I started to name this post “The Art of Healing” in a sort of ironic way, because what I know about healing could fit a postage stamp. But then I felt a frisson of fear that someone might read that and think I had answers or instructions and be terribly disappointed when what I really offered was my tiny hard-learned truth that healing tends to be something that happens to us, not something we make happen ourselves.

All I have really learned is that I can participate–as best I can and am able–with healing. I can make room for small practices that help me be more open to the Spirit: quiet listening, stillness, walking in creation at my own pace, breathing slow and deep, leaning more into curiosity and grace rather than judgment within and without, befriending myself as much as I possibly can. But I am finding that’s a tiny speck truth that holds a galaxy of freedom in it for someone like me.

As someone both hard-wired and well-trained to perform, I immediately recognize benchmarks sketched out by someone else as urgent, laudable demands. I joke about being a recovering straight-A student. But unlearning those patterns of an external-centric, someone-else-always-has-the-answers orientation is a lifetime’s work.

Even and especially when it comes to healing.

All of us are on some sort of healing journey. Many—most?– of us wish we were farther along than where we actually are. Even in the smallest, run of the mill healing experiences, like dealing with a really bad cold as I am now, there’s often an internal and external tendency to pushpushpush forward. There’s things to do, calendars to obey, ministries to administer, people to serve, lessons to teach, sermons to write, expectations to meet (insert the words of your Inner Taskmaster here)!!

As if viruses can be out-willed. As if we nephesh are machines, just a little oil here, replace this worn out part, clank-click-twist-and-shut, and boom! Ready to go!

Just take this medicine, this home remedy, this zinc-coated lozenge—no, wait! Studies show that zinc doesn’t really help. Take this instead! That’s the ticket: this cold medicine that’s been on the market for ages (you know the one we told you over and over, “take this and you’ll be better in no time!”)—no, wait! Studies have shown it has almost no effect on congestion. So…ummmm…just rest and by tomorrow or the day after you’ll be raring to go! And even if you aren’t, hurry up and get back to it!

By next week, I likely will be fine. Or at least back to my normal. But the thing I am reminded every single time I get a really bad cold is that it takes as long as it takes to run its course and my system to recover.

And even more so, every single time I get a bad cold I think of people who deal with chronic illness, urgent diagnoses, life-altering accidents… people whose “normal” requires a complete re-figuring. Families I have walked with through the years who have re-made their lives in response to a circumstance completely out of their control. Nephesh whose everyday existence challenges every jot and tittle of our cultural myth of constant upward production and progress.

And how human beings have been doing this hard work for millennia. How pain and suffering and struggle are an integral part of what it means to be human and alive, even if our modern lives want to tell us they are aberrations or worse, that we are aberrations when experiencing hard times.

From where I sit now, propped up in bed surrounded by tissues, lozenges, cold meds (that may or may not be remotely effective), and a humidifier, supported by good health insurance, a compassionate family and congregation, I want so badly to be more untangled than I am from these lies about suffering and healing that alienate us from ourselves. I want to get better at recognizing those lies when they float themselves into my congestion-fuzzy brain or burrow into my neighbor’s self-judgment that she should be dealing with her grief “better.” I am markedly better at recognizing these lies when someone else says them than when I hear them in my own self-chatter. So there’s that.

The part of me that recognizes those lies loves Advent. I crave the stillness and wonder and waiting and even the sharply pointed warning “Prepare!” by John the Baptist —a strange character in any story but especially in our modern always-upwardly-progressing, manufactured-cheer-no-pain-here holiday season myth.

You bet I want to prepare! I want space and time and courage for a clear-eyed gaze like John’s. I want to burn up all that chaff that clogs up our lives and keeps us from truth. I want to clear the decks of everything that keeps me spinning and toiling for treasures that do not keep so I can sit down and see the treasure that is already ours.

Come on John, I’m urging this Advent as the lies seem stronger than ever to me, give us that truth that leads us manger-side.

I want all the time the next four weeks can give us. Every minute. Not so I can gobble it up, but so we can marinate, soak slow and deep and long in this gift of a season of preparation. A season where pain and suffering and struggle and grief and messy, prickly humanity are all “normal,” welcome, accepted, seen, valued. For me, at least, that’s way for me to “prepare Him room.”

If I know anything about healing, it’s that healing takes its own time. I can walk or sit or lie down in its pace or I can choose not to. But the season will take as long as it takes. Ugh. Whew. Thanks be to God. Amen.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in HEARTS ON FIRE

Rev. Alicia Davis Porterfield lives in Greenville, NC, is mom to one teenaged and two young adult sons, and is part of a clergy couple.