The Slow Way: On Healing and Beginning Again
Healing begins with vulnerability, and it begins with love.
On Healing and Beginning Again
My dad and I always shared a tendency for headaches. He got them in the mornings, or after mowing the lawn in the heat. He got them if he drank too much coffee, or not enough. He got them when he went backpacking; always when he went backpacking, his post-tent-constructing-nap necessary for survival. But, unlike me, he didn’t complain. I was a crier when started having them weekly as a teenager: When I was stressed about Algebra. When the boys I adored didn’t adore me. When I drank too much coffee or not enough. By college I took a lot of over-the-counter medication to control them. My dad did too.
We both inherited our headaches from one source, his mother, my Meemaw. She endured such terrible headaches when my dad was a child that she opted to be the first patient in my hometown to have brain surgery back in the fifties. She was a young mom of three tinies. Back then, brain surgery meant risking your life, and then staying in the hospital apart from your kids for an entire month. My dad remembered my grandpa holding him up and looking through the glass at his mother in the hospital room. I wish I’d asked her when she was living what those headaches felt like, and what the surgery accomplished for her. She must have been desperate to take that kind of risk. I’ve known that kind of desperation.
When my migraines started after a concussion and an ongoing struggle to heal, my dad was anxious. I was repeating a story he already knew. Three little ones and a mom in bed unable to cope. Dad wasn’t one for long chats, but he wanted to know how my migraines were. He checked in, and he talked about it with my mom. He worried about my kids. My dad understood that it’s terrible to have a mom in bed with a headache. I was in bed with a migraine 1 to 2 days a week for two years.
I hate that my dad died of brain cancer. Of all the things. Hadn’t he suffered enough from head pain the rest of his life? But for an entire year, he lived through a terrible series of headaches: tumor-growth pain, then brain surgery recovery, then the burn of radiation, back to the horrible pain of tumor growth, and to surgery again, and on and on. While he suffered, I wonder if he thought of me, in bed with my own migraines, my kids avoiding my room.
I’ve been reading Amy Julia Becker’s new book To Be Made Well, a book about physical and spiritual healing, and the connections between the two. “To live in God’s healing presence is like swimming in the ocean. Immense. Frightening. Powerful. Beautiful. Where, as the psalmist writes, ‘deep calls to deep’ (Psalm 42:7). Where answers don’t come easily. Where pain is exposed rather than covered over. Where healing leads to transformation.”
Amy Julia explains that in order to open ourselves up to healing, the root of the pain must be exposed. We can’t cover over our pain and expect it to go away. As I’ve learned over the years, Tylenol doesn’t heal a headache. It simply tricks the mind into believing it’s disappeared. Headaches have their way until they’ve done whatever it was they set out to accomplish.
The last massive migraine I had was in December, a handful of days before my dad died. He had stopped eating on a Thursday and that Friday I bought a flight, finished pre-Christmas tasks, and packed so I could make it to my parents in time to be with him for as long as he needed. That Saturday I was hit with a migraine and, as I was used to at that point, spent the afternoon in bed, medicated, with a heating pad on my neck and a lavender eye mask over my face.
The next day I flew to Texas.
I hesitate to tell you this story, because it still feels tender, because I don’t know what it will become. But here goes. I look back on the days that followed that flight to Texas: my dad in so much pain that he could no longer speak or drink. As I wet his lips with a sponge and rubbed his head to try to relieve the pressure, I never felt my own head pain. I thought then that it had to do with purpose and adrenaline. My body knew he needed me, and it was guiding me through those days free of pain. Then, in the days that followed his passing, I assumed I was psychologically keeping it together for my mom. I assumed I’d get home to New Jersey and my migraines would ignite again. But, a month later, there were no migraines. Each morning of January I woke without the severe neck pain I’d lived with since my fall and concussion in 2019. For two years, it had taken me an hour to get out of bed in the morning, while I stretched my neck, used a heating pad, and waited out the first head pain of the day. Now, I was getting out of bed as if the concussion had never happened: normal, easy, clear-minded.
In February, I met with my therapist and told her the truth: “I feel so guilty that I lost my dad and my migraines stopped. I don’t want to associate his death with something good.”
“Micha,” she said. “What if he took them with him? What if this is what your dad wanted?”
I thought of my dad’s memories of his mom’s headaches, his fears for my boys having to watch their mom in bed. I thought of the relentless pain in his brain, and the way I rubbed his shaved head with oil, knowing that underneath his own flesh something evil was growing and destroying the mind we all had loved so deeply. How does healing work? Did my dad get a say in mine?
Amy Julia writes about how true healing leads to transformation. It’s never a covering over; it’s always a rooting out. And it’s always a swim in the deep. It’s never tidy or a five-step process. Physical healing and spiritual healing follow a similar path: There is a place of pain, of emptiness, of ache. And when we turn to the healing work of the Divine and allow our pain to be exposed, there is no promised fix. But there is transformation that comes simply through our vulnerability.
I tend to avoid talk of healing because I hate the spiritual and emotional abuse that so often plays out in churches where healing is a gift only for the good-enough, a spiritual reward dangled over the heads of vulnerable people who are promised if they’re faithful enough, persistent enough, prayerful enough, God will swoop in and remove the suffering. When faith is the litmus test for who gets to live, more dies inside a person than the physical body. Why did my migraines leave me? I promise you I didn’t have enough faith for this one. And I certainly was not doing any trading. I would have chosen to keep my daily migraines and hold on to my dad. The prayer I prayed was for his brain to be healed, not mine.
