When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey through Healing Stories in the Bible

By Lory Widmer Hess

A candid and courageous book sharing a personal journey to wellbeing, through the healing stories in the Bible, which will inspire readers on their own spiritual path.

During a difficult time in her life, Lory Widmer Hess turned to the accounts of Jesus's work on earth for comfort and inspiration. She wrote poems about the lives of the people who had been touched by Christ and, over several years, added personal reflections that explored the difficulties she was facing in her marriage, the challenges of raising a family, and setbacks in her career. Gradually she learned forgiveness and self-acceptance.

In a unique blend of poetry, commentary and autobiography, this powerful book shows how we can connect our experiences to the gospel stories in a creative way that allows us to draw strength from them. At the end of each chapter, the essential meaning of the story is distilled into a simple, contemplative phrase. Readers interested in Christian spirituality will turn to this unique and remarkable book again and again for inspiration and contemplation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Floris Books
• Release date: Feb 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9781782509004

Lory Widmer Hess

Lory Widmer Hess is an American writer and editor. She grew up near Seattle, Washington, USA. Encountering anthroposophy at the age of 26 set her on a long journey of exploration and discovery that included studies at Sunbridge College, Eurythmy Spring Valley, and the Seminary of The Christian Community in North America. Lory has been a book editor for the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America and has worked for a number of anthroposophical organisations, most recently in communities serving adults with developmental disabilities. She currently lives with her family in Switzerland and is in training as a spiritual director. Visit her website and blog at enterenchanted.com.

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Preface

What gives me the authority to write a book about healing, and healing in the gospels at that? I am not a doctor or a nurse, a therapist or a counselor. Nor am I a pastor, a priest, a theologian, a Biblical scholar or a historian. How could I have the temerity to imagine that my thoughts about the healing process might be of help or of interest to anyone else?

I may not have any official credentials or stamp of approval upon my knowledge of healing, but I do have the experience of being someone who has been healed through relationship with Christ, and through a deepened connection with the human community toward which Christ seeks to guide us. My condition lasted for many years and touched me on many levels: body, soul and spirit. It kept me from being able to speak or even to cognize my own deepest truth. It caused me to hurt people, to bungle relationships, to add chaos and disorder to a world already suffering far too much from dysfunctional human activity.

However, this condition did not prevent me from maintaining the appearance of normality, as I went to school, to work, and even raised a family. It was seldom apparent to anyone else in its full extent. Most people only noticed one aspect of it if they noticed anything at all. Even my closest loved ones and colleagues were largely blind to what was going on inside me. And so, even though for a long time I felt unable to live a full or satisfying life, I was never completely pulled out of life, either. I didn’t have to be hospitalized or spend time in a psychiatric clinic. I was not labelled with an official diagnosis or put on drugs. Much of my suffering took place in silence, behind a mask. Only toward the end of the process did I gain the courage to admit that I needed time and support in order to heal and to speak about my experiences.

Because of this, I know there must be other people who are also suffering in this way, who maintain a seemingly ‘normal’ outer life while inwardly they feel themselves to be paralyzed or dying. I am daring to write this book for them, to tell them that they are not alone and that there is hope. If you can identify what you need and dare to reach out for it, then the Healer will meet you there in that place of courageous self-knowledge. I know this from my own experience, and I also know that this healing is available to everyone, not just me, or it would not be true healing. Out of the depths of what I have endured, I want to pass on a message that may give strength to others who are similarly struggling.

Although not a healing professional, I am a reader, a writer, and a lifelong student of language and literature. I’ve worked as an editor and graphic designer, striving to craft words and images in a way that is meaningful, inspiring and true. Language has been the great love of my life, even at the times when it seemed to become the greatest stumbling block. Insofar as the gospels are stories, crafted in artistic language, I therefore have some experience in how to navigate them. Long before I started to study the Bible or to cultivate a conscious relationship with Christ, I was steeped in the magic of story, finding in it my own personal savior. How this personal salvation eventually became connected with the Savior of the world, and how my love of story eventually guided me to recognize and claim my own healing story, forms much of the background of this book. If you, too, love language and find relief for your suffering through narrative, I hope it will resonate with you.

