My Healing

My Healing

I need to give a witness.  At least I think that's the expression.  And the purpose of a witness, I believe, is not strictly for the benefit of others.  It might also be for my own.

First, a correction.  This should more accurately be called "My Healings."  Plural.  Even multiple.  I have been healed many times. 

Now I know and you know what a healing is.  It is not getting a cut or a bruise or a bug bite and treating it and after a few days it's no longer there.  It's not getting an arm or a leg broken, setting it in a cast, and after a prescribed period of time and maybe a little rehab it works again.  I'm talking about a healing outside of yourself.  A healing that cannot be credited to anything you did on your own.  Something beyond your own power.

My first healing: 

Throughout my life I've enjoyed snow skiing.  To do this right I have periodically upgraded my ski equipment to the latest and the greatest.  One particular time, in high school, I got a set of poles by a major manufacturer that had leather straps.  These straps wrapped around your wrists and were there solely for the safety of others.  On that infrequent occasion when you decorated the hill with a wipe out, my favorite expression is "yard sale," these straps kept your poles from impaling anyone in the immediate vicinity.

Well, something happened to me that probably happened to many others and that is if you didn't wear the strap correctly and crashed in a particular way, the strap had a way of wrapping around your thumb like a tourniquet, making every attempt to pull it off.  This was not good.  But apparently it was something I was willing to put up with, at least at the time. 

So my ski seasons became, along with the joy experienced, times of injury for my right thumb and region around it.  The off-season became a time for it to heal.  Heal on its own. 

Then I moved West and started skiing bigger and better hills.  Mountains.  Places with names like Mammoth, Steamboat, Park City, Alta, Crested Butte.  And along with extreme skiing came extreme friends.  Heck, I was extreme.  And this all lead to faster and, by others definition, more dangerous skiing.  Throughout all this I kept upgrading my equipment, including poles, but the plastic wrist grips that came into vogue and replaced my old leather straps were too confining.  So even though the pole section of my garage grew in size and stature, I kept going back to my old poles; the ones with the leather straps.  Weird, but you stick with what works.

And sure enough, with each new ski season and each increasingly spectacular spill, my thumb soon became permanently damaged.  Shot.  There was even a season I almost made it though without re-injury and it still ached nevertheless.  I just didn't make it any worse - until the last day when a major biff virtually destroyed any remaining musculature and ligaments, or whatever medical terms are used for what makes a thumb a thumb.  From that point on for just about any reason and at any time pain would throb through my hand.  This was particularly aggravating as, among other things, I am a writer.  I need to use a keyboard of some sort.

Sometime in here I started going to what anyone could rightly call a "diverse" church in Hollywood.  Mostly white and almost a hundred years old, this church nevertheless welcomed people of all races, socio-economic levels, even orientations.  You know what I mean.  And the Gospel from the pulpit was pleasing, even edifying.  And I liked going there and even became a member. 

Then, I can't really tell you when, I met Gloria.  She invited me to her church, the West Angeles Church of God in Christ.  Not to join or anything, but to attend a Christmas concert or something similar.  It was South of the 10 Freeway, on Crenshaw.  (They have since grown even larger and moved a few blocks away)

I entered the doors of West Angeles to an entirely new experience.  The concert was great.  The people were great.  But the Spirit was greater.  It awakened something inside me.  And soon I was slipping away from my church and coming down to West Angeles, particularly during the summer months when my regular pastor was recharging his Calvinist battery in Scotland.  And yes, there were times, except for one poor hopelessly out-of-synch girl in the choir, where I was the only white person there, but I honestly have to say it didn't matter.  I was warmly received and loved. 

I don't want to make this about something that it isn't, but for the next few years I went down to West Angeles perhaps 5-6 times a year.  It would be fashionable to now say that Denzel goes there, as does Magic, as did attorney Johnny Cochran, but this was unknown to me at the time.  I also took friends.  I even took a former rabbinical student writing a film for me about urban LA, now a recipient of several Academy Awards, and was more entertained than anything else when the preacher, Bishop Charles Blake, yelled, "Now turn to your neighbor and say to them, JESUS IS THE ONLY WAY.  SAY IT!  JESUS IS THE ONLY WAY!"

After awhile I started calling my regular church kindling and West Angeles jet fuel.

And it was on one particular Sunday that something incredible happened.  I went down to West Angeles, to their last service of the day.  That, if you don't like long services, is a mistake.  Apparently it is a known fact that the first 4 services are limited by the need to clear the auditorium for the next service.  No matter what, you were there for an hour and a half max, then done.  Not so with the last service.  This service had no bookend, no time constraints, and I found that out the hard way.  I left something in a pew rack once and had to wait hours before that service got out. 

Anyway, there I was, at the last service.  By now my ski injury pain was something I just lived with, like I suppose is the case with many professional football players.  Add to this I also felt robbed, as a guest preacher took to the pulpit that day.  A broad shouldered man with an impeccably tailored suit.  He would be good, to be sure; otherwise they surely wouldn't have invited him.  But I knew he wouldn't set the place on Holy Spirit fire like Bishop Blake.

