Washington National Cathedral

Deryl Davis: We’re very fortunate this morning to have the Rev. Dr. Anne Brower with us this morning. Many of you may know Anne as the director of the Cathedral’s healing ministries. A long time, more than forty years, Anne has practiced medicine as a radiologist in specific, but since 2001 she has been an ordained minister also practicing a healing ministry at the Cathedral and many other Episcopal churches. Anne is with us on a very special day to talk about physicians, healing, how our faith works into this whole question, because today is the feast of St. Luke, the patron of physicians and healers. So it’s a good time to be talking about this on Sunday, October 18th.

Anne has consulted on the health care of five sitting U.S. presidents, and in 1998 Anne received the Madame Curie Award for the outstanding woman radiologist in the United States. Several years ago she wrote a book on healing which I highly commend to you. It’s called I Am Not Ready to Die Just Yet. It’s a book of stories on healing and this book is available, inscribed, at All Hallows Guild outside the Cathedral today.

Anne, thank you for joining us today.

Rev. Dr. Brower: My pleasure.

Davis: We all know that faith and healing is a big and radioactive sort of subject here, but I want to start by asking you about your personal experience, and that is, how does someone who has been a very successful practicing doctor for thirty odd years suddenly decide, “I’m going to become a priest,” and what does that mean?

Brower: You’d probably have to be a little crazy. [laughter] I need also to say that, while St. Luke was the patron of physicians and surgeons, he was also the patron saint of butchers, whatever that means. [laughter]

Basically, when I started practicing medicine, I practiced the art of medicine. And for those of you who would be my age would remember that a physician would spend a half-hour taking a history and finding out everything about you and listening to you the entire time, and asking you nice questions and things, and the second part of it was doing a thorough physical examination that—if you were really good—took a half hour to do. Well, what he was doing was touching you, and if you had a disease, he was saying you were quite touchable. What he was saying was, “You know, I’m fine with you,” and the two aspects which are very important in healing [are] listening and touching.

Well. Nowadays, as you know he gives you five minutes if you are lucky, and then he puts you in one of my machines. And I don’t know how many of you have had an MRI, but I don’t think you find it very comfortable. I don’t think you find it warm and cozy. I don’t think you find it healing. So we have become technicians and people who treat with medicine or surgery, and I said, “We have lost the art, and I need to get back to the healing of the whole, which is mind, body and spirit.”

Davis: You make an interesting comparison in your book between the healing of bones—because, as a radiologist, that was a real focus of yours—and the healing of one’s soul. Can you talk just a bit about that, because I thought that was an interesting metaphor.

Brower: Well, I looked at everything that was happening in the bone and it just seemed that everything that was happening was happening in the macrocosm. But for instance, if you break your bone—and I am sure everybody here has broken a bone at some time, but let’s say you break your lower leg and you go into a cast. You then become very dependent. You lose all of your independence because you can’t drive a car, you can’t go downstairs to do the laundry, and you can’t do the things that your spouse or your convivant would like you to do, and they have to take that over. So you not only break your bone but you break your relationship.

But often people break their relationship with God. I’ve seen them come in and throw down their crutches and say, “Why on earth did God do this to me?” Which of course—God didn’t do it to them. But it’s a broken relationship [at] three different levels, and all of it has to mend. And the way it does… with the bone, it takes away all the trash and the garbage and the bad stuff, and then it brings in good stuff to heal the bone and make it whole. But it’s a different bone. It is never the same bone that it was before it fractured.

The same way with your relationships, you have to heal those as well. They certainly have been broken. You’ve got to get rid of the bad and talk it all out and get it cured and taken care of, and then you go into a better relationship, and then hopefully you also are guided to a better relationship with your God.

Davis: You do write about this connection between a kind of physical brokenness oftentimes leading to the breaking of a spiritual relationship with God, or between oneself and other people. And that sometimes does happen when we are asking the question, “Well, why did this happen, and why did this happen to me?”

Brower: Well, the trouble is that people tend to blame God for the disease that occurs. And God is not to blame, and it has nothing to do with your spiritual or your prayer life.

