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Video transcript:
Once upon a time, I gave someone I cared about a priesthood blessing of healing. I told them in the blessing that the next day they would be healed of their sickness. It didn’t work. For a long time now, I’ve been wondering why. I followed the steps. I said the words. I thought I was in tune with the Spirit. Why do priesthood blessings just fail sometimes?
Not surprisingly, I quickly learned that I was not alone in this question. In fact, people have been trying to understand charismatic healing for literally thousands of years now. In Matthew 17 a father brought his afflicted child to Jesus. He told Jesus, “I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him.”
Clearly, they tried, and it didn’t work. “…the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’” In one account, Jesus says it was because of their unbelief. In another, he says that only prayer and fasting would have worked.
Clearly, the process was not as simple as the disciples had thought. And perhaps not surprisingly, I eventually came to the same conclusion.
So, knowing that questions like this have existed since time immemorial was comforting, but it didn’t exactly answer my question. Whether ancient or modern, why do blessings of healing fail sometimes? The next place I started looking for answers was in our own church history. Over 150 pages of historical research later, my understanding of healing was actually revolutionized, and I’m going to tell you why.
In the early decades of the Church, charismatic healing took many different forms. If you sprained your ankle, they might have anointed and laid hands on your ankle. Consecrated oil was not just considered holy; in a sense, it was also considered medicinal. Many people literally drank it. Some would anoint their entire body with oil. Animals were even blessed sometimes. For a long time, it was extremely popular to be baptized for health. And despite the method, sometimes these healings worked, and sometimes they didn’t.
But from the chaos, there was a paradigm-changing principle that emerged: For most of my life, I have viewed healing exclusively as a priesthood thing. But In the early decades of the Church, healing was largely considered to be a gift of the Spirit, not an exclusive function of the priesthood. In fact, as we’ve explored in the past, men and women gave blessings of healing without invoking the priesthood. Healing was a gift potentially available to anyone with faith in Jesus Christ.
Now, as the Church grew, Church practices had to be standardized. Leaders had to decide which forms and methods to institutionalize, and which to leave on the cutting room floor. And unavoidably, culture played a role in that process. For example, most Protestants in Joseph Smith’s day were cessationists, meaning they believed that the gifts of the Spirit, like the gift of healing, were things of the past. But over time, as more Protestants began practicing charismatic healing, Latter-day Saints responded, in part, by increasing the emphasis on healing through our unique priesthood authority. The scriptures do sometimes call on priesthood officers to engage in healing, but healing through priesthood authority was also an identity marker that set us apart from other Christians.
So, I wanted to know why priesthood blessings fail sometimes. But now I’m also wondering, if healing worked in the early years without priesthood authority, why do we need it for healing today at all? As I wrestled with this topic, I came to what, looking back, seems like an obvious conclusion. When your family does a special fast for a loved one to be healed, that’s not a priesthood ordinance. Neither are your personal faith-filled prayers for healing. Alma the Younger received spiritual healing through the faith of his father. Priesthood is the divinely appointed institutional channel through which healing can happen, but it is not the only channel.
And there are pros and cons to each channel. I love that by involving multiple priesthood officers, the priesthood channel can tap into the faith and support of your local covenant community (aka, the people in your ward). And I think God blesses us as we sustain our leaders and use that institutional channel — but it’s one of many.
Furthermore, this history taught me that official blessings of healing are not something that can only intrinsically and eternally be accomplished through priesthood officers. It is a service that has simply been formally assigned to priesthood officers for the present time. And that may or may not evolve more in the future.
Again, helpful information. Paradigm-shifting information, even, but I still hadn’t found the answer to my burning question. Why do priesthood blessings fail sometimes?
There are two traditional answers to that question that I know you’ve heard before. One option is that the blessing didn’t pan out because the recipient of the blessing didn’t have enough faith. That may very well be true sometimes. But real talk, that explanation feels like a cop-out sometimes, and the last thing that someone struggling needs to hear is that they are the problem — that they lacked the faith.
The other traditional answer is that the blessing didn’t pan out because the person giving it said things that just were not inspired by the Spirit. To be blunt, I think that is a more reasonable explanation, but what it does is it creates a lot of anxiety for priesthood-holders. They feel a lot of pressure to get the words right, and it can lead to very ambiguous blessings, because they’re afraid that being too specific might backfire.
So, what do we do? What is the answer? Why do priesthood blessings fail sometimes? After a lot of thought, discussion, prayer, and soul-searching, I came to a conclusion that was not necessarily what I hoped for, but that I think resonates as true.