But, that’s not how the story went. And the only answer I have to this strange miracle is that my dad loves me. If he had a say, if he got to take my migraines with him, he would have done it. It’s possible they’ll come back again. But, it seems to me that the story of Amy Julia’s book, and the story of my new life without daily pain is this: Healing begins with vulnerability, and it begins with love. And just as healing is rarely a one-time event, vulnerability and love are a way of living out the gift of wholeness.
St. Benedict’s Rule contains instructions for novices seeking to live a cloistered, monastic life: “Always we begin again,” St Benedict says. Every day. What if healing is more of a daily practice than one time event? Not necessarily a promised forever, but a tender rebirthing: My brain’s bruises finally pink and smooth. Living into a new story with open hands and a gratitude for the gift of this day without pain.
If, like Amy Julia writes, our bodies and our spirits are connected, when we seek healing in our deepest places, that healing flows out to our bodies. Wholeness and wellness are interconnected sometimes. And sometimes they’re not. That’s a mystery I’ll add to the collection of mysteries I keep in my heart’s corner. I pick them up and look at them from time to time, waiting for them to one day make sense. But, until that happens, I’ll wake up in the morning, sit up without pain, and walk to the kitchen to make coffee. At some point in that five minute stretch I’ll remember that my dad is gone, and that I’m here pain free. Each time I do, I’ll come closer to the kind of love that heals us all. Love that requires honesty, truth, and a willingness to show up as we are, asking to be made well.
Always beginning again. Every day, beginning again.
A Slow Practice
How do you begin your days with wholeness and healing in mind?
Let’s practice beginning again. When I mentioned my lifelong struggle with headaches, maybe something physical came to mind for you. Some of us are more prone to illness than others. Some of us live with chronic pain. But others may experience their pain in the form of grief, depression, fear and panic, addiction, or relational strife.
Today I want you to consider where you need healing. Where is your physical, emotional or psychological pain? Can you picture it? Can you give it an image or a symbol?
“To live in God’s healing presence is like swimming in the ocean,” Amy Julia Becker writes. “Immense. Frightening. Powerful. Beautiful. Where . . . ‘deep calls to deep.’”
Sit in a comfortable position. Breathe in. Breathe out.
I want you to close your eyes and bring to mind the image of your pain, whatever that looks like or means for you. Can you imagine yourself on a boat in the immense ocean? Your pain is something you’re carrying in your hand, like the old lady in Titanic, you walk to the edge of the boat and hold it over the edge, let it fall into the deep.
Imagine it falling into the depth of God’s healing love. Watch it float along the deep water, get swept into currents. Your pain doesn’t have to belong only to you. You can choose to release it into the presence of God everyday. You can share it.
So now imagine yourself releasing it each morning, walking to the same edge of the boat and letting it go. The seasons change. You change. And each day you release your pain.
What if you release it everyday and nothing changes about your pain, what will have changed about you? What will happen to your pain when it is apart from you in the healing presence of God? What do you want to happen to it?
Take some time to talk to God about your hopes for that pain, your desire, and your willingness to release it, beginning again and again and again.
A List of Things
Did you notice? We’re in a new space! Welcome to Substack, Slow Wayers! I’m excited to host our newsletter here, where we can engage more easily with other newsletters, and where you’re welcome to comment and communicate with me and each other. I think this could be a sweet space for us.
This week’s free downloadable image (up above!) will be available to you through email. Remember you can print it, use it as wallpaper on your phone as a reminder. Big thanks to Karsen Boyett for designing it.
Amy Julia Becker’s book To Be Made Well was released this week! It was the inspiration for this week’s newsletter and I highly recommend it for its wisdom and depth. Amy Julia is constantly a beautiful and thoughtful writer. I’d love for you to take a look.
Terry Gross interviewed Marie Yavanovich this past week about her tenure as US Ambassador to Ukraine, about her new memoir about her firing by the Trump White House. I learned a lot about the experience from her perspective, but also learned a lot about the history of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. It was fascinating.
This article about H Mart was a small, particular plunge into Korean-American culture. Even after living for a decade in San Francisco, where I was lucky enough to know and love some dear Korean-American friends, I didn’t know about the amazing cultural affinity for H Mart until I started reading Michelle Zauner’s book Crying in H Mart, in which she describes it as a “beautiful, holy place.” As I grow in my awareness of challenges that Asian-Americans experience in our white-centered culture, I’m attempting to learn about and appreciate places and moments that are particular to cultures that aren’t often centered.
For the Bible nerds out there, I thought this “Why Read the Bible in Hebrew” thread from Ari Lamm was fascinating. He goes waaaaaay deep into the verse in Jeremiah 31 in which Rachel is weeping for her children. He points out allusion after allusion, and the depth of layering in Jeremiah’s work.
I love this story. Thank you for sharing it.
This is a powerful story, even as I can feel how tender it is for you to share it. We need these stories of what is holy and unexpected and unbidden, because they break apart the tidy containers we assigned to healing or miracles or any of those weighty words we wonder if we have the right to use. I’m grateful for your words today.