Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “We cannot measure how you heal” by John Bell and Graham Maule.
The whole area of spiritual healing is one in which attitudes vary among Christians, from those who dismiss the idea that God can intervene at all in natural processes to those who believe that any physical or mental illness can be healed with prayer if only we have enough faith. But most of us, I hope, would accept that God can and does heal, and that an apparent lack of healing in response to prayer is not the fault either of the sufferer or the one who prays for them.
That seems to be the starting point of this hymn: we cannot understand the “how” or “why” of healing, yet “we believe your grace responds where faith and doubt unite to care”. The second part of this first verse refers to Jesus’ blood on the cross, which is an essential part of a specifically Christian attitude to healing: Jesus, the “wounded healer”, suffered both physical and mental pain, to an extent that few humans are unlucky enough to share, and only the truly evil would wish on anyone else.
The second verse acknowledges what is increasingly understood by medical practitioners as well as faith healers, that good health and effective healing are heavily dependent on psychology and on a person’s past experience. Pain, guilt, fear and bad memories are indeed “present as if meant to last”, preventing us from achieving health in the roundest sense of that term. The antidote to that is explained here as “love which tends the hurt we never hoped to find”. The third verse also makes reference in the phrase “some have come to make amends” to the fact that lack of forgiveness, either for our own sins or for the ways that others have hurt us, can also lead to ill health and prevent healing.
Many people have testified to the healing work of God’s Holy Spirit in uncovering past experiences that are at the root of later suffering. I recently read “A smile on the face of God”, by Adrian Plass, a biography of the Revd Philip Ilott who experienced this as part of his own healing as well as being given the spiritual gift of bringing God’s healing to others. The process was not a pleasant experience for him, and his story is certainly not one of ‘happy ever after’ (in fact he died of multiple sclerosis) but it does illustrate many of the points made above, and along the way he discovered the peace of God that can be present even though pain, which sometimes is in fact the healing that is needed.
Yes to all Stephen has written above. I think this is deservedly one of John Bell’s better-known hymns, and I appreciate it.
However, I confess I don’t particularly like John Bell’s arrangement of the tune, and a long while ago (whilst using the tune for another – about the Hubble Space Telescope, would you believe?) I rewrote the bass and harmony for the melody. The tune is particularly useful for DLM words which don’t have exactly the right numbers of syllables to the line, as the many slurs allow each verse to fit in its own way to the tune.