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<\/a>“Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but just grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’ Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?”‘ He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease'” (Mark 5:25-34). Victoria Park, Truro NS. Photo credit JAT 2025.<\/p><\/div>\n
From today’s perspective, you don’t look like a religious teacher or wandering philosopher sage at all.\u00a0 You look like a really gifted doctor.\u00a0 In fact, you look to me like a really gifted psychiatrist.\u00a0 And I ought to know what a psychiatrist looks like, since I was married to one for twenty years.<\/p>\n
J:\u00a0 I don’t deny what you’re saying.\u00a0 A psychiatrist’s job, after all, is to help patients examine the parts of their biology that are interfering with their ability to think, feel, and choose in balanced, holistic ways.\u00a0 It’s probably the most important field of medicine, though it’s usually the specialty that receives the least respect and the least funding.<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 You were a physician.\u00a0 A pioneering spirit in the as-yet unknown discipline of psychiatry.\u00a0 Yet a religious movement sprang up around you.\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n
J:\u00a0 Because I was a man of deep faith.\u00a0 I wasn’t afraid to trust God, to love God as they really are.\u00a0 I wasn’t afraid to open my heart to the wonder of healing.\u00a0 More important, I had a radically different idea of what illness and healing meant.\u00a0 For me, illness didn’t mean “lack of perfection.”\u00a0 And healing didn’t mean “acquisition of perfection.”\u00a0 I had an entirely different understanding of our lives as human beings, an understanding based on my observation of the natural world.\u00a0 For me, pain and death were not the enemy.\u00a0 Death was obviously unavoidable.\u00a0 Pain was a language, a language that spoke the truth about a person’s relationships with himself, with others, with the world around him, and with God.\u00a0 I saw the loss of love and trust in God as a major source of pain and suffering in the people around me.\u00a0 Their souls weren’t happy with the loss of relationship with God.\u00a0 Their bodies mirrored this lack of happiness, this spiritual pain.<\/p>\n
The truth is that all souls need God.\u00a0 They need relationship with God.\u00a0 They need to feel that connection, that bond of love and trust.\u00a0 They also need to feel the same kind of love and trust in their relationships with their families and friends and community.\u00a0 They need to feel safe<\/em> — emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually safe<\/em>.<\/p>\n The world I grew up in didn’t teach anyone to feel safe in their relationship with God, or, for that matter, safe within their own families.\u00a0 No community can be safe when it preaches the inferiority of women and the right to own slaves.\u00a0 Second Temple Judaism was no different in this regard from the Hellenistic world around us.\u00a0 Women had few rights.\u00a0 And seriously ill or disabled women had even fewer.<\/p>\n My daughter was born with Down Syndrome.\u00a0 She died at age 3 of respiratory failure.\u00a0 It was probably pneumonia.\u00a0 But she died in terrible emotional pain, terrible emotional suffering, because her own mother believed she was a curse.\u00a0 A curse!<\/p>\n Her body got sick and died, but the pain of her physical suffering was small in comparison to her emotional and spiritual suffering.\u00a0 She was horribly abused by her mother and her mother’s family.\u00a0 Not because she deserved it but because Jewish magicians said<\/em> she deserved it.\u00a0 And I did nothing to protect her.<\/p>\n After she died — and there’s no doubt her mother and her mother’s mother were complicit in her death — I had to look at myself in the mirror and be honest about what I’d done — or rather, what I hadn’t<\/em> done.\u00a0 I had to own up to my complete and utter lack of courage.\u00a0 And I had to deal with the constant memory of her face and her trusting smile.<\/p>\n I have no respect for the constant preaching from Christian theologians about the lofty preeminence of my suffering and death and resurrection.\u00a0 Fuck that.\u00a0 My contribution wasn’t my own death.\u00a0 My contribution was to see meaning and life in the face of death, to see transformation and forgiveness in the face of death, and to really mean it.\u00a0 My contribution was to find the courage to remember my daughter’s trusting smile and try to do something useful with the gift of her love.\u00a0 Her love — the memory and the ongoing presence of her love in my heart — was a constant source of wonder and healing for me.<\/p>\n Apparently my guardian angels approved of this attitude because after I spent years learning how to forgive and learning how to listen to God’s voice and learning how to follow my own inborn talent as a physician, really weird shit started to happen around me.\u00a0\u00a0 I mean, really weird shit.\u00a0 Healings that were more than placebo effect (which I had started to get used to by then).\u00a0 I mean sudden, miraculous healings that only God can do.\u00a0 I was as shocked as many of my patients.\u00a0 But I understood in a logical, rational way what was happening.\u00a0 So I wasn’t afraid.\u00a0 I was just . . .\u00a0 non-plussed.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 Why weren’t you afraid?<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Because I trusted God.\u00a0 Because I could hear the voice of my own guardian angels.\u00a0 Because I could feel the comfort and safety of these “events” deep in my gut.\u00a0 Because people around me were crying in relief and gratitude.\u00a0 Because good things were happening to regular people.\u00a0 Because some of the people I helped heal began to believe in a loving God instead of a cruel, vengeful God.\u00a0 Because God was obviously present in small huts and green fields and all the places where God wasn’t supposed to be present.\u00a0 Because the only contribution we humans needed to bring to the table of healing was our kindness — our true kindness towards ourselves, towards each other, and towards God.\u00a0 Not many people then or now have been willing to show kindness towards God.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 Did you understand the science<\/em> of the miracle healings?<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 You mean the quantum physics of it?\u00a0 Hell, no.\u00a0 I’m an angel on the Other Side and I still barely grasp the quantum physics of it!\u00a0 But the science of it is there.\u00a0 The truthful and logical reality of the healings is there.\u00a0 Just because humans — and many angels! — don’t fully understand the science doesn’t mean it’s not science.\u00a0 It’s just a really, really advanced science.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 A science which obviously circumvents the linear “cause and effect” of classical, Newtonian physics.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Divine Love and forgiveness feel like emotional gifts, but at a quantum level, they’re both related to non-locality or, as some prefer to call it today, quantum entanglement.\u00a0 Love and forgiveness also tie in with the soul’s sense of time and timing.<\/p>\n If you have no sense of time — no personal relationship with past, present, and future — it’s impossible for you, as a human being, to give and receive either Divine Love or forgiveness.<\/p>\n Trying to live in the moment — in other words, living in a state of denial about your own pain or somebody else’s pain — destroys the biological brain’s ability to process pain and turn it into something else, something much deeper and more proactive in the world, like, oh, say, like courage.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 So you’d define courage, then, as the ability to shift pain into some form of healing action or choice.\u00a0 The ability to take action and help make the world a better place, even if it’s an emotional action, like choosing to love and forgive and trust, as opposed to a physical action, like joining the Peace Corps.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Courage is the choice to help God “build an ark.”<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 There’s no doubt about the amount of pain that exists in the world.\u00a0 So if pain is the raw material — the wooden planks — that can be turned into something deeper and more proactive, that’s one helluv’an ark we’re gonna be building.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n