Hi folks, pardon the typos. I can type but not read, so no proofreading today.
This week, I had a health crisis. The room spun. A lot. Also, I was vomiting. These are bad symtoms, so off I went to consult a medical professional. They gave me some nice drugs and the whole eperience got to be sort of funny, because if I didn’t laugh, I would cry.
First off, I had to keep assuring people that the weather is always sunny in Cincinnati. And smiling really big. Apparently, if the weather was cloudy in Cincinnati and I was frowny about it, I might have had a stroke. But as long as I could assure people the weather was sunny in Cincnnati and I was super duper happy about it, I did not have a stroke.
They sent me in for an MRI anyway. My first MRI! And they didn’t even give me a sticker.
After the best that modern medicine could do, a doctor with a professional sounding voice (I could not really see what he looked ike because the room would not hold still), told me that I had successfully caused the weather in Cincinnati to be sunny and I did not have a stroke. Instead, the crystals of my inner ear were out of alignment, and that’s why I was trapped in a vortex of movement while the room was actually still.
He did not comment on whether my chakras were aligned or not. Just the inner ear thing.
I got sent home, with the room approaching super-collider velocity of spinning, with meds and instuctions to make proper obeisance to the Goddess of Balance and beseech her to align the Sacred Crtystals of My Inner Ear to bring me back into alignment with the rest of the universe in its stillness. And also to bless Cincinnati with sunny weather.
Here’s the obeisance Imust do regularly until my petition is granted by Her Holiness:
I got thinking about blessings of healing. If this had happened ten years ago, I would have asked for a blessing of healing. It would have worked too, because apparently this condition resolves gradually over time. If the priesthood blessing had told me that I would be fully healed, I would have consiered my ultimate healing as a blessing. Instead, I am choosing to believe that the Goddess of Balance is pleased with my obeisance, and also Cinncinati’s weather has something to do with it.
I haven’t seen in the news in days (Hurray!!). Also, I’m not going to be able to read comments and moderate anything touchy, so please no one start talking about politics in the comments.
Questions:
- Have you ever had a healing blessing that worked?
- Have you ever given a priesthood blessing of healing that worked?
- 3. Even if you knew the blessing didn’t actually do anything, did it bring comfort? Because we can’t be dismisive about the value of being comforted when something really scary is happening.
Wheat & Tares 
Argh!!. MRI and vomiting is a poor combination, which killed my aunt.
Sorry about the vertigo. A family member (not my aunt) experienced this. It took a while.
thx for posting this, even in your ‘unbalanced’ situation. We hope the best for you.
When my firstborn was 2 or 3 yrs old, she had some sort of pain or sickness that caused her nonstop crying. When I came home from work, my distraught wife explained the situation, so I sat down, took the child into my arms, and pronounced a priesthood blessing, whereupon she stopped crying and was asleep within minutes. Priesthood power? The calming influence of a warm embrace after an afternoon of exhaustive crying? A decision that enough is enough, so it’s time to relax and give in? I won’t say. But I loved that little girl ever so much harder as I held her in her sleep.
For every example of a blessing from anyone having any efficacy whatsoever, there are at least a dozen contrary examples where the subject succumbs. And yet, there is A LOT of evidence for the healing power of the placebo effect, so why not give the blessing? If the blessed really believes, maybe it will be healing.
My dad was chronically ill and demanded a lot of blessings over the years from priesthood leaders, who eventually begrudged him for all the time and effort and last minute requests when nothing ever changed. Perhaps my dad just wanted to be touched by people who care. When I grew up then he wearied me with these requests and of course I was more willing to give them to my dad than the ward neighbors at the drop of a hat but I always struggled with what to say because even in my believing days I did not believe anything would work. I eventually would just petition deity for peace and petition my dad to be accepting of the way things are.
I no longer give priesthood blessings. I do wonder, if the priesthood truly works this way, why we don’t spend more time roaming hospital halls healing people.
