I’ve thought a lot about this quote from Anthony De Mello:
“People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favor progress, provided they can have it without change. Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.”
What is the church offering people today? A cure or relief?
My observation is that we have offered relief far more than we do a cure. Here’s your medication, read your Bible, pray about it, stop living in sin… etc… When will the church begin to offer a cure for all that ails this broken world?
What would the cure look like? I have an idea…
I hope to get some responses on this one!
7 comments:
I think much of the church has offered mere relief, but there are always elements of the church that have offered "cure." I think of those traditions which emphasize discipleship here and now more than getting to heaven by and by. The really tough work is reconciling the two ideas -- how can the same Jesus say, "Whoever wants to follow me must take up a cross" and "Take my yoke and learn from me, for my burden is easy and my yoke is light"? How is discipleship also salvation?
It is not wrong for the suffering to want relief. Masochism is not a Christian virtue. What we must try to avoid is forms of relief that are merely temporary anesthetics. I'm reminded of an old farmer who refused pain medication, saying, "Taking those pills is like looking out the window to see your barn is on fire and pulling down the shade. I don't want pills -- I want to know what's wrong, and I want it fixed!"
By the way, therapists have a saying similar to DeMello's: "New clients don't want to change; they want other people to change so they can feel better." The first task in therapy is convincing people that changing themselves is a lot easier than changing other people, and a lot more likely to lead to feeling better.
Thanks, I am grateful for your insight and willingness to dive deeper into this question. I don't want to leave out the probability that those who are suffering injustice and oppression do want relief. I think they would opt for the cure over the relief.
I believe there is something to the "suffering" aspect of Christianity; Christ showed us how to do the victim thing the right way and all we have ever done is use the victim card to our advantage.
After giving this some more thought, I think I may have come up with an analogy that puts it in the proper perspective. What Jesus offers is relief through cure. It is not necessarily an either/or proposition.
It is a bit like the alternative between pain pills and surgery. The surgery actually means more suffering for a while, in order to have both healing and relief later. This is what the church should offer (aka the narrow road). What pills offer is temporary relief only.
How does that analogy strike you?
But we have to know what the real alternatives are. If, in a given situation, cure is not available but relief is, there is no dishonor in choosing relief over continued suffering, provided your relief does not inflict suffering on others.
Thoughtful analogy... I have always had a philosophy that it is no longer either/or rather it is both/and... Again I am not discrediting anything related to relief. I believe that the purpose is to offer a cure. Jesus didn't just offer relief to the blind man or Jarius' daughter he also cured them.
Maybe it would be helpful to name what places in the church we have given a cure/transformation, albeit institutional? relational?
I think one question in relation to relief or cure is who is acting? When it is us--humans, we just want relief, or at least that's all we're willing to give ourselves. But if it's God whose acting, and we are open to receiving this, we are more likely to be cured. It was Jesus who cured the sick, not the other way around. But then he did say your faith has made you well, which makes it more complicated!
When I think of a cure, I think of a conversion or transformation, whether it is a direct result of God or of humanity.
Maybe it is not all that different from the different addiction groups that are out there. Even then you could say that the church has become a detox center offering relief until the healing/cure takes place. I think there are many addiction programs that have brought about healing/cure. If that is case then the church is loosing ground.
Maybe we(the Church)have become too much like the therapist's saying in Jimbo's first comment. The church doesn't want to change we want others to change so that we can feel good about ourselves... hmmm provacative!
Is the church really for detox, or has it become part of what we need to be detoxed from?
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