Along the way I earned a diploma from the School of Eurythmy in Spring Valley, New York. Eurythmy is a performance art arising out of anthroposophy, the spiritual world view and path of knowledge described by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). Described as ‘visible speech’ and ‘visible singing’, eurythmy also has applications in education and medical therapy. It aims to make the whole human being the visible expression of what otherwise happens invisibly in the soul when we speak or make music. As you can imagine, participating in eurythmy training is not a straightforward matter for a secretly ill person; nevertheless, eurythmy played a significant role in my healing journey.

In the course of that journey, I found and joined the Christian Community, a sister movement to anthroposophy that is inspired by its insights but whose main function is to be a renewal of the ritual stream of Christian worship. Through the creation of communities that celebrate the sacraments in a form appropriate to modern consciousness, it is a vessel for the working of Christ in human bodies and souls. This, too, has been a major factor in my own story.

My most important learning experiences, though, were ones that carried no degree, certificate, membership or outer recognition whatsoever. My instructors were people who had no power or authority in this world, no voice and no ability to speak up for themselves, but everything to teach me about the most important things in life and its true foundation in the sacrificial power of love. Those teachers were firstly my son, Brendan, who came to me at the time of my greatest need as a messenger from the world of the angels, and secondly those developmentally disabled individuals I have worked with in communities in the United States and Switzerland, who had the patience to continue teaching me when I had a hard time comprehending my son’s message. My debt to them is immeasurable and cannot be expressed in words, although I will try.

I have also learned so much from my co-sufferer and companion in the journey of life, my husband, Michael Widmer. Our marriage has been a crucible and a catalyst for healing, and I could not have come to this point without it. I thank him, as well as our son, for allowing me to describe some of our adventures together, and for continuing to be my greatest support and comfort as we continue on our way.

All of these people and many others were part of my story, helping to pull me back from the brink of death and into life and community. I cannot describe all of them in the course of this book, but to them go my profound thanks.

However qualified or otherwise I may be to write a book like this, I take comfort in knowing that the gospels were not written to be the province of scholars or academics or experts of any kind. They were created as a training manual for people in need of healing, people challenged to take up the task of evolving the new kind of faith that would make them whole. No one is either too humble or too grand for that calling, and no expertise is required other than a willingness to honestly ask what it means to be human. In that, we are all equal.

This book is a work of imaginative devotion rather than a product of scholarship, and incorporates facts and observations that have been interesting and helpful to me. The stories drawn from my personal life are included as my testimony to the power of the Healing Spirit, which I can only offer from my own point of view. I am convinced that this healing activity, or at least its potential, can be found in anyone’s life if one looks in the right way. Any responses to this work, or any communications about how readers have worked in similar or different ways on this content, would be gratefully received.

Thank you for joining me in this sacred reading space, and for being a witness of and a participant in the great story that includes us all. I wish for you the blessings of peace and joyful expectation that are offered to us by the Healing Spirit, our comforter and advocate, who accompanies each one of us when things seem most dark and hopeless. At those times, let us remember the words of Jacques Lusseyran: ‘Light is in us, even when we have no eyes.’¹

Introduction

Many people devote all their efforts to preserving and securing their existence in the material world. Even religious or spiritual efforts may be devoted to this end, whether the aim is security and prosperity now, or in the next world, which is conceived of as a copy or a continuation of this one.

In his book Falling Upward, the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr calls these the concerns of the ‘first half’ of life. It’s legitimate for a young person to build a ‘container’ in which to dwell, along with a firm sense of their identity and their place in the world. But at some point, we each need to consider what the container is actually meant to hold, even giving it over in service to the whole rather than keeping it for the benefit of our own personal existence. Otherwise we miss the chance to enter the ‘second half’ of life, and this ‘half’ is not necessarily a temporal measurement but indicates a shift in focus.¹

If one only considers the security and integrity of the container, then illness is a threat and death is THE END. Both are to be struggled with and overcome, or avoided and denied at all costs. That is the attitude taken by our outer, materialistically focused culture.