I’ve known several people over the years suffer this condition and unfortunately their timeline to healing varied from months to decades. I hope your improves sooner.
https://www.stjoes.ca/patients-visitors/patient-education/patient-education-a-e/pd-8567-self-treatment-of-benign-paroxsymal-positional-vertigo.pdf
You haven’t seen the news in days? So you don’t know about Matt Gaetz and the push for recess appointments? You won’t be the only one who needs a blessing.
I’m told that my life was spared, both from death and deformity, due to a blessing I had as an infant. Surely some of the credit also goes to doctors and hospital staff.
Since then, I haven’t had any remarkable experiences with blessings. As a younger person I tried to mimic the blessings I heard and used flowery, effusive language. Once, on my mission, I took part in a blessing that was given by an older member of our ward. The blessing was very concise – “you will have blessings according to your faith” or something similar. I liked that style, and blessings I gave after that time were shorter and more on point.
A few months after I told my parents I was leaving the church, my mom texted me and asked if I would give her a blessing. In the text, she reassured me that despite my sins I could still give blessings (something I think she sincerely believes, but still missed the mark with me). I responded that I felt confident about my worthiness as a person, but did not want to participate in that particular ritual for other reasons. I haven’t been asked to give a blessing since then.
I had an emergency health problem recently. Were I still a believer, I might have asked for a blessing. When the paramedics arrived they immediately gave me some meds that immediately worked (lucky me! not all health problems are so easily assuaged). Perhaps I would have credited that to the blessing had there been one. Maybe paramedics really are a blessing, though here in the US they’re a blessing that we pay for. That night cost me and my insurance company the equivalent of a low-mileage, mid-tier Honda Civic.
If priesthood blessings worked, we would be able to see it in the statistics in Utah hospitals, right? But alas, I’m not aware that the recovery rates are tremendously different in Utah than they are for other places in the US. Perhaps accounting for lifestyle, not smoking or drinking, things like that. But I’m general I see no evidence that blessings do anything.
Blessings are, like so many things in Mormonism, something we believe in anecdotally, but not empirically. I’ve never been one to seek out blessings much, but I was sick once as a missionary for a couple of days, and by day 2 asked for a blessing. The next day I felt dramatically better. I’ve never given a blessing that I found to be particularly miraculous, though I have given a blessing that definitely, 100% did not work out. Ten years later, that one still hurts.
These days I’m not sure that I have much interesting in priesthood blessings. I might still accept that God can perform miracles, but I have little confidence in someone pronouncing blessings in His name. And clearly most of the people giving priesthood blessings agree with me, which is why virtually all of them say something to the effect of “I bless you that you will be able to be healed if that is God’s will” as opposed to “rise, take up thy bed, and walk”. I certainly don’t have sufficient faith to give that sort of blessing, nor apparently to even witness that sort of blessing. Prayer is a sufficiently fraught subject for me as it is without even venturing into the priesthood blessing category.
Brad, it’s probably because we lack faith (sarcasm intended) or, as Bednar now says, we have progressed to having the faith NOT to be healed. Either way, treating faith or priesthood as a way to bend reality to our will seems to not be working. I still can’t quite wrap my head around the phrase oft repeated in blessings “according to your faith”, or in other words, whatever happens to you, good or bad, it’s your fault. The blessing giver may as well start by saying they have NO healing power whatsoever.
Dallin Oaks, from the April 2010 conference:
The words spoken in a healing blessing can edify and energize the faith of those who hear them, but the effect of the blessing is dependent upon faith and the Lord’s will, not upon the words spoken by the elder who officiated.
That’s as close to a general authority acknowledging that blessings are a placebo as you will get. (And I’m with jaredsbrother in favor of using placebos.)
I’ve never seen any kind of convincing evidence that a healing blessing worked. Sure, some people recovered, but it sure seems like those that did were likely going to recover anyway.
Even in my more orthodox days, I always dreaded being asked to give a healing blessing to someone. I fully support women’s ordination to the priesthood, but giving healing blessings is, for me, a huge negative aspect of holding the priesthood. It would be great if women could give blessings as well so that I would be asked to give them less frequently. After all, God might deny healing to someone, and it could be all my fault. Was I “worthy” enough? What about that evil thought I’d had two weeks ago? Would the words of revelation come to me? After my first experience with being “the voice” for the blessing, where I tried very hard to do everything “right” and absolutely no revelation came, I have always jockeyed very hard to be the “opening act” of the blessing whose job was solely to apply the oil and say a few rote phrases or incantations instead of the “main act” who actually had to be “the voice” of God.