It has nothing to do with being out of synch with God. You have got to get rid of that idea. Basically, I think unfortunately it just is the natural order of our universe, because everything that lives on this universe eventually dies: the fish and the trees and the flowers and everything. And if you don’t die of a traumatic event, you will die of disease. Only Americans and Europeans think they can get away with it, but you can’t. You eventually will die.

The question is what do you die to? Will you die to nothingness or do you die to newness? And I would suspect everybody here would believe that you die to newness, and so I think that’s the cycle that we live in… death to something new, death to something new. And I think that’s just the cycle that we’re in. Remember that the saints died early and the reprobates died late. That makes me a reprobate.

Davis: I want to get to your definitions of things like disease, illness, cure and wellbeing in just a moment.

But first let me ask you about something that kind of came to my mind. We talked about this earlier. And that is when you look at a lot of ancient literature… from Greek tragedy to even the Book of Job, we get the sense of a dynamic running between suffering and somehow wisdom, that the more we suffer, the wiser we become, somehow the more spiritually strong we become. How do you address that question?

Brower: I don’t think that’s quite true. I don’t think that you have to suffer as much as Job to be wise.

I think there are people in this world who have been though things but are wise anyway, but I can tell you briefly that basically I went through a period of having breast cancer, and I went through a difficult period for a year. I wouldn’t say I suffered like Job, but I suffered.

I did gain wisdom in that whole process and so I think, if you go through any kind of brokenness or any kind of disease, if you can go through it and beyond it to a higher health or a higher consciousness, or a better place with God, then you do gain wisdom.

But the trick is to get beyond your disease or your brokenness. In other words, you could be an abused child, you are always an abused child, but do you go around in adulthood saying, “I was an abused child and therefore you owe me this and this and this,” or do you go around saying, “I was an abused child but I have gotten beyond that, I’m through that and I am in a new and better place.”

Davis: That leads us pretty naturally, then, to talking about some of these definitions as you define some of these terms in your book. We kind of think in popular terms of disease as a physical or bodily ailment we want to get rid of. The cure is the answer that gets us there as fast as we can, and healing is a process of getting over any kind of physical ailment. But you define these things somewhat differently.

Brower: Yes.

Disease you can’t avoid. Disease is the organic thing that attacks you, and it will. You won’t die of old age. If you do an autopsy on your grandmother who died of old age, you will find that it will be either heart disease or diabetes or infection, there are seven causes. So disease is the organic thing that attacks you.

Illness is your response to your disease. And that’s probably the hardest thing of all. But do you say, “Oh I have terrible arthritis and I am absolutely crippled by it and there’s nothing else that I can do?” Or do you say, “I have terrible arthritis and the pain is awful, but you know, I think I can learn to do something else like teaching or doing something that’s different from what I’ve done before.” In other words, you live with your disease and through it. So your illness, or your response to it, is a little more positive.

Sickness is the social response to your disease. The easiest way to understand that is the beginning of AIDS. They were considered the lepers of our society. We wouldn’t touch them. We wouldn’t give them jobs. We just put them aside in a colony somewhere to die. Well it goes on today. Not AIDS so much, but if somebody has a terminal illness or if they have cancer, you as society say, “I don’t want to go and visit them, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to say.”

Well, you’re not supposed to do or say anything. You are supposed to just go and be with that person. Just be. Be with them. If they are depressed, be with them in their depression. If they are lonely, be with them in their loneliness. Be with them where they are. But when you don’t go and see them because you don’t know what to say, and you don’t know what to do, that’s sickness. It causes sickness to the patient because they feel, “God, they don’t love me anymore. I am isolated. I’m alone.” And that adds to their illness and piles on their disease so it’s harder to eventually heal.

Davis: Sickness is a social response.

Brower: Sickness is a social response, and it’s something you all can change in your reaction to people who are ill or sick.

Davis: In medical schools, is there any attempt to teach a deeper understanding of these terms, such as what a cure is, what wellness is?

