It was a hot summer day in the mid-western US as I approached a dusty, small town marked by an “unincorporated” sign on its only road. With only a handful of houses and a single church, I pulled into the church parking lot and stared at the simple country house that housed the local pastor. What on earth am I doing here?!
One week prior, my meditation teacher, Joy, had asked for my help. She was taking a flight and asked that I drive her to the small airport a few towns down the road. After she checked in, we sat at the chairs in the airport and looked out the windows. Joy was always excited about everything, as she saw each opportunity as holding purpose and divine direction for the path we are to walk.
A woman in her late 50s approached us with an uncertain smile and asked for our help. She had lost most of her hearing and needed our assistance to know when the plane was boarding. We agreed and motioned for her to sit with us and join the conversation about the beautiful summer day.
This woman, who was about to impact my life greatly, started telling us her story. She had a terrible infection some years back and was prescribed antibiotics by her doctor to remedy the infection. The woman was not informed that a risk of deafness was a possible side effect of the antibiotics she had been given.
Joy gasped, started crying, and extended her magnanimous warmth as she caressed the woman’s arm. I felt something inside of me sink. Then Joy asked the next question, the question that was sitting on the tip of my tongue like a razor blade.
“What antibiotic has done this to you?” Joy asked.
The woman stated the name of the antibiotic she had been given, and I immediately lost the wind in my lungs. We all sat silent for a moment, and then Joy began to cry loudly, in a song that could be heard throughout the entire airport.
Gathering herself by smoothing her curly, purple-hennaed hair and blotting her eyes with a tissue from her purse, Joy fished for her address book. She tore out a page from the notes section in the back and quickly wrote a name and phone number on the paper. She passed it to me just as the flight attendant called for the boarding of the flight. In both dismay and gratitude, we all took a deep breath and glanced at each other through the shambles of the bomb that had just been dropped in front of us.
“Please call this man. He will be able to help you. You need to get off of those antibiotics.” Joy pulled me close to her for an embrace before she and our newest friend headed toward the gate. The women both waved at me as they headed off to their destination while I contemplated my own.
As I sat outside the pastor’s home in the dusty town, I contemplated the terrible run-ins I had with Christians. I was raised by them but quickly learned that it was not my path. Getting kicked out of church at the age of 14 because the pastor didn’t like my questions about the gender of God or why there are two creation stories was a part of my history. The pastor who had kicked me out of church avoided me at the wedding of a family friend some years later. He moved across the room, always keeping a certain distance from me, as I moved through the reception greeting my friends. He kept the same distance from me in the parking lot.
I had nothing against Jesus, really. In fact, I was pretty sure we would be friends, and that he too wouldn’t be so keen on the dogma and divides that had been created around his name. Now, still a teenager but an “adult,” I was reentering Christendom for the purpose of healing, of all things. I took a deep breath as I opened my car door and headed to the house.
The somewhat elderly pastor greeted me at the door with a soft smile, and he motioned for me to enter his home. He was dressed in plain clothes; khaki pants and a neatly pressed button up plaid shirt, although this summer day was unusually warm. I followed the pastor into his office and sat in a small wooden chair in front of his desk which was the home of many stacks of paper.
“Let me take a look at you,” he said as he leaned over his desk to take a look into my eyes. He asked to see my hands, and he took a careful look at both sides and then studied my cuticles. He pulled a thermometer out of his desk and gently shoved it into my mouth. “Hummm” he said with a grumble and a raised eyebrow. After his initial assessment, he sat back quietly to listen to the story of my symptoms and battles with recurring infections throughout my childhood.
After spending some time going down my long history of health issues and interventions, my teenage curiosity got the better of me. At some point, I could no longer focus on what was wrong with me, as I had become more interested in the particulars of his story. “How did you learn to be a homeopath?” I asked.
“My mother was a homeopath from Germany, and when she came to the US, she taught me everything that she knew.”