What’s the deal with the two roles in Mormon healing blessings, the anointer and the sealer of the anointing? Why can’t one guy just do the whole enchilada? The first guy, the anointer, really doesn’t do much at all, which is why I’m always trying to take that role when asked to participate in a blessing. It’s as if we’re casting spells here, and everything has to be done in just the right order, with just the right number of people (eh, men), just the right words, and just the right potion (the virgin olive oil that has to have a spell cast over it before it can be used). Besides, a blessing of comfort can be given by just one priesthood holder, and that seems to be the fallback option when a second priesthood holder isn’t available. Is the one-man version of a healing blessing without the olive oil really less effective than the two man version with the olive oil? I have a pretty strong feeling that they are both equally ineffective.
The only time that I’ve given a blessing where it “worked” was when I was a missionary. A woman in the local ward contacted us and wanted us to come and give her infant a blessing because he hadn’t had a bowel movement in several days. My companion and I gave the blessing at some point in the morning. In the late afternoon, we just happened to run into this woman again on the streets. She came up to us and thanked us profusely, as the kid had finally pooped several hours after we’d given the blessing. I served in a country where bowel movements are much more openly spoken about than in American culture, and boy did we get a vivid description of this kid’s poop. Apparently, the kid’s bowel movement had overflowed his diaper and filled up his pajama bottoms, which isn’t surprising given that this was the first time something had exited his colon in several days. The volume, color, and consistency of the bowel movement were told to us in great detail. My companion and I struggled to hold back our laughter until the woman walked away. Suffice it to say that this mother was a very, very satisfied customer.
I think it’s very telling how the volume and faith in healing blessings in the Church continues to decrease as science and medicine progresses. For example, in the past, a priesthood blessing would have been the only option for dealing with appendicitis. However, nowadays, many members choose to forgo a priesthood blessing for a simple case of appendicitis. After all, a simple laparoscopic appendectomy can be completed in just a few minutes, and the afflicted person can be back at school or the office the following day. Why even bother with casting a spell with a special potion (er, give a priesthood blessing with consecrated oil) in cases like this (and many members don’t any longer) since the cause of the illness is fully explained by science, which has also provided an almost 100% safe and effective cure? As medicine progresses, the need to fall back on magical healing techniques decreases.
I had a weird experience when I was hospitalized overnight for a DVT a few years ago. Because these are life-threatening, and it had gotten worse (xarelto did not work for me), I was kind of scared and couldn’t sleep well that night. In the morning, some older man in a jacket entered the room and offered me a blessing, and I agree to be polite although I didn’t know him. He removed his jacket and was wearing some kind of sash like you might see in the Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo. He put his right arm to the square are said some kind of prayer, then left. I have no idea who he was or what religion, and I fell asleep again. In the meantime my actual bishop stopped by but didn’t come to see me for some reason. I believe that prayer and blessings all kind of work as a placebo, like meditation or intentional thinking. But with the old guy that came in, I truly just was curious and also trying to be nice. I had no belief at all in whatever he was doing, so health-wise I imagine it did nothing for me.
I think the practice of blessings has value. For example, for families gathered around a terminal patient it is acknowledgement that they have done everything they can do and are now placing the outcome in God’s hands. It can be an act of humility and contrition. I only wish that women were included. I’ve always felt that pushing faith outside of the circle is definitely the wrong approach. Church leaders have tried to disengage priesthood from maleness, but will never be successful as long as only males stand in the circle at such times.
mountainclimber: counterpoint: the booming Utah county essential oils business. We’ve just changed our special potions for a broader variety that smell better.
@DaveW, it really would be interesting to know how much Mormon interest in essential oils is driven by the fact that olive oil is used in priesthood healing blessings! Church members do (disproportionately?) fall for all kinds of other MLM scams, uh companies, selling “health and wellness” products besides essential oils that have very little scientific evidence to back them up.
