Three friends have suffered serious illness in the recent past: the first, breast cancer, the second, colon cancer, and the third, migraine headaches and depression. All three turned to the resources of traditional medicine but looked beyond them as well. As one of them said, "I depend on my doctor for fixing. It's up to me to find sources of support and healing." And all three, members of mainline Protestant denominations now or at one time, engaged in what I have come to call theological creativity—the willingness to reconfigure major concepts of one's religious traditions. The goal of such creativity is to construct a worldview that is coherent with experiences of both suffering and healing, rendering these experiences both bearable and fruitful by making them meaningful.

For many years I have been interested in healing, especially alternative healing, as an arena of theological experimentation and creativity. I have become convinced, primarily from new religious movements and women's theologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that the theological imagination is a powerful resource in health care. Theological creativity often requires the integration of insights from religious worldviews other than one's own and from disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, and literature.

Historically, the practice of borrowing insights and seeking correctives from other religious traditions has been called syncretism, a term with negative connotations in many theological circles—a practice to be guarded against. On the other hand, many theologians and religious scholars speak of this phenomenon as "gift exchange." These exchanges can bring about major transformations in people's theological assumptions about God, human possibilities and limitations, and the meaning of suffering. It is my sense that these transformations do not necessarily motivate departure from religious communities but can instead result in an expansion of personal spiritual boundaries.

Theological creativity can result in valuable spiritual understandings and includes three broad characteristics: God as immanent; shifting perceptions of identity and responsibility; and suffering as inevitable, not as punishment.

God as Immanent
The first characteristic is that of God, or more broadly, ultimate reality. There is an emerging emphasis on the immanence, the indwelling, of the sacred—in the world, in ourselves, in our relationships, in every atom of the universe. This notion is central to contemporary movements such as Theosophy and New Age spirituality. With regard to healing, an emphasis on immanence brings the divine down to earth, making the sacred more accessible, subverting institutional restrictions on who may have access to the divine, and constructing models of God that seem to be more consonant with scientific renderings of how the universe operates. Emphasis on immanence tends to diminish models of God as person, which can create emotionally mixed consequences. To depersonalize God is one way to avoid understanding God as a far-distant being who, for unfathomable reasons, imposes suffering on creation. As my friend with breast cancer put it, "I want a God who is more presence than person." What is lost is the possibility of reliance on a God who takes a personal interest, however ambiguous, in human suffering.

For many the loss is worth the gain. A God understood as presence rather than person, does not have a directly causational effect on either suffering or healing. This same woman does not feel that she, either, is responsible for her illness. However, she does feel that she is responsible for how she deals with her illness and counts on God as present with her. She thinks of her body as a garden that must be well tended—by means of nutrition, meditation, exercise, and the like—so that illness does not feel invited to dwell there. Her judgment of who or what is responsible for both sickness and healing is an example of theological creativity. It also illustrates the second theme: shifting perceptions of who we are as human beings and what our responsibilities are as sufferers and as healers.

Shifting Perceptions of Identity and Responsibility
Undergirding alternative healing therapies are understandings of human nature and agency that emphasize individual responsibility for healing. This stance emerges readily from an emphasis on the immanence of the divine: because we have access to the divine, we also have the obligation to draw on this access in our own healing. Further, due to the influence of occult and Eastern understandings of the human person, there is a growing conviction among those who use alternative therapies that the individual is a highly complex entity living within a network of multiple relationships. Theosophical worldviews, for example, understand the human person as composed of material, spiritual, and emotional layers, all of which play a part in getting sick and getting well. Taken together, ideas about divine immanence and expanding notions of human complexity promote a confidence in the innate healing capacity of each person. Whatever the worldview, the rituals, or the naming of the innate power invoked, it is believed that finally we heal ourselves and each other by finding ways to activate this inner—and therefore accessible—capacity.

Such views prompt those who are suffering to think of healing as a process of self-discovery, of learning to listen to inner wisdom, of taking for granted the basic wholeness that is one's birthright, one's natural state. Part of the healing process, therefore, must proceed from inner to outer rather than the reverse. For most of the people I encounter, this stance does not preclude the use of traditional medicine or create a need to depart from a traditional faith community. But, as my Presbyterian friend with colon cancer has expressed, she wants more than the fixing that traditional medicine offers, essential as it is to her recovery. She sees it as her responsibility to find that "more." For my friend with migraines and depression, this responsibility takes the form of practicing and teaching yoga. As she sees it, faithfulness to her practice has instilled in her a confidence in an undefinable and inner sense of the sacred that she never derived from Christianity alone. For her, it has been a source of both physical and emotional healing.

Copyright Micah Marty

Suffering as Inevitable, Not as Punishment
A third characteristic is the inquiry into ideas about the nature of both suffering and healing. I encounter many efforts to distinguish among suffering that is inevitable because we are human, suffering that is unnecessary but inflicted on us because we are particular kinds of human beings, and suffering that we choose to take on for the sake of justice. These various kinds of suffering require different theological responses and different kinds of healing. Distinctions aside, I find an ever more frequently cited insistence that suffering is inevitable, if not necessary, and must be borne—not as punishment, but simply as part of the way things are. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, this claim is a rejection of the idea that efforts to live a blameless life will help fend off suffering.

I encounter everywhere the powerful insight that there is a difference between curing and healing. Every friend I spoke to cited this distinction as pivotal because it has opened up for them new possibilities of what healing can mean—including death. Curing is associated with improvement in physical health. Healing is tied to the search for "wholeness." The content of wholeness is related not to the achievement of physical, emotional, or spiritual perfection but to the persistence of hope. It is the wherewithal to keep on, to take one more step, to face what must be faced, to do what must be done. To be healed is to find sufficient hope to proceed, whatever that might mean in any particular case. To offer healing to others is to take action to elicit sources of hope in ourselves and in those we care for. What forms hope takes is dependent on what possibilities and resources are available to us. One of those resources is the power of the theological imagination.

Mary Farrell Bednarowski, Ph.D., is a Professor of Religious Studies at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.