Epiphany: Healing?

 Honor physicians

   for their gift of healing

   comes from the Most High. (Sirach, 38).

Brain surgery awaits me tomorrow. Linda and I spent last Wednesday in pre-op sessions at Kaiser’s Regional Neurosurgery Center across the bay in Redwood City—just up the road from Stanford Hospital. The day started at 9:30am with a 45min MRI session taking extensive pictures of my brain. It was quite a trick keeping my head fixed and calm while my Parkinson legs kept thrashing about.

The rest of the day was spent meeting “the team”: nurses and technicians and PA and the anesthesiologist who will be bringing me in and out of consciousness—have to be awake to help them find the sweet spot when they insert the probe. It was our session with the surgeon that interested me—his tone and his way. A young (early 40s maybe) impressive guy; but not at all pretentious. Linda teared up. There was a simple straightforwardness about him. No big claims: “As you know,” he would say, “Parkinson is a progressive disease. This is not a cure. What Deep Brain Stimulation does, if we get it right, is pick up where your medications are giving out. Our hope is that the operation will alleviate your symptoms—especially tremors.”

Sirach (Apocryphal book of wisdom, also known as Ecclesiasticus, 180BC) has a wonderful ode to physicians (38:1-15): “Honor physicians for the Lord created them; and their gift of healing comes from the Most High.”  Through the day, I thought of that line: “gift of healing.” Neither the surgeon, nor anyone else on “the team” ever spoke of healing. Rather, they simply talked about a probe inserted into my brain and then hooked up to a machine implanted in my chest to help alleviate symptoms of my disease. It caused me to think Sirach over stated things.

During Epiphany we celebrate our Lord’s earthly life among us: “How he went about doing good and healing the oppressed” (Ac 10:38). Yet even then… even at its best, like raising his friend Lazarus from the dead; Lazarus was raised back into this mortal life only to face sickness and death. Yet, Jesus figured this mortal life is worth living. Like that zoom meeting last night with my sister, and our children with their families—our children’s children. They laughed and cried and said kind things and prayed for the surgeon and that all will go well. Jesus is right, this mortal life is worth living.

Big Healing awaits another day. That Day when “the trumpet sounds…. and this mortal body puts on immortality” (1Cor 15:52-53). On that Day, “crying and pain and death will be no more” (Rv 21:4). Between now and then; we do well, as Sirach instructs us, to give thanks for physicians and all those medical care people who attend to our physical well-being. That’s another line from Sirach’s ode: “Pray to the Lord, and give the physician his place.” We will do that.