Priesthood blessings fail sometimes because priesthood blessings are an imperfect system. Priesthood blessings are not an exact science. Priesthood blessings represent the Church’s evolving best attempt at harnessing the spiritual gift of healing. But in the words of Mother Abbess, sometimes it’s like we’re trying to catch a cloud and pin it down.
Most priesthood holders are doing their best to give inspired blessings. And I think most recipients of blessings are doing their best to have faith. But we live in a fallen world. We don’t always understand God’s will or timing. And things don’t go the way we want, sometimes. Priesthood blessings are not predictable recipes. The Spirit isn’t a divine vending machine where we punch in a code and “God’s will” automatically drops into the tray below. Instead, the blessings someone receives are based on dynamic relationships whose intricacies are much more far-reaching than the 5-minute boundaries of the blessing itself.
There might be a variety of reasons why specific blessings don’t pan out, depending on the scenario. But while we may not always receive a specific answer as to why blessings fail sometimes, there are a couple of ways we can shift our paradigm so that we’re more comfortable with not always having the answers.
First: Jesus Christ is the source of all healing. Priesthood blessings are a channel. Sometimes I worry that we might inadvertently be placing more faith in the channel than in the source. Is our faith in the priesthood officer’s connection with the Spirit? Or is our faith in Jesus Christ? If we place too much faith in the giver of the blessing, we may be setting ourselves up for disappointment if the blessing fails.
Of course, we hope that the priesthood officer’s words are inspired, but when our faith is centered on Jesus Christ, then we have confidence that His will will be done, no matter what words are spoken. We hope Christ will heal us, but if not, our faith in Him stands firm nonetheless. Like Shadrach, Mesach, Abednego, and many others, let’s try to get to the point where our faith in the Lord is anchored in our love for God, not on outcomes.
Second: We need to understand that struggling to discern God’s will is not a wrench in God’s plan — it is God’s plan. It’s not supposed to be easy. He doesn’t expect priesthood officers to be perfect at it. Think about this: If every blessing was always perfectly fulfilled, there would be no need for faith. Priesthood officers are not always a crystal clear window through which the will of God effortlessly shines. In mortality, we all see through a glass darkly. God doesn’t just call a timeout on that condition of mortality so someone can give a perfect blessing. So, let’s extend priesthood officers some grace in that regard. And if you give priesthood blessings, extend some of that grace towards yourself if you need to.
Third: Please remember that imperfect systems can still massively bless our lives. I can’t stand rush hour on I-15, but getting from A to B would still be a heck of a lot harder without the freeway. As I was writing this episode, there was a power outage and my computer shut off. It’s not a perfect system, but I’m not throwing my computer out the window. The health care system drives me up the wall sometimes, but my wife and children probably wouldn’t be alive today without it. Priesthood blessings don’t always go the way we want, and some people might be tempted to just throw the baby out with the bathwater. I can’t do that, because I know that sometimes blessings do miraculously work out. And I’ve felt the power of the Spirit that can attend them. Even as I’ve gone about studying this very topic, I’ve seen how the Lord has helped me and nudged me along the way. And like Nephi, while I do not understand the meaning of all things, I know that God loveth his children. So, take heart.
Earlier, I said that both men and women used to give blessings of healing — we dig a lot deeper into what that looked like and why it changed in this episode. Go check it out, and I’ll see you there.
Resources:
— “Healing,” via the Church History Topics glossary on the Church’s website: https://tinyurl.com/mr3pmea7
— “‘Pouring in Oil’: The Development of the Modern Mormon Healing Ritual,” by Jonathan A. Stapley: https://tinyurl.com/2546ntkp
— “Last Rites and the Dynamics of Mormon Liturgy,” by Jonathan A. Stapley: https://tinyurl.com/2pvhjjxw
— “The Forms and the Power: The Development of Mormon Ritual Healing to 1847,” by Jonathan A. Stapley & Kristine Wright, in John Whitmer Historical Association Journal, Summer 2009: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23291019
— “Female Ritual Healing in Mormonism,” by Jonathan A. Stapley and Kristine Wright, Journal of Mormon History 37 (Winter 2011): https://www.jstor.org/stable/23291588
Notes:
— If the Lord’s will will be done no matter what is said in a priesthood blessing, why give the blessing at all? Well, because the reception of some blessings is contingent upon our asking for them.