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I can tell this is going to be agony -- the mere topic of "getting well", which is no topic without the reality of health behind it, like blood held just barely from flowing behind the scab. Can I write about something I don't yet have??? And who will bother to cut through the dense mat of words that will be necessary, in order to get one second's glimpse of the beautiful clearing behind?

The issue here is that getting well requires God's intervention. What to say to an atheist? I guess I would say that the God an atheist is fleeing is really some devil in disguise, and not God at all -- remembering that a devil's "existence" or "non-existence" is something like a virus that can only come to life when it infests a human will. (I say this so that people don't waste their time disputing about the existence of the devil.) In this spirit the pseudo-God that an atheist attacks is, God help us, most likely a demonic non-existence that only thrashes within human delusion like a giant parasite. That is not God. God is other and real and wholly worth one's love and worship.

Some rabbi (I think his name was Lawrence Hoffman?) said that he used to talk to atheistic Jews he knew by asking them to describe the God they didn't believe in. When they were finished he would say to them "I don't believe in *that* God either." It really matters that you first get a glimpse of the God you reject -- that is, the real God, not the demon who tries to impersonate him -- before you reject the one whom, if you really *do* glimpse him, you will not be able to reject. The God of reason who is kicked around in the debating halls of humans is not the God who heals, unless only insofar as being kicked around is a sort of pathway into his utter kindness and splendor.

What a huge digression! I only wanted to say that if healing is into God's safe place it can only be done by God, ultimately. (And if ultimately, then also immediately.) Otherwise, you have this picture of let's say a rapist being cured of cancer so that he is able to go out and rape again, which is as far from health as it is possible to go. What are you healed into? What are you healed to do?

Is an addict "healed" of his withdrawal agony by being given the drug? What is health, what is it truly? Where is health? This simple person, a disgusting creature, a sinner, wants to know where it is, how to find it.

I haven't even gotten near my August subject, which was to be the story of a church's search for its own healing. Perhaps my inability to get to my own topic is another indication that I am unwell. Or maybe the digression pulls me into its space for a reason. A good reason, as good as the Maker of reasons.

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