c. 2000 Religion News Service

“No agnostic ever tried more assiduously than I to disprove what seemed to me the fantastic notion that God miraculously healed the sick.”

_ The late Rev. Emily Gardiner Neal.

(UNDATED) “The Reluctant Healer” (Episcopal Healing Ministry), compiled and edited by Anne Cassel, brings together selections from the writings of Emily Gardiner Neal into a spiritual autobiography chronicling a famous healer’s journey from skepticism to faith.

A journalist through and through, Neal was a classic skeptic. Her work began in the early 1950s after she felt strongly affected by witnessing a healing service. She had to investigate the phenomenon.

Like any seasoned journalist, she began by talking to those who claimed to be healed along with their pastors, families and physicians.

Her decision turned her life _ and her outlook on the world, especially the world of faith healing _ upside down. Though she later became known nationwide for her ministry based at an Episcopal church in Pittsburgh, Neal resisted the term “healer,” writes Cassel, the book’s editor.

Instead, Neal “saw herself simply as an instrument that is used for God’s healing purposes,” Cassel says. “And she saw that the word healer is used to refer to many types of people _ even some who might question the very existence of God. She believed that God acts unceasingly and creatively in many ways to touch human lives with healing grace.”

To Neal, the essential truth of healing was that God is the source, humanity the instrument. Neal never argued in favor of forsaking traditional medicine for faith healing. Instead, she believed healing may come through medical treatment, psychological counseling, lifestyle changes, the church’s ministry and/or a direct encounter with God’s will for wholeness.

Cassel, who began planning the book project with Neal before her death in 1989, does a superb job of preparing the reader for the book that follows her introduction.

This book is drawn from the seven books about the church’s ministry of healing which Neal wrote during her lifetime. Arranged in chronological order, the selections begin with the book “A Reporter Finds God,” which Neal wrote after her first investigation of faith healing.

Published in 1956, it went through 15 printings as Neal became a pioneer in reviving an ancient Christian ministry.

Before her first book, Neal began her work as a journalist during World War II. She later wrote freelance features for national magazines including Look, Redbook and Reader’s Digest. But her first interviews and investigation of faith healing took her life on a very different course, culminating many years later in her ordination as deacon in the Episcopal Church.

She began her study of the phenomenon by attending various healing services at a cross section of local churches. She then interviewed clergy and physicians.

“As time went on, the variety of evidence attesting to former illness and medically unlikely cure left little doubt in my mind that some extraordinary healing force was in operation,” Neal wrote in her first book.

Then there were the cases of medically inexplicable recovery including the case of the boy thrown from a car in an automobile accident. His back was crushed. He bled profusely. Taken to a nearby hospital, he lay unconscious for many weeks, paralyzed from the neck down.

Doctors deemed his case hopeless. Only his minister stayed hopeful, coming each day to the hospital to pray for him. When the boy regained consciousness, the clergyman said God would heal him. Two weeks after the boy emerged from the coma, he received “the laying on of hands” _ a form of healing practiced since the first Christians.

“Three weeks later,” Neal writes, “he got out of bed and walked. He re-entered college the next fall and graduated a year later with highest honors.”

In subsequent research, Neal writes, she received scores of reports of such healings from reputable physicians. And she went on to gradually shift from functioning as a reporter to also becoming a teacher, and eventually a healer. Until her death, she insisted healing was essentially linked to the church’s teachings and sacraments.

Hers was an understanding of the healing ministry rooted in Christian orthodoxy. Faith healing was part of the work and ministry of the church, not a sideshow conducted in questionable taste.

Today, when more medical schools are training physicians in how accepting the spiritual dimension of healing may assist in recovery, the line dividing medicine and religion is blurring.

It is a trend embraced by some people in both fields and soundly criticized by others. This book, like Neal’s life and ministry, provides a sound spiritual resource and a historical context within which one may examine such related current trends.

DEA END HOLMES