Anybody Can Do This

by Jason Kinchen

I’ve now prayed over hundreds of people this week.  I feel I should
now have something profound to say about how the Spirit works in a place of desperate poverty like Haiti.  Sigh. I guess I’ll have to get back to you on that.  And I did wind up praying over many men during the week.  I don’t know what happened that first day, but the rest of the days plenty of men honored me by allowing me to lay hands on them and invoke God’s healing power.

So much for my treatise on gender bias in spiritual ministrations.

Though I did get more comfortable though the week, I still feel like any of my teammates would be equally qualified to do what I did. Thank God for the Bible and the Prayer Book – and mean that in a very practical sense.  I would have been a babbling fool without them.
Sidebar: If you have only seen the BCP prayers for Holy Eucharist,Rite II Sunday Morning, you are missing out on some amazingly beautiful words in the rest of it.  To wit – check out this little gem tucked away in the Ministrations to the Sick:

In the Morning

This is another day, O Lord.  I know not what it will bring forth, but make me ready, Lord, for whatever it may be.If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely.If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly.If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently.And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly.Make these words more than words, and give me the Spirit of Jesus.

Amen.

Make these words more than words.  Amen.  I guess that is the trick,isn’t it?  I guess I could extend that to our whole team’s activities– make these pills more than pills; make these blood tests more than blood tests; make these pressure cuffs more than pressure cuffs.  All my friends who really ministered to the sick were also engaged in a form of prayer, just as I, in praying, was engaged in a form of therapy.

The temptation is to think that the therapeutic effect is mostly delivered to the Haitian people whom we served.  I suspect an even more profound impact on our own souls.  The fact of the matter is that in the vast majority of cases, we just will not ever know the effects of our physical ministrations.  The only thing we can be sure of is the transformation in ourselves.

At our last night’s reflections, we talked about the things we will bring back with us. Inevitably, we told stories of the wonderful things we had seen in Haiti – the miracles we had seen in the lives of people we know here.  But miracles are about transformation. The true blessing will be the way in which these people follow us home.

Haiti and the US are opposites in many ways – perhaps most ways.  And there are ways in which they need each other.  The conventional wisdom is all about what the US can and should do for Haiti.  She suffers crushing poverty, unemployment and completely daunting health and social issues.  But, the US suffers the burden of acquisitiveness, the addiction of adding to our store of earthly treasures which creates its own kind of spiritual poverty.  A trip to a place like Haiti is a tonic for those kinds of sickness.

O God, the source of all health: So fill my heart with faith in your love, that with calm expectancy I may make room for your power to possess me, and gracefully accept your healing; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

I’m telling you – that Prayer Book just rocks!