Brower: Well, we ought to talk a little about what a cure is, since I didn’t hit on that.

Cure is putting your body back to the same way it was before whatever hit you hit you, before whatever attacked you attacked you. And that is what you want, and that is what I as a physician always wanted to do: to put you back together the way you were before. Well, even if you take the broken leg, the broken leg is different. It’s not the same leg. It might be crooked, it might cause arthritis at the end of it. It will always be stronger in the place where it healed, but it is not the same leg.

If you have pneumonia, I will be able to tell it. You may get over our pneumonia, but I will be able to tell it because there’s a scar on your lungs.

So we don’t really cure. We really don’t really cure. What we do is we give you medications or we do surgery that will help you to function in life better. If you have diabetes, you have to take medication. If you have arthritis and tremendous pain, you’re going to take anti-inflammatories and perhaps pain pills. If you have hypertension, you’re going to take pills to decrease that. It’s always… you’re going to take something so you can live with your disease and function at a better level in society. So forget about cure.

Now healing is a process that not only involves disease but involves any kind of brokenness. And it’s a process, it’s a way of living, and we have to live our lives constantly towards healing.

And that’s change. That’s coming closer to God every moment of our lives. It involves love, it involves surrender, it involves moving out of where we are to a new place. So when you see people up here at the healing rail, you may come up and say, “I want my cancer cured.” No one is going to pray for that. They will lift you up to God and ask that God be with you while you are going through your disease process, that he give you the strength to travel through it, that you might feel his healing touch, that you might… There are lots of things that we say, but healing is basically helping you to move with your disease through and beyond it to a higher consciousness, a higher level, a higher presence with God.

Davis: But that does evoke for us as Christians… when we think about healing, our minds are immediately drawn to the New Testament healing stories in particular. We think of the many wonderful accounts of Jesus’ healing, of raising from the dead, of healing the blind, the lame and others. There’s the story of Capernaum, Jesus’ headquarters in Galilee, at sunset, where all the people who are broken physically are brought outside the door for his touch. How do we approach these stories?

Brower: Well, I’m probably a little different from most people on this, but I believe, yes, Jesus did perform cures. I can’t get around that.

But if you notice that every cure that he did when he healed the blind, or when he healed the deaf or when he healed the paralytic or the woman who was bleeding, it was one person—one person out of a whole crowd of people. And always he used that moment to talk about the Kingdom of God, because no one really understood the Kingdom of God as Jesus understood it. They understood it from the Old Testament but they did not understand a loving, caring God that was going to walk with them or be with them.

And he always talked about the Kingdom of God, and he also talked about “your faith has made you well.” That means the God within you has made you well.

I think he was doing the cure to talk about the healing aspect or to talk about the Kingdom of God. If he had really wanted cure to be the real thing, he would have cured everybody. And he didn’t do that. He did one at a time, basically. And he always touched them, always touched them. Whether it was on the ears, or on the eyes or on the mouth or wherever, he always touched them. And that’s why touch is also such an important part.

Davis: You have a whole chapter where you write about touch, both Jesus’ use of touch, but also in the healing rites. Share a little of that with us, please.

Brower: Well, I know that people get a little scared about this touch bit. And when you get a little antsy about that, I want to ask you, what is the first thing you do when you stub your toe, besides say a few words which I can’t mention up here?

Davis: Please. [laughter]

Brower: Or when you slam your thumb in a door. I mean, just think of it, I mean you cradle that, you go, Ohhhh, ohhhhh, and you touch it. You have to touch it. I had a friend who was in a long leg cast and had a bunch of troubles, and he called me one day and he was in tears and I said, “What’s the trouble?”

And he said “Well I just dropped a cast iron skillet on my open toe, and I can’t reach it. I can’t get there to touch it. If I could just touch it, I know it would be better.”

Also kids, you know, they’re out on the sidewalk and they fall down, after they say a few things, what’s the first thing they do? They pick themselves up And they come running in to be hugged and to be embraced and to be loved

So touch is really our most natural instinct, though we’re trying to do something different with it. But it’s how we know love, it’s how we know, it senses everything, it senses fear, you know. And we have to be able to incorporate that touch.