I live in the Mormon Corridor in a pretty affluent area. It was admittedly a pretty small minority, but I was shocked to hear my kids tell me how certain college educated, professional parents of Mormon kids on my kids’ high school sports teams would first go to essential oils for essentially any malady affecting their kids, including strained muscles, stress fractures, bacterial and viral infections, and yep, even Covid (no need for Covid vaccinations in those families at the height of the pandemic if you were using the right essential oils)!!! A couple of families were even sending their kids with kits containing an assortment of various essential oils on overnight team trips “in case something happened”.
Years ago when I was 17 and roller skating at a church youth night at a roller rink, I fell and busted my chin open. It was quite clear that I needed some stitches. All the adults insisted that I have a blessing before going to the emergency room. In the blessing I was promised that the wound would not scar. I have a scar on my chin. It could be due to my lack of faith because the whole thing seemed ridiculous to me (I wasn’t gravely ill or dying) and I never asked for the blessing. They all insisted so I was in an annoyed mood.
My grandmother was old enough to remember when women gave blessings of healing in our faith. In what ended up being the last year of her life, I came to her and she could tell I wasn’t feeling well: nothing serious, just cold symptom stuff. But I could see that my suffering bothered her. She put her hands on my head and gave me a very short matter of fact blessing of healing. I don’t think it helped me get better faster, but I will treasure that memory forever.
Get well soon, Janey. My husband and a work friend both have something very similar, and they say rest is especially important.
I appreciate lastlemming quoting Elder Oaks, above. He’s right. One error (if I may be so bold as to use that word) is men trying to discern or divine the will of God, and to channel the will of heaven to the earth. This isn’t how scripture says that blessings work. When one is sick the elders are called and they pronounce a blessing, not a prophecy, and not a statement of God’s will. They pronounce a blessing of health and healing. I think it is D&C 42, but it is stated clearly that we give the blessing, and if the recipient lives he lives unto the Lord, and if he dies he dies unto the Lord. We deceive the people when we make them think that we are speaking the Lord’s will for that sick person. Our job is to pronounce a blessing, and that is all.
The placebo effect is real, and effective in certain personalities even if they know it’s a placebo. It’s more effective if your doctor prescribes the placebo and you are charged for the fake medication. They say the doctor’s attention plays a role in this, and so does the perception of expertise displayed by the professional feel of his office.
https://search.app?link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.magzter.com%2Fstories%2FEntertainment%2FReaders-Digest-US%2FThe-Power-Of-Fake-Pills%3Fsrsltid%3DAfmBOoperV0HI0THFKl1ksgG8KeewopZZIGaek4XIG3e-EJ_HNXhMYgo&utm_campaign=aga&utm_source=agsadl1%2Csh%2Fx%2Fgs%2Fm2%2F4
In the same way, and very much by the same mechanism, blessings can have effective positive effects, even if you accept that God probably won’t heal you, and if you are healed it might have happened without the blessing. Just the attention, touch and caring involved in a healing ritual can be powerful for some people.
I had many blessings of comfort from a member of the bishopric during the years my husband and I were regularly in conflict. These blessings were effective at the time and helped me feel treasured and connected to God in spite of the conflict in my marriage. I was often in misery and despair over my marriage.
Eventually my husband stopped picking fights. Our counselor said sometimes a spouse anticipates his partner will leave (after all his mother left his father). With this anticipation they may pick fights to get the marriage over with because of their fear. The blessings helped me hang in there, and eventually my husband knew I wasn’t going anywhere and stopped picking fights.
My beliefs have changed and matured since then, but I suspect that my faith had less to do with the effectiveness of the blessing than my being able to seek support from someone that could offer a form of ritualized support to me. It is one way to offer connection and care, even if everyone present accepts that we don’t control life or God. I still treasure the memory of the blessings and my friendship with this brother that gave me the blessings.
I wish I had lived when women gave blessings. Sometimes I long to bless my children in this ritualized way.