Nevertheless we at West Angeles gave him a warm welcome and as the service progressed he spoke mightily about God.  Many times.  He would speak, leave the podium, only to return minutes later with more of his message.  Then again.  And then again.  Well, like any race car driver, you eventually want to see the finish line.  And on this day it didn't seem to be in sight.  Mind you, by now we were way into the healthy portion of the second hour.   Finally he seemed to finish and sat down.  Yet I could see on his face that he was receiving another thought from God and was compelled to come back to the pulpit for yet another, perhaps final, time.

But this time he seemed confused.  This man of many confidences and assurances seemed to not be so sure of what he was about to say.  "There is someone out there who has a problem with their hand, or their wrist."  And he even held up his hand as if it were lame or something and looked out at us briefly.  "I need to tell you that by the will of God and healing power of the Holy Spirit you are healed."  It was not delivered with fiery oratory.  It was more a gentle afterthought.  With that he sat down and the service was brought to a conclusion. 

As I drove home I realized I no longer felt any pain or impairment in my thumb or to my hand whatsoever.  

My Second Healing:

They started when I was 18.  Headaches.  The sudden crushing impairment of a pain so powerful and devastating that it robbed me of any ability to focus on anything else but pure survival during its duration.  Later in life these headaches would be diagnosed as Cluster Headaches.  I think they were a gift from my mother.  She had them.  Two of my three brothers also have them. 

My headaches came every 13 months and lasted 5 weeks.  Actually, to call them headaches is not accurate.  It was one continuous headache for 5 weeks.  Only the strongest of painkillers could mute its effects and for the minimum duration of their efficacy.  For example, if a Darvon is supposed to last for 4 hours, with me it lasted for 3. Soon I learned to set an alarm to try to beat the wave of the drugs wearing off by taking more.  And if the alarm didn't wake me up, the headache would. 

I think I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing leading up to every blackout period of my life, but I cannot tell you too much about what happened during the headache, or "curse," as my brothers took to calling it.  Life changed completely when the pain reappeared.  One doctor, when writing a prescription for a selection of powerful painkillers, said, "Don't try to do anything on these.  Just check out."

I have never owned a gun.  To my knowledge none of my brothers have, either, and I know why.  When the pain digs in as deep as it does and is relentless and unending, you lose all rational thought.

Now back to me in Hollywood.  My business is known for and as, if nothing else, a harbor for self-absorption.  To escape this you have to find something to get outside of yourself.  To find some meaning.  To not suffocate.  At least I did.   I think this is why so many celebrities, not that I am one by any stretch, are involved in charitable work.  

I was new to the area and almost inadvertently found out from some people that you could serve the homeless if you wanted to at the Salvation Army on Hollywood Blvd.  I did so and started in the kitchen.  Not long after I became King of pots and pans.  Not much later the Army decided to pull away from the meal business in that location for whatever reason and my new friends said, "Let's try this at Hollywood Presbyterian Church."  The big red brick place on Gower near the 101.  "Hell, yes," I said, "I'm in." 

So for the next 3-4 years I did that once a week.  On Sundays.  There I became King of lemonade.  And immediately following the actual meal time some old ladies would portion off a room and pray for the homeless if they wanted it, before they went back out onto the streets.  And I got to know these old ladies.  What they lacked in social skills they made up in determination.  Old ladies, unphased, praying with heroin addicts, praying with people who hadn't bathed in weeks, praying with alcoholics who were already drunk at 2 in the afternoon.  

And at one particular feeding my headache came knocking again; an uninvited yet all too familiar guest demanding entrance.  I quickly calculated my personal timeline and yes, it had been 13 months.  Now, after years of enduring this, I was more than skilled in what I had to do next.  The first was that I had to leave while I could still drive.  Then get as many pain killers into my system as soon as possible. 

I went to get my coat and the main prayer lady, Judy, who made Edith Bunker look like a Rhodes scholar, said to me, "Michael, where are you going?"  I said, "Judy, I've got a headache and I'm going to be gone for about 5 weeks."  She looked at me incredulously and said, "We cannot have a servant of the Lord suffer a headache."  I didn't immediately think that mixing giant vats of lemonade made me a "servant of the Lord," nor did I want to take the time to explain to someone like Judy the nuances of an oncoming freight train cluster headache.  Yet there was something so pure about her intention, her determination and her simple faith, that I said what the heck. 

And as the dull growing pain in my left temple grew in intensity Judy and her crew sat me down in a chair and surrounded me and placed their aged hands about my shoulders and head and prayed up a storm.

I have not had another headache since that day when I was healed by a bunch of old ladies confidently summoning and calling down the healing power of God. 

When I began I said I have been healed many times.  These were just two of them.  I'm hoping there's at least one more.  I hope there's always one more.

Like I said, I just had to give a witness.