Now, Jesus touched everybody that he cured. We use it in the healing rite because we feel that touch is as important as listening to you and also giving God back to you. We put our hands on your head because the energy from God flows down through your body. And that is done in any special service, and any time we are ordained, all the bishops come and lay hands upon our head. It’s a thing that’s very important.

Davis: The Spirit moving through you.

Brower: Yes.

Davis: Let’s go back for a minute to the example of Jesus, which is so powerful for us in every way as Christians, but specifically with healing. You make a wonderful point in your book about the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus, and that in most if not all of those cases, Jesus is finally recognized by apostles: if it’s on the road to Emmaus, or if it’s Thomas, whom we call Doubting Thomas, Jesus is recognized through his wounds.

Brower: Yes, I like to preach on the Doubting Thomas and say it is not really about Doubting Thomas. It really is about Jesus appearing with his wounds. You realize in all the Gospel stories of his appearance, nobody recognizes him. Nobody recognizes him until one of two things happen. One, he breaks the bread, or two, he shows them the wounds.

And it is not only Doubting Thomas. There are others stories where they show him his wounds. And I always ask myself the question, “Why didn’t He come back perfect? Why on earth did he come back with his wounds? Why didn’t he come back in perfect shape?”

Well, he didn’t. And I think that what He did was to come back and say, “I am whole with my wounds.” And I think that’s because he knows that all of us are human and all of us have our wounds and he’s trying to show us that you can have your wounds and still be whole because you will have your wounds and we hope that you will be whole. And I think that he’s just telling us that by showing us his wounds.

Davis: You write movingly as well about your own experience that you’ve alluded to with breast cancer, and getting to a point where you felt well again, whole again, but healed… Tell us a little more about how you got to that point and what it meant.

Brower: And how I am not a cure. I had breast cancer in 1993. I was heading down to Eastern Virginia Medical School to be professor and chair of the Radiology Department there, and it was the day before I left. I was getting everything done so I could go in there and sock my job and really do it well. And the day before I left I had my mammogram, which was only eight months after a normal mammogram. And I go in and they get me a second picture and I say, “Uh-oh, I’ve got it.” And I did. I had a little pea-sized thing with tentacles and it was very deep. And my question was, do I stay in DC where I had my community where I had my doctors, where I had my mammographer, where I had everything? Or do I go down there and take this job?

And I had many thoughts on the way down. But I had an illness. I had an illness, because when I got down there I felt very alone and very depressed. I didn’t think I was going to die from my cancer, but I knew it was going to take a certain amount from me and I wasn’t going to be able to do my job, and I wasn’t going to be very popular and things were just going to go to pot. And they did.

And I cried a lot. A lot and then I had to go through, I had to have it biopsied, but I knew it was cancer because I had that experience, and I was dealing with reality. My friends so to speak were saying to me, “Well you are too pessimistic, you don’t know what your biopsy’s going to show. It might not be cancer. You are just travelling with your glass half empty instead of half full.”

That was a sickness, okay? They were creating a sickness in me that added to my illness, and I really tumbled. So I stopped talking.

So then they did the biopsy and of course it was cancer. And then they started saying, “Well you’re going to have to change your lifestyle. You must be eating the wrong thing or you are not exercising enough.” They were blaming me for having my cancer. So I really tumbled down.

I got through my radiation. I still was ill, and I still was sick. I’d finished. I had no positive nodes. My cancer was gone. My radiation was gone but I still was sick. I still was ill.

I had to find new friends. I had to find new support. I had to find a different way of… not changing my life, a different way of relating to people. Actually it was through touch. It was through a massage therapist. Now you have to understand that I was 58 years old, and had never had a massage in my life and me, be touched?