As an infant, our oldest child had some physical issues that caused obvious distress and resulted in long crying spells, often in the middle of the night. I rarely requested a blessing, but when I did, she ALWAYS calmed down and went to sleep. Even at the time, I said I didn’t know if the result came from the blessing itself or from the fact that the support of another person calmed me down and changed the interaction between us. Oddly, I became more hesitant to ask for blessings because I didn’t want to experience the first time the blessing did not have the desired effect.
On the other hand, a very near neighbor spent this fall struggling with an extremely painful terminal disease. She was given a blessing in which she was apparently told that this was not her time to die. Her family clung to this blessing, convinced she had several more months to live. They refused to allow hospice care because she was not dying. They refused adequate pain management because they did not want to chance addiction and because they wanted her to be lucid for the conversations they hoped to have over those months. She died within days.
I think blessings bring comfort and peace to believers. I think they can effect our ability to think clearly. I think they share a message of love and support. I genuinely don’t know if they bring miracles of healing. I chose to have a blessing prior to cancer surgery. I definitely also chose to seek competent medical care and follow my doctor’s advice.
When I wrote this, I hadn’t had meds in about 12 hours and I honestly didn’t think I was still high, but … I might have been high. I thought I was friggin’ hilarious too.
I’m getting better. Thank you all for the well wishes.
Fascinating comments – I especially enjoyed mountainclimber’s descriptions of the spells we cast during the healing blessing, and then the connection to essential oils. I had never thought about that before. Of course the LDS believe essential oils have healing powers!
The connection to healing blessings manifested for me by the people who came to help me. I didn’t have a blessing, nor did I want one, but I felt a lot of comfort in the presence of people who arrived to help me. There’s a placebo effect there. When we ‘mourn with those who mourn’ or simply bear witness to suffering, that human connection can help. Not heal us physically, but comfort counts for a lot when you’re scared and hurting.
When a family member had her gall bladder removed, the Elders were called in to give her a blessing. She told me, breathlessly, that she had recovered in 3 weeks! I had the same surgery, no blessing, and recovered in 3 weeks. And, oh, yes, the doctor told me that recovery for gall bladder surgery usually takes about 3 weeks.
When my dad was hospitalized for severe stomach illness, he received several priesthood blessings promising recovery and return to full health. Shortly thereafter, he was diagnosed with a very aggressive stomach cancer, which was inoperable and not responding to radiation. He died less than 2 weeks later. He was very devout to the end, but I suppose he lacked the faith NOT to be healed (eyeroll).
Of the many blessings I’ve taken part in administering, I can’t recall a single instance of any “miraculous” result, such as spontaneous healing or any faster-than-normal recovery. In the case of chronic health issues, there was no apparent improvement, or the problem progressed.
One could argue that blessings of healing are ultimately good because they offer a placebo effect, but in order for that to work the recipient (and possibly the giver) need to be delusional enough to fully believe in divine interventional healing powers, thus perpetuating the superstitious Mormon folk beliefs surrounding such blessings. Another more nuanced view is that blessings offer no healing in themselves, but represent an act of simple kindness and concern for the sick and injured. I’m not fully sold on that idea either, as a large percentage of the blessings I’ve given have been done begrudgingly, late at night, to people I barely knew (or were only assigned to care about on a home teaching roster), and were sometimes putting more trust in me and my vial of oil than in medical professionals.
There are probably many better, more loving ways of being present with another person in their suffering. If I were hospitalized and lonely, I would much rather have someone bring me a crossword puzzle book or a sweet treat or just a few minutes of genuine conversation, rather than have them place hands on my head and attempt to interpret God’s will for me with some artificial, forced words of encouragement.
One could argue that blessings of healing are ultimately good because they offer a placebo effect, but in order for that to work the recipient (and possibly the giver) need to be delusional enough to fully believe in divine interventional healing powers, thus perpetuating the superstitious Mormon folk beliefs surrounding such blessings.
Nonsense. Reread what lws329 wrote above. I’ll even help out by quoting it here: “The placebo effect is real, and effective in certain personalities even if they know it’s a placebo” (emphasis mine). You don’t have to take our word for it–there’s plenty of scientific literature out there on the subject. So no delusion is required. It won’t work for everybody, but for those it helps, there is no reason not to use it.
