‘It is not medicine that heals, it is love.’
I’ve said it to people in conversation, even to my personal physician—and he agreed with me! I’ve written it to my closest friends in messages and emails. I’ve thanked God for it, the healing that comes from love, not just from the feeling of love, but from the actions that love inspires. I’ve reminisced how I used to hold my sons when they were very young, and sick with fever, sitting on my lap facing me, bare chest to bare chest, rocking them gently to calm them and to absorb the fever from their hot bodies into my cool one, or how as a sick and frightened child, one of them would slip into papa’s bed, to sleep in safety. And I’ve thought about the strange sharing of others’ sicknesses and distress by holding them close to my heart, spiritually, by prayer, and how they have done the same for me.
As holy apostle Paul writes, ‘If one part suffers, every part suffers with it’ (1 Corinthians 12:26), to which verse my experiences have given very personal meaning.
Here is a word from Elder Païsios, one of my teachers, in which he describes this same idea, that it is love that heals. The elder writes,
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3O1g9vB8RZolTWQugpZEc08yY2hPFoYcoPn3KIK7npQXi5X21d-QSJ4ZYV801mSQY14TKRyXQ02H0IZRmLiWHw0YNOZJPhETX0tLhtydcGVj1D1fftaz5t6oonOUeQXZgEwA2_Q/s200/paisios.jpg)
— Elder Païsios of the Holy Mountain (Athos)
Ameyn! Ameyn! Thanks for sharing this again with us!
ReplyDeleteLove is one of the most important attributes of Jesus. Christians must love Jesus and love their neighbors at all times.
ReplyDeleteWhen a person is sick, demonstrating love for that person will assist him in getting better faster.
Empathy is also important in promoting healing; that is, a feeling of another person's condition as if it were your own.