So somebody said, but this woman is so spiritually based and Christ centered, she really can read you and help you and I said, “Right.” And then I met her and she had some insights. I didn’t meet her on the massage table. She had some terrific insights into disease of people and why they were responding the way they were. And I said, “I think I can trust this woman. So I call her up and she says, “Well, I only work Monday through Friday.” And I said, “Well that is when I work, so I guess we can’t set it up. And so she said, “Oh, well I’ll do Saturday morning for you. And I go, Uhh. And somebody invited me to go shopping in Williamsburg, and I thought I would rather do that than get a massage. And then she cancelled out on that, so I had to go for my massage.

And I can tell you… It sounds kind of spooky, but it really was the turning point for me. She gave a beautiful massage, and I felt it really was really God’s touch. But she was also working with me on insights as to what was going on with me, and it was at that point that I knew I was healed. My illness and my sickness went away. And it was dramatic.

Davis: And led you then into ordained ministry?

Brower: No, it didn’t lead me into the ministry. That wasn’t my change. One of the things that changed about me was that I learned to set boundaries.

Caregivers do not learn to set boundaries. Caregivers will give their life away, and I was one of those people who would give my life away and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t deal with my disease and deal with my job both, and I had to say no to certain aspects of my job.

And then somebody taught me that I was given thirty pieces of pie to take care of. And when I was given a thirty-first piece of pie, if I took care of it, I gave less to the other thirty pieces, therefore let that thirty-first piece go and remember that God probably will provide somebody else to take care of that thirty-first piece. And I’ve remembered that ever since And I really work on that. And that breast cancer changed that aspect of me. But It took me another six years to go into the ministry.

Davis: To find a way through that. You were part of… I don’t know if it’s a rare breed, but I know it’s a minority within those who practice medicine. We’ve got a lot of studies out that show that something like thirty-forty percent alone of all doctors believe in some kind of higher spiritual source. Much lower, much lower than the national average of those who believe in God, a higher power, however it is defined in various surveys.

Brower: Well, in 1995 there was a Gallup survey in which 95% of the people believed in a higher power, whether it was Allah, Buddha, or God Almighty, whatever. And when they went to doctors, only 43% admitted to believing in something higher than themselves. I think that has increased slightly since then. And I give Larry Dossey a lot of credit for that. In 1993 he published his Healing Words and he went around to universities and talked about prayer and he’d fill the audience and he’d ask for questions afterwards.

It was filled with doctors, and he’d ask if there were questions and nobody would ask him a question. So he’d go off to his office and there would be this trail of doctors going after him to talk to him.

I can tell you now that ninety out of 120 medical schools have some program in their curriculum on spirituality. Whether it is looking at all the world religions, whether it is looking at the role it plays in patients’ health care, whether it’s how to take a spiritual history, they all have some program in there. And now, for a change, all psychiatry residencies have required spirituality in their curriculum. That is a total change. In the early Eighties, when Freud reigned, we did not talk about God at all.

Davis: And you mention spiritual histories which we’re hearing more about. And I know that’s something that particularly George Washington School of Medicine, where you are also involved, has a strong focus on that. What is a doctor doing, or what is a medical student doing when they take a spiritual history, a diagnostic tool in the way that one would take a medical history?

Brower: Yes, it is. Dr. Puchalski is named it FICA. That sort of has bad connotations, but nevertheless. The first question is, “Do you have any kind of faith?”And if you do, then the next question is, “How important is it in your health?” And then if that is answered positively, then you say “Do you have any community that supports you in your health care?” And if that’s answered, then you say, “Is there something that we can do while you are here?”

It takes about two minutes to do, at the most, but it is very helpful. I remember one person, a man, was being sent home from the hospital and, according to the resident, he was going home where there was nobody to take care of him and he needed somebody to take care of him and he didn’t have any money to hire anybody to take care of him, and what on earth was he going to do?

And Dr. Puchalski said, “Well, have you taken a spiritual history?” And he said, “No.” and she said, “Well, go back and get one.” And it turned out he was a Catholic and had a large Catholic community that had already set up getting him meals and getting him to the doctors and everything else, but none of this was known until the spiritual history was taken.

