March 3, 2003

Dear Drummers,

The second hour of this Friday's drum will provide you an opportunity to ask for healing. That word—healing—can be terribly loaded with all sorts of implications and meanings. In our drum meetings together, there is a guiding principle—it is a Unitarian Universalist principle, and I believe it sincerely—it is ultimately up to each of you to make meaning from our experiences together. My job, as I see it, is to open the door wide enough for you step through to receive an experience. Then it is up to you to decide what that experience means for you.

So, for this week’s drum to have meaning for you, you will need to ask for what you want healed. If you really wish, you can ask for some kind of generalized healing for others, or for the world, but I encourage you to try to make this request more specific to you and yourself. What needs healing may be instantly clear to you, or it may not. It may be physical, or it may be emotional, psychological or spiritual. (Part of your decision of what to ask for may depend on whether or not you believe ritual—or the spirit world, or the holy spirit-can (or will) deliver healing on the physical level. I cannot decide that for you.)

If you don't have an instantly clear feeling of what to ask for I offer this as a guide:

Something has been broken and needs to be repaired

Something has been lost and needs to be returned

Something has invaded and needs to be removed

Maybe one of those phrases will somehow appeal to you, and generate an idea of what it is you want to ask to be healed. Don't stress out if there seems to be no firm answer to any of this. Arriving on Friday with only a vague idea is fine. Arriving with only one of those phrases in your mind will be enough.

I think the essence of all of this is to ask. The act of asking for healing is somehow really important. A great line from St. Francis of Assisi says: "Praying is important because it irrigates the heart." I extend this to mean that asking for healing makes us vulnerable to the spirit (whether that spirit is "in here," in the imagination or psyche, or whether it is "out there"—a separate force from humans). So, asking is a tremendous act of faith—a difficult and intimate act, an act of opening to the "Thou."

This brings up a really important question—one that often blocks people from asking for healing. The question is “How can I ask for healing (1) if I’m not sure if I have faith in anything or (2) if I don’t know what faith is or (3) if I don’t know what kind of god I believe in or (4) if I’m not sure I believe prayer can be healing. These are all questions I’ve struggled with for 12 years as I have pursued my mystical and shamanic studies. You may or may not have these questions, but I can tell you from my experience that they have burned brightly in me for a long time.

My answer to all the above questions comes directly out of mystical traditions from all times and cultures: All descriptions of the Holy are inaccurate. All religious language, all ritual, all ceremony can only hope to capture a very small glimpse of the power and beauty behind creation. Given the fact that we can never know more than a little bit of the Divine’s power, what is our choice—to never ask anything, to never pray, to never seek, to never question? Or is our choice to say “I cannot know the power that permeates creation but I can ask, and see if anything in my life changes because of the asking.”

I don’t have any wonder-filled stories for you of healing ceremonies that I have done where people have jumped out of wheelchairs or tossed their crutches away. I do have many stories—none particularly magical, of how I have experienced the power of prayer in my life—even with all the questions. In certain ways, the power of prayer is in the changes of consciousness that happen to the person praying. As St. Theresa of Avilla said: “The heart has divine instincts; it just needs to be turned loose into the sky.”

When I think of where we are right now-a culture that devalues deep emotions (especially grief), a culture that denigrates vulnerability and glorifies destructive might, a culture that values the physical (science) over the ephemeral (spirit), it seems to me that asking for healing is a daring, difficult, and necessary thing to do. I also think that the powers of anti-life hope to convince us not to ask for healing, and this is one act of defiance against those forces that tell us to give up. I think that the powers of anti-life and anti-beauty want us not to be healed, because a healed populace is a populace that can move out of weakness, fear, depression and powerlessness, and can begin to demand change.

So to get ready for Friday, you might think about if you have a spiritual figure that carries, for you, the power of healing. Maybe it is the Christ, or Mary, or a Buddhist goddess, or a spirit guide, or an animal, or whatever. While it is best to have as specific an image as possible, for some people, more abstract images may be most useful. For example, "the Holy Spirit," or "God", or "The presence" or "Love" or "the Light." Or “the circle of life” (Ojibwe artists often depict the Divine as a ball of warm yellow light with tendrils that touch other things in the picture—an image of some central spark that gives its energy to all living beings). If you have a figure or image like this in your spiritual life, you may want to spend these few days preparing to ask that figure to conduct a healing. If you don't have such a figure, don't worry.

The process of hour two will involve a traditional shamanic journey to the "Lower World" to meet a healing presence. You can begin this journey with the intention of meeting that figure that is important to you, or you can take this journey not knowing who that presence will be.

In all of our sessions together you are free to participate on any level that you wish. As I see it, there are three essential ways to approach this kind of work:

1) The theatrical way: This is interesting and fun, but I don’t “believe” any of it. The imagery and poetry are beautiful as artistic expression. I like being with others, and I like doing something spiritual, but faith is not an important aspect in this experience for me.

2) The psychological way: All religious images are psychological. There is no God outside the human psyche. Religious imagery and ceremony are valuable in that they speak to the imagination, and in that way, prayer can be effective because it releases tension, and creates a meditative place whereby I may gain insight into my life.

3) The spiritual way: There is a force—or forces, or beings—in nature and beyond nature that responds to our calls for help and our yearning for wisdom and prayers. Ritual—with focused intention and open sincerity—is the way we communicate with the Holy Spirit and seek its active response in our life.

I emphasize that none of these ways is better, higher, deeper, harder, or more complex or worthwhile than any other level. I offer the description of levels only to help you make sense of what I am doing.

See you Friday!

Jaime

Back to Drumming Group Letters