But if our lives are solely dedicated to building and maintaining our container, it becomes a prison. Often our one-sided preoccupation with what is only meant to be a single step on the path toward true life must be transformed through some kind of disruption: illness, loss, divorce, failure, death. What seemed like a threat and obstacle can then become a doorway through which one reaches another, higher level of existence, a level that transcends but also embraces the first. Symptoms may turn out to be messengers, catalysts for needed change. Through patterns of generational trauma and communal healing we might find out how we are connected to others. Intractable physical challenges may push us to cultivate inner capacities. We may move from merely persisting in our ‘survival dance’ to joining the ‘sacred dance’, as Rohr puts it.

Sadly, many people never progress to this stage. Fear of illness and death, along with resistance to much-needed change, present the greatest obstacle to making the transition. We have to find a way not to fight against these realities, but to comprehend and move through them on our way to a wider existence.

At the beginning of the gospel narratives of Christ’s ministry, we are called by John the Baptist to repent.² But the word usually translated as ‘repentance’, metanoia, is better understood as indicating a complete change of heart and mind. The way of Christ involves a turning upside down and inside out of the values and methods of the first half of life. It doesn’t deny or oppose them in their own realm, but brings them to the next level so that we won’t fall prey to death through remaining stuck to our container.

In line with this picture, one of Rudolf Steiner’s most revelatory insights was that the sensory world and the thinking connected with it were created not as a permanent home for humanity, but to form the basis for freedom. However, we need the impulse of spiritual activity that surges up within this sensory container, transforming it and bringing it forward, if we are to go beyond the first step on that journey. In freedom, we have the potential to perform metanoia and cross over into a new phase of evolution, to become a new order of being in the universe. At the Incarnation this happened on the macrocosmic level when the deed of Christ provided the impulse for the whole earth to cross over into the second half of evolution. With this as a model, the same thing has to happen within the microcosm of each individual life. Two thousand years later, however, we are still struggling to catch up.

The Children’s Service of the Christian Community, which is a remarkable storehouse of pithy wisdom, describes Christ as the one ‘who leads what is living into death that it may live anew; who leads what is dead into life that it may behold the spirit’. The goal is not eternal life in the material world, but participation in the eternal cycle of living. We bring to it, as our special contribution to the whole, our enduring, evolving human consciousness.

The stories of Christ’s healings in the gospels, therefore, cannot be understood merely as the erasure of physical obstacles: the restoration of safety and security in material life, which returns sick people to a container whose weaknesses have been repaired. Rather, they are challenging pictures of how illness, disability and death may become gateways to a greater, fuller life, a process in which the agency and empowerment of the healed person is always a central factor. These stories guide us toward finding the meaningful contents of life, toward beholding the spirit and joining the sacred dance.

My healing journey

My opportunity to make this transition and receive the gifts that come through illness arrived when I was in my late twenties. From childhood I had had disturbing inner experiences – paranoia, self-loathing, withdrawal, anxiety – but I had been able to keep these hidden. I never spoke of them to anyone, and they were never noticed by my peers or elders. My physical health was fairly robust; I only had a sensitive digestion that caused me to throw up easily in response to stomach bugs or motion sickness, and a tendency toward binge-eating and gaining excess weight.

I got through college successfully and seemed to be coping well enough in daily life. I had friends and a job teaching children in an elementary school, but I felt as though I were living behind a glass wall that shut me out from the world. Inside I was cold and numb, afraid to reveal my true self to anyone. Social situations made me extremely nervous and I shrank from public speaking or too much emotional engagement. Most disturbing to me was my apparent inability to love anyone deeply, and my occasional bouts of dissociation, which distanced me from my body and senses.