Davis: I want to alert our audience and ask you if you have questions this morning for our guest that you begin passing those to the center aisle where we will be collecting those. We’ve got another question or two here, Anne. Following on that, you made a pretty strong statement in your book, that if a doctor believes in the power of prayer and knows that his or her patient also believes in the importance of prayer in that person’s life, it is a kind of malpractice if they don’t do it, really bring it to the fore.

Brower: And I am going to answer that. One other statement I made was that Dossey said that doctors are the most spiritually deprived people in the world. I have now learned that priests are the most medically deprived people in the world.

The statement, basically, if you believe in the power of prayer and that the healing rite goes on after every service… All of us up there are nothing special. We are just people who believe in the power of healing, the power of prayer, but we are just vessels for God. And you aren’t talking to us, even though you are. You are really talking to God, and God is saying a prayer back.

But if you believe in the soul, and you know that your patient believes in the soul, then you really ought to be praying for that person. Now, you don’t necessarily have to pray with that person. If the person asks you, then I think you should, but if the person doesn’t ask you, then if I were a surgeon heading into surgery, I would, I know plenty of surgeons who do. They will pray that God uses his hands in the right way to make this person better.

I always tell people now, when you are going for surgery to ask your anesthesiologist or your surgeon—either one—to pray with you. They have the right to say no. That’s fine. But you will have raised their level of consciousness to where you want it to be when you are in the operating room. So go ahead and ask. It won’t hurt.

Davis: I’m going to play devil’s advocate here in the final question. What happens when we pray for healing and healing doesn’t come, or when that prayer is not answered, so we think?

Brower: You see, you ask the question, what happens when you pray for healing and healing doesn’t come? Healing always will come. It’s if you ask for a specific thing, like a cure, or I want the Redskins to win today, or when you are directing the prayer to a specific thing, it may not be answered.

But if your prayer is directed for healing, which is basically a closer relationship with God, that will happen, because prayer is your relationship with God. And if you’re praying to God, or talking to God, whether you do it intercessory, whether you do it conversationally or meditatively, however you do it, it’s your relationship with God and that’s fine.

And whatever, however you pray, as long as you pray with love and intention, it’s fine. Healing prayers will always work, because you’re just asking, “Please be closer to me,” and that’s all God wants to be. It’s just when, you have to be very careful of coming forth and saying, “I would like my cancer to be cured,” because it may not be and it may. That’s up to God. It’s not up to any of us, and nobody knows. God is mystery and we don’t know.

Davis: So it’s a very open-ended prayer in that way, a very open-hearted sort of prayer.

Brower: Yes, Dossey talks about two kinds of prayer. One of them is directed prayer, which is, “I want this or this.” He says extroverts do that. He says introverts do the kind of prayer of “Thy will be done.” It’s an active form of prayer, but it is a turning it over to God. He says introverts do that.

And he said that one time he was talking to people and he said, “You always know introverts, because they are at the end of the line. The extroverts are at the beginning of the line. And so a lot of people had been standing with him and finally the very very last person came up to him and said, “Dr. Dossey.” He said, “Yes.” “I was diagnosed with colon cancer thirty years ago and given six months to live.” And Dossey said, “Well, what did you do?” And she said, “I didn’t do anything, but do you think Oprah will put me on her show?” But, you know, it was just turning it over to God, but that doesn’t mean everyone survives, but she was one of the ones who did.

Davis: We’re going to turn to questions now from the audience, and we have several early questions here to start with. This question asks, “What do you make of modern healing stories, or of healings associated with modern saints of the church?

Brower: I’m stuck. Help me out with that.

Davis: I think this question is about healings associated with sainthood, maybe.

Brower: As I said earlier, a lot of the saints died early and reprobates lived late. Modern saints… As long as there is healing, that is a good thing. You know, healing is coming in closeness to God. It doesn’t determine when you are going to die or how long you are going to live. It only has to do with your relationship with God, basically.

Davis: This questioner asks “What is the best way to ascertain that one’s physician is spiritual? Most of us are bound to the doctors within our health care network.”

