbors.

Interestingly, 12-step recovery programs are premised on the concept that change, and especially spiritual growth, occurs when a person reaches crisis or “bottom.” Fortunately, the bottom is where the person decides to stop digging, implying life can start anew at any moment, provided we seek guidance from a power greater than ourselves.

I also would like to note that just as I see parallels between the church and the individual, I see parallels with the living organisms we call family and society. Indeed, just like the church and the individual, families and society are vulnerable to a wide variety of injuries, including war, environmental degradation, and poverty.

Much of the pastoral counselor’s mission is to help clients find meaning in life. Koenig points out, the word “shalom” represents an all-encompassing peace free from meaningless suffering. I contend that all suffering is meaningless in and of itself, and that we are challenged to make meaning from the suffering. Like the pastoral counselor, the church, as a manifestation of God’s compassion, has a mission to find meaning in suffering and bring about healing and wholeness. If there is any doubt as to the Christian church’s charge to heal, Koenig draws attention to the many times Jesus either healed the sick or issued directives so to do, including Matthew 10.1, Mark 6.7, Luke 9.1-2, plus Acts 1.1-10, 4.30, and 9.32-43.

 Sister Kathleen Popko currently is executive vice president of strategy and ministry development for healthcare provider Catholic Health East. Koenig quoted her as saying, “Throughout the centuries, the church's mission has been to create the human conditions where one can experience God, particularly in those moments of vulnerability and brokenness.” Koenig said that when we embody God's healing presence through touch, concern, or liturgy, “we take part in God's activity of healing the world.”

Just as individuals use laying on of hands to facilitate spiritual and physical healing, so too, in a figurative sense, must the church lay its hands on those suffering in the world.

Both churches and individuals can get caught up in ego self-aggrandizement, in their own sense of differentness, in their own logistics and bureaucracy and politics. Ultimately, the theology of the church as well as the theology of the individual can become compromised, leading to a loss of integrity. In Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Daniel L. Migliore stresses that the church is not charged with promoting its own survival or expanding, but with representing the highest values of Christianity.[3] I contend the exact same can be said of an individual Christian. Just as Liberation Theology calls on the church to take action in the world with an eye toward justice, so too are individual humans called upon to take action in the world with an eye toward compassion. Although usually applied to the church, I believe the term “ecclesiology” also can be applied to the individual. In both cases, healing is facilitated when theological integrity – that is, adherence to the highest principles of Christianity, particularly sharing in God’s communion – are maintained.

As a human institution striving to align with God’s will, the church must admit its shortcomings if it is to give full voice to the mystery of God’s divine actions in the world. Likewise, the individual Christian is invited to abandon the trappings of ego and embrace humility as a doorway to salvation. While this guidance should apply to everyone, I see it as particularly true of pastoral counselors and other caregivers. “When we honestly admit the problems of the church – which have their roots in our forgetfulness of the profoundly social meanings of all the articles of the faith as well as in our failure to hold together faith and practice – we may begin to catch sight of the mystery of the church, which is to bear witness to the Trinitarian love of God,” Migliore said. Sometimes pain and suffering creates that doorway to mystery. It is when we embrace suffering as an opportunity to find spiritual meaning that we begin to heal, and as we heal we more fully engage the God’s mystery.

The Bible uses a wide variety of terms and expressions to describe God, just as it does to describe the church and the people of Earth. The fact no one term completely encapsulates God, the church or a human speaks volumes to the inherent enigma of each entity and advances the argument they all act in parallel as different expressions of the same thing. Most branches of Christianity embrace the Trinity, or the notion that the Godhead (ousia) finds expression as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Is it too bold to find affinity for a different type of Trinity, one that finds expression as God, human and church?

---

[1] Norberg, Tilda (2007). Stretch Out Your Hand: Exploring Healing Prayer. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press. Norberg is a United Methodist minister and founder of Gestalt Pastoral Care.

[2] Koenig, John (1997). Healing. Dorothy C. Bass (ed.), Practicing Our Faith. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

[3] Migliore, Daniel L. (2004). Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).