I was raised in a loving and secure family, so there was no obvious explanation for what might have caused me to have these experiences; I remained a mystery to myself. I was convinced there was something terribly wrong with me, that I was possibly evil and dangerous.

A light appeared in my darkness when I entered a part-time program in Seattle for learning about Waldorf education and its spiritual foundations in anthroposophy. Finally, experiences and ideas that had been isolated and incomprehensible began to fit together and make sense. Especially important was discovering how my individual destiny was a part of a greater arc of evolution that gave meaning to all the struggles human beings meet in life. It was something of a surprise to discover a Christian world view that included reincarnation, but after I had lived with this idea for a while it became one of the most important gifts anthroposophy brought me. I started to consider that what happened to me was not just random and arbitrary, nor part of a system of reward and punishment from some distant entity, but part of a learning process that I myself had had a role in shaping. This gave a different aspect to all the things I ordinarily most wanted to avoid, and slowly, over the course of many years, that began to change the way I thought and the choices I made.

Eurythmy was a particularly enlightening experience. I felt at once how invigorating it was to perform physical movements that were in accord with soul experiences – an expression of truth that was linked with human language but went far deeper into the very sources of meaning, into the logos. In eurythmy, word was truly made flesh.

I didn’t at that time have any notion of entering the eurythmy training, but I was glad to have this source of enthusiasm appear in my formerly gray inner world. The course spoke to parts of me that had never been addressed before and helped me open up in unprecedented ways, although I still did not feel able to fully reveal myself.

I decided to enter the two-year full-time Waldorf teacher training at Sunbridge College (as it then was) in New York. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a Waldorf teacher, but I wanted to continue on this anthroposophical path somehow.

During my first year there, my inner life exploded. In place of numbness there appeared a confusing realm of uncontrollable emotions that could be exciting but also frightening. Unrequited romantic love caused overwhelming feelings of desire and dependency to surge up, then left me feeling even more paralyzed and numb. I hated my weakness and incapacity, which I saw as a lack of willpower and moral strength.

I started to have physical as well as psychological symptoms, such as backaches and sleeping problems. I was being challenged now to take up the gifts of illness, but I still did not tell anyone what I was going through, mainly out of shame and fear of rejection. I became convinced that what I truly loved was eurythmy and that switching to the eurythmy training would heal me. I even thought, in a surge of grandiosity, that it would help me to heal the world.

I expected the training to serve a first-half-of-life function: it would lead to a career and provide confirmation of my identity and a place in the world. I thought that ‘healing’ meant resolving the issues I’d been struggling with and returning to the peace and security I’d had before my problems began in childhood.

And I did find healing, but instead of the four years of the regular eurythmy training, it took more than twenty-five years and involved more illness and dysfunction, both inner and outer. It turned out that my first-half-of-life container needed more than just some minor fixes and superficial Band-Aids. It had to be practically destroyed and rebuilt, leading me through many kinds of death before I could reach the shores of life again. Only lately do I feel that I am reaching a kind of completion of that journey, assuming I can stop skipping over necessary steps or resisting needful death processes, thereby making the ordeal even longer.

I am grateful now for all that I have gone through, because I learned so much and came into contact with my true self, as well as into true, intimate relationships with other people. The precious fruit of all my suffering was that people became real to me, no longer just shadowy, symbolic figures in my inner drama. I also experienced the spiritual source of healing that is available to all human beings who are able to admit their need and reach out for it. My certain knowledge of this source of healing is more real than anything else I have ever experienced; it connects me to a firm ground of reality that I know will never pass away, no matter what storms may come. It doesn’t mean that I have no more troubles or doubts or that all my symptoms are gone. They aren’t. But whatever remains I can endure with patience, knowing that this, too, has something to teach me and will one day be turned to the good.

By sharing my story and my thoughts about the gospel healings in connection with it, I would like to encourage readers to bring their own need for healing to that infallible source of life and strength. It took me a long time to turn to it; I can only hope that by means of this