“You know, there are homeopathic remedies that can dissolve tumors.” “I had a patient once who came to me with large, cancerous tumors and a terrible prognosis. I gave him mistletoe, among other things, and the remedies dissolved the tumors entirely. He was cured of his cancer.”
I stared at the pastor in both joy and disbelief. I knew the allopathic system of medicine had not helped me. It had even harmed me. When facing a plunge into a completely unknown world, there is always an initial reaction to resist or flee. For a chronically ill person, however, the more immediate instinct is to jump in fully, for the sake of hope, for an end to the suffering. But the programming of our former paradigm still remains there to try to hold us back.
“Look, I know that you have a thyroid condition because it is 100 degrees F today and your body temperature is 95 degrees. If you were older, your blood wouldn’t flow properly and you’d be dead.”
“Take this remedy daily and monitor your temperature as well. When your temperature returns to normal, stop taking the remedy as your thyroid will have been healed. And next time you feel an infection coming on, take these herbs and the infection will be eliminated. There is no longer a need for your antibiotic prescription from your doctor as that will cause more problems for you than good.”
The pastor passed me two paper bags filled with the homeopathic and herbal remedies that he recommended as I exchanged a modest amount of cash for his services. Could healing really be this simple?
Driving on the dusty road back to my hometown, I contemplated the natural world and how it might be possible that it contains everything that we need to heal and thrive. Perhaps we just do not understand it adequately enough to be able to know its secrets. If they are secrets at all. I had been learning through meditation that giving things space is often all that is needed in order to learn the answers. They exist in the space without the constant analytical clammer of our minds. I recalled an argument with my mother a few years prior when I was refusing to go to church.
“I feel more spirituality in the parking lot!” I shouted. Angry about being forced into something that wasn’t mine, my intent was never to hurt her. Needing space to breathe was my only intent; to feel things outside of the sterile box of the church with all of its prescribed sit down, stand up, functions and ceremony. I preferred to be among the wind and the birds and to hide my offerings to the divine in the hollows of the trees; to be around what is alive.”
“You are NOT taking those herbs the next time you get an infection!!!” my mother stated harshly as I returned to her home holding two bags of herbs from the homeopath, hoping to tell her of all that I had learned. She was afraid, and I understood why. However, I had already made my decision. In few words, I stated what I knew to be true; the path I had been walking with allopathy was not working, and continuing down that path would shorten my life.
I took the thyroid remedies and monitored my temperature, and just as the homeopath had predicted my temperature was normal within one month of taking the remedies. Placing the bottle of antibiotics that my doctors had prescribed into a drawer and closing it with firm determination, I was walking away from what was no longer working. And when I felt the familiar sense of an infection coming on, I took the herbs from the homeopath, and the infection process was immediately halted and reversed.
My family was astonished, and my grandmother immediately asked me for the name of the homeopathic pastor so that she could make an appointment. She was going through her own healing process, having been diagnosed with breast cancer a second time, this time in her bones. After she had seen the homeopath and started following his recommendations, her Oncologist pulled her aside to ask what she was doing differently when her bloodwork came back so unusually improved.
When we step outside of the boxes of all that is familiar and head down that dusty road of the unknown in search of a new possibility, we must learn to embrace the danger and doubt that it entails. Because often times staying in the same, familiar place is more dangerous. And while we may find an answer on these winding roads, or pieces of the larger puzzle, we must not attach to them so tightly that we allow them to become our new paradigm that then boxes us in.
Knowledge and healing are alive, much like us; dynamic and expanding. These things live on their own terms. When we seek to possess them or attempt to narrowly define what they are with stark conclusions, they quickly leave us. It is not our business to draw conclusions. Similarly, it is not our business to determine what is possible. The roads to knowledge and healing never end, but cross with other paths that contain within them new and other opportunities. We must only be willing to be open to them as new friends on our path.
©Cardinal Speaks