Peter Costello
Fr Pat Collins CM. Holistic Healing: A Christian Approach
by Pat Collins CM (Columba Books, €16.99)
This book is only partly about healing. As with all medical matters health in mind, body and spirit begins not in curing but preventing. Living a whole life in a healthy way is the essence of the matter. And, Fr Collins [pictured below] suggests, that must mean living life to the whole in the light of Christ.
The healing hand of Jesus, so often spoken of in the Gospels, is not only for the broken leg, but for the shattered mind. All too often the leg is easier to deal with – they say 80% of bodily ills will ‘cure themselves’ in time. The damaged child, the exhausted father, the anxious mother need other kinds of treatment to mend, or better still, never get that way.
This book is no mere ‘self-realisation’ manual. It is deeply rooted in the author’s own experiences, indeed in the whole nature of his vocation as he sees it. He wants to share in whatever way he can those experiences of the power of healing. The book is imbued from the start by the desire to recover the charismatic spirit of the early Church which the more institutionalised, even more worldly Church has lost.
Wholeness
What is said in the later chapters about healing and about bringing spiritual depth and wholeness to individual lives is rooted for Fr Collins in those early experiences of the Apostles and disciples, which is there for all to read about in the Gospels, the Acts and in the writings of the some of the Greek and Latin Fathers.
Through all of this there is a very ecumenical feeling, a hope that Christian experience and outlook may become more unified, with more understanding between individuals. But he is also aware of all the difficulties, personal, social, institutional, political, even “scientific”, that stand in the way.
He alludes to the experience of Emil Zola when on his visit Lourdes he could not bring himself to accept what he had witnessed with his own eyes, the girl Marie Lemarchand he encountered had been cured of lupus. That kind of immoveable scepticism affects many other areas of life too. Acceptance and understanding can lead to great changes everywhere.
Fr Collins does not burden his text with footnotes, but he provides a list of his own relevant writings over the years, as well as books by many others which will enable his readers to learn more, to deepen their knowledge and ultimately involve themselves in the healing mission of Christianity.
There will be those who find it hard to accept all he says; ‘faith-healing’ has been given a very bad name in the press over the years”
Given these troubled, fretful and contagious times we live in, this book deserves a wide readership to help promote understanding. There will be those who find it hard to accept all he says; ‘faith-healing’ has been given a very bad name in the press over the years. But the way to overcome fears of the unknown is to increase one’s knowledge and experiences, and Fr Collins’ deeply felt, moving and insightful book will certainly help many to do that.
But before leaving this topic I am reminded of a framed motto that hung for many years on the surgery wall of a relative who was a local doctor: “Lord, please help me to remember that it is you who does the healing, not me.”