Note that I am in no way suggesting that we go into competition with doctors. Oaks emphasizes that point in the talk I referenced above. Blessings should be viewed a a supplement to medical care, not an alternative.
It’s good to know that you’re well on the road to recovery, Janey. Anything that involves nausea makes me shrink, from motion sickness to dangerous illness, and I hope it’s all behind you soon.
Anymore, whenever I am called to consider priesthood blessings, I go straight to the practice of women’s healing blessings, established by Joseph and Brigham, that was a thing until after the turn of the century (1900) until it was finally forbidden over the pulpit in the (30s or 40s) and has been so thoroughly erased from church history that none of us now living had any knowledge of it.
By the time I found out about it, anyone I would have asked for their first-hand memories had passed on, such as my great-grandma who trained as a midwife in Salt Lake in 1908, or my grandma, her daughter, who I knew well, who was an RSP when they held bazaars to fund their annual budgets. That makes me so damn mad, and that’s just the beginning.
Through careful, painstaking research, (still not widely available) we now know much better how and why this came to be an important part of the priesthood of Relief Society, and the details of how and to whom women gave priesthood healing blessings. And from my experience as the recipient of these blessings at the hands of men in my life, I have discovered my own understanding of what these blessings can mean.
It’s my belief that these blessings, at their best, are first and foremost palliative and for comfort, and not as a form of medical care. Even a placebo can serve this purpose, though I reject that as a descriptor. Palliative care is no small thing in the restoration of health. In fact, in the beginning, therapeutic remedies were a big part of the folk medicine used to help a patient in need find relief, and to allow their body to cure itself as best as was possible. I think it’s entirely appropriate then and now for a believing person to invoke the powers of heaven to participate in rehabilitating someone who’s injured or ill, or to guide a doctor, or whatever is necessary. Joseph and Brigham firmly advocated against the pushback of men who wanted to shut down the practice, favoring women to have this privilege. And I’m damn mad that as a young woman I wasn’t taught to learn and develop my own practice of this privilege.
When I consider what women did with this privilege over the scant hundred years that they had it, teaching it to other women, training and giving life to Visiting Teaching with the assignment, in power that we can hardly imagine now. And as a woman who’s given birth, the prospect of my church friends and family members, in a sacred ritual, washing, anointing and blessing both my body and the baby’s, in preparation for imminent labor and delivery … Well, damn mad doesn’t really express all my feelings about that.
The Church really missed a vital opportunity when they shut this down, both to inform and influence the practice of men giving these blessings, and to develop women’s power in a real and serviceable way that could have prevented much of the current power imbalance and infantilized sisterhood that we are now experiencing. So much has been lost.
What’s the difference between a priesthood blessing given by a man versus given by a woman?
A: If it’s given by a woman, it’s considered witchcraft.
lastlemming, thank you for the clarification. I stand corrected.
I’m still bothered by the idea of peddling superstition and deception as a viable solution to a person’s suffering, even if done with the best of intentions.
That, and the fact that half of the human population is excluded from participating in this form of ministering for arbitrary, non-doctrinal (and possibly misogynist) reasons.
My thoughts on blessings shifted when I became a mother. As I am single by choice, there were a few times when I wanted to give my girls blessings of healing or comfort. I decided that essentially a blessing is a prayer for the other person spoken out loud and when I felt if was needed would pray out loud with my children for healing or comfort as needed. I do believe that the church is behind on women’s ordination, but I still took care to not mimic an “official” priesthood blessing. Just a prayer out loud expressing a desire that the illness or unease ceases.
I did have an experience when I felt I needed to ask for a blessing. I was in Mexico on vacation and my gall bladder / kidney / liver were shutting down and I was being taken in for emergency surgery. My friend who was with me had been my companion when we were missionaries a million years ago. I asked her to please offer a blessing and (whether it was placebo or not), I felt so much comfort from the words she hesitantly offered. They were words I needed to hear out loud and helped me to be as calm and peaceful as I could be in that moment.