Brower: Well, ask them. As I said, I am really bad, I will go to a physician and say, “It is very important to me that you be with me when I am in the hospital and I want to know how you are going to be with me in the hospital when I go. Are you capable of praying with me? And if they say—in fact I have turned down doctors who say, “I don’t believe in God.” Then I walk out, because I have a soul. I know I have a soul. It has to be taken care of and if he/she is not willing to be there with me in that, then I’ll find somebody else.

Davis: This questioner asks if you would talk about the value palliative care teams bring to patient care pathways, as opposed to the recently described death panels: the value of palliative care teams.

Brower: I can talk about positive attitudes, that there are a thousand books out there talking about, you know, you have to have a positive attitude if you are going to work out of this cancer. Or you have to have humor. Or you have to have various things that are really upbeat to help you to deal with your disease and there is a book put out by Jerome Groopman, trying to find the center of the brain for hope, because if he could find the center of the brain for hope, he could stimulate that when you got kind of down and then put a needle in and stimulate the center for hope.

And he passed the book by… I got really furious at the book when I read it. I passed the book by a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist read it and he said to Groopman, “You left out one thing.” And he said, “What’s that?”

“What are you going to do with the soul? You’ve got to pay attention to the soul of the person.” Because eventually all these positive attitudes begin to fail. They begin to fail. It’s very hard when you are dying and in pain to keep a positive attitude. And the one thing that helps you during a transition time is your faith belief system. And that’s why it’s so important that the doctor realize that that soul needs to be taken care of, because that’s what gets you through when all else fails.

I have done stuff in hospitals where people have been members of the church for twenty years, and the rector doesn’t show up. The rector doesn’t show up. This is horrible. And so sometimes it’s gets left into the hands of a physician.

Davis: This person is asking for advice on how you reconcile concepts of illness or disease and prayers for healing with an understanding of an all-powerful God.

Brower: The all-powerful God is a God basically who is going to walk with you through your disease and be with you through your disease and either transition with you past your disease or bring you out of your disease to a higher health. The all-powerful God, remember, was down there on the cross with Christ. He was with him, he wasn’t saving him, he wasn’t curing him, he wasn’t doing anything but being there with Christ on the cross.

So I don’t look at a God who is going to save you from your disease. He is going to travel with you through your disease, be with you, and in the way it goes, be with you.

Davis: That is a very powerful image, the Christ on the cross, and the wounded Christ. We have time for one last question, and this questioner asks, “Should doctors be paid specifically to listen to their patients?” Perhaps they already are. Something that there is too little of—the listening—too little of today.

Brower: I don’t know how to answer that one. Basically, I know doctors who still practice the way we used to practice, who will give me the half-hour physical. I think insurance companies are the ones who are pushing into, well you have to get so many patients done per minute, or per hour and then you can’t do it very well. You have to somehow, I don’t know how they do it, but they just rebel against the insurance companies and say I won’t practice that way. You get paid by the insurance company and that’s decided by the insurance company. We’ve become blue collar workers in a sense.

Davis: Well, this has been a wonderful conversation, Anne. Thank you for joining us.

And I want have a few words in conclusion before we end. Next week we’re going to be turning to another very important subject, that is, interfaith relations and relationships, here at the Forum. And our guest will be the Georgetown University Muslim chaplain, Imam Yahya Hendi, who is very well known here locally and nationally for his work as an authority on Islam. So I hope you will join us here next Sunday. And the topic is specifically “What Christians can learn from Muslims and Muslim communities in America.”

Next Sunday evening at 5:30 pm we have a follow-up to that morning conversation. That is a new film about Muslim communities at 5:30 pm.

We hope you will stay as always for our upcoming worship service at 11:15 here in the nave, and in the meantime I’ve got a short pitch for your support. If you’ve found this Forum and others meaningful, we hope you will support us in a time of financial need. You can do that by going to our national website at www.cathedral.org or contacting anyone on our development department. But please keep that in your thoughts. And as always you can access any of our Sunday Forums on line, also on our home page. So thank you all very much for being here today in this conversation and thank you, Anne, for joining us in this very meaningful conversation.

Brower: Thank you all very much. [Applause]