Here are some powerful words from one of my favourite people, Lewis Mehl-Madrona from his excellent book Healing the Mind Through the Power of Story: The Promise of Narrative Psychiatry (my paragraphing below). |
Spiritual power arises through relationship. It arises from common prayer, from coherent thought generated by shared intention. People who pray together or share spiritual practice together week after week become coherent with each other.
When I encounter people who have experienced miraculous (by biomedical standards) healing, these people are usually members of tight-knit communities, whether on rural or remote reservations or in the middle of ethnic neighborhoods in the largest cities.
What seems important is duration of relationship, longer history of exposure to doing ceremony together, and being in cohesive spiritual relationship with each other. When these conditions are met, miracles can occur.
Elders and ceremonial leaders certainly can be wonderful people who inspire confidence, faith, and hope, and whose cultivation of relationships with spirits is helpful in healing, but their role rides on top of a solid community of long-term relationships that build interconnectedness and a communal mind.
I suspect that the mainstream media miss the importance of community and focus on the idea of the powerful, individual healer as a result of the pervasive individualistic paradigms and the contemporary preferences of mainstream Euro-American culture to find quick fixes and answers outside of ourselves...
... Communities are more powerful than individuals - a consistent lesson from indigenous cultures.'