Prayer Thirty-One

Early in Mark’s gospel (1.40), a man with leprosy approaches Jesus. We see him in this Byzantine mosaic, covered in sores. “If you want to,” he says, “you can make me clean”. And Jesus responds: “I do want to. Be clean.” The interchange could not be simpler. The man courageously lays bare his need: Jesus’ reply hold’s heaven’s longing for healing.

The poet Antony Wilson wrote the prayer above after successful treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. He looks back at his sick self as a baby open-eyed with fright in the dark, his words aching with longing for the comfort which healing would bring. In fact, the refrain ‘Let the healing start’, shapes the whole prayer, a short repeatable mantra which characterised Wilson’s own ‘Passion of Sickness’.

Taking us on an imaginary tour of his body, he pictures healing ‘flooding’ every one of his diseased blood cells ‘with light’ and ‘infecting’ too (in the sense here of ‘affecting’), his heart. He ventures to play his part in his healing by visualising it, laying himself completely bare before the God who says, “I do want to. Be clean.” He is ready and waiting. Open to whatever will be.

Leonard Cohen’s song, Come Healing, though more enigmatic, is as yearning and invitational as Wilson’s prayer. Both men, fully aware that healing does not always come, nonetheless encourage us to invite it, to imagine it, to be open to it.