![\"Celsus](\"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/Celcus-Library-Ephesus-Turkey-2.jpg\")
<\/a>Celsus Library, Ephesus Turkey (c) JAT 2001<\/p><\/div>\n
A:\u00a0 Blowing up buildings and massacring innocent people is pretty showy, too.<\/p>\n
J:\u00a0 At the time, it seems like a good idea to the psychopath — a way to earn fame and glory.\u00a0 It doesn’t look that way to the victims, of course, but to the psychopaths, it’s good fodder for the history books.<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 You must have seen this mindset all around you in the early Roman empire you lived in.\u00a0 It wasn’t a pretty place for conquered peoples.<\/p>\n
J:\u00a0 Yeah, go to your local arena and see enslaved animals and gladiators savage each other on the big screen of Real Life!\u00a0 Sick stuff.<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 Yet these displays of physical prowess were considered normal.\u00a0 Culturally acceptable.<\/p>\n
J:\u00a0 Like slavery then and slavery later.\u00a0 Just because it’s culturally acceptable doesn’t make it right<\/em>.\u00a0 The soul longs for freedom.\u00a0 The soul believes in freedom.\u00a0 Not libertarian freedom (the freedom to do whatever the hell you want, regardless of how it affects other people), but the freedom that comes with dignity and respect and egalitarianism.\u00a0 Balanced<\/em> freedom, you could call it.\u00a0 The freedom to be considered a unique individual who is an important and worthy part of the larger community.\u00a0 The freedom to look your neighbour in the eye as an equal.<\/p>\n This is the kind of freedom that psychopaths always try to strip away from others.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 So how does this relate to fearlessness?<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 It’s linked very strongly to free will.\u00a0 To free will and to trust.\u00a0 When the community you live in allows you to exercise your soul’s free will and your soul’s trust in God in the fullest possible way, you become, in your own unique way, a healer<\/em>.\u00a0 Not a physician or surgeon or internist, but a healer.\u00a0 A person with a unique gift that brings some form of healing into the world and into the hearts and minds of those around you.\u00a0 There is no sphere of human existence where the inner impulse of fearlessness — trust and free will working together<\/em> — shows itself more clearly than in the mysterious gift of healing.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 By healing . . . do you mean what modern Western allopathic doctors mean by healing?\u00a0 Treating symptoms until the symptoms go away and “normal” function is restored?<\/p>\n J (shaking his head):\u00a0 No.\u00a0 By healing, I mean helping a person find a sense of wholeness, a sense of wholeness within themselves, a sense of worthiness within themselves that incorporates emotional worthiness, cognitive worthiness, physical worthiness, and spiritual worthiness.\u00a0 All these together<\/em>.\u00a0 The whole enchilada.<\/p>\n Obviously there’s no point telling people they can find complete healing through pure physical worthiness or pure cognitive worthiness if in the next breath you’re going to tell them they’re full of Original Sin.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 It’s amazing what can happen to a person’s physical symptoms when emotions and cognitive function and spiritual growth are treated with as much respect as the physical symptoms.\u00a0 (I speak from personal experience\u00a0 . . . )<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Some Western physicians and health care professionals know this.\u00a0 But not enough of them.\u00a0 For a brief period in the twentieth century, Western physicians showed a strong blend “science and faith” in their healing relationships with patients.\u00a0 But today this common sense blend has been shoved out of the way and replaced by the technological model.\u00a0 It’s a pure Materialistic model, and, to be honest, I see no difference between the current allopathic medical model and the demon-model I fought against 2,000 years ago.\u00a0 Today’s obsessive-compulsive focus on “germs and genes” and “fighting germs and genes” is no different than yesterday’s obsessive-compulsive focus on “demons” and “fighting demons.”\u00a0 Both are attempts to control all the laws of Cause and Effect in the universe\u00a0 — laws which, in fact, no human being has the final say over.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 When my beautiful son was battling leukemia — A.L.L. — he had little immune function for the first few months of his treatment, and then he had none at all after they blasted his body with radiation in preparation for a bone marrow transplant.\u00a0 Theoretically he shouldn’t have been able to fight off any pathogens.\u00a0 But theory got blown away by reality.\u00a0 In the nine months he lived between diagnosis and death, he suffered from many painful and frightening events (not least a massive stroke).\u00a0 But never once did he “get sick” from a cold or a flu or an infection of any kind.<\/p>\n When he was in hospital, he was in isolation.\u00a0 But after his bone marrow started to show faint signs of recovery, he was discharged from hospital and spent the summer at home.\u00a0 Our home wasn’t a sanitized and germ-free place.\u00a0 It was a normal home.\u00a0 I provided the nursing care for the central venous line that was still sticking out of his chest wall, and he never once got an infection at the entry site or in the line itself.\u00a0 He probably should have, but he didn’t.\u00a0 He was very disappointed, though, that he wasn’t allowed to eat fresh strawberries, which had been shown at the time to carry bacteria that could be harmful to immune-suppressed children.\u00a0 He loved strawberries.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Were you afraid while you were caring for your son?<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 I was terrified of his pain.\u00a0 Not terrified for me, but terrified for him.\u00a0 I recall with intense grief the days when he and I had to get through his spinal taps together without any pain medication at all.\u00a0 He was extraordinarily brave.\u00a0 He was so brave I couldn’t believe it.\u00a0 I couldn’t believe anyone could be so brave and so trusting of the people who were trying to help him.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Did your terror for him stop you from doing what needed to be done?\u00a0 Did it stop you from loving him and showing him your love?<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I wasn’t afraid of the procedures.\u00a0 I understood what had to be done, and I wasn’t afraid of the science.\u00a0 I was afraid of the grief and the pain.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 You were afraid of the grief and the pain, but you did it anyway.\u00a0 You and your husband made sure your son spent almost no time alone in the hospital room.\u00a0 Someone was always with him.\u00a0 You made sure his heart always felt safe, yes?<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 We did our best.\u00a0 Though Sick Kids Hospital wouldn’t let us stay with him overnight, which was very difficult for us.\u00a0 We had to stay at the Ronald McDonald House.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 You could have” left the room” (emotionally speaking) and turned things over to “the science” or “the law,” as so many parents have done (not to their credit).\u00a0 But you didn’t.\u00a0 You believed you needed to be with him and look him in the eye and tell him you loved him.\u00a0 You knew he needed constant comfort.<\/p>\n A (nodding):\u00a0 My heart said he needed us.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 He needed you.\u00a0 And you didn’t let him down.\u00a0 This is what fearlessness feels like.\u00a0 It’s not lack of fear in the face of illness and death.\u00a0 It’s the choice to choose love and trust even when you feel the fear.\u00a0 It’s the choice to do the right thing for somebody else’s healing.\u00a0 For somebody else’s sense of worthiness and wholeness.\u00a0 For somebody else’s discovery deep within that the mystery of love cannot be contained.\u00a0 It’s too big to ever be held back by small rooms and the petty concerns of Law. \u00a0 It fills up the smallest cracks of Creation with its wondrous powers of growth and healing and expansion.\u00a0 It grows and grows within, even when the physical body itself is dying.<\/p>\n This is the gift of one human being to another, a gift that is eternal.<\/p>\n All human beings have this power within their hearts if they choose to claim it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n