Unleashing the Lion: God's Power in Health and Healing Book

In a book which explores the balance between illness and medical science on one hand and faith and healing on the other, Petrie, a parish priest, poet, musician and former teacher, manages to be both immensely scholarly and highly readable--quite a feat.His central premise is that God is like a lion, a wild animal, and as such is untameable and limitless. We can only experience the healing power of God by finding the courage to set him loose in our lives with all his frightening leonine strength and, perhaps, caprices. The church's, and in some cases the State's, habit of seeking to control and institutionalise God is not helpful. Petrie's God is not a tame kitten.Unleashing the Lion starts with a close analysis of some of the 26 cases of individual healing described in the gospels. From there he moves to a short history of medicine and healing during the last 2,000 years, including a thoughtful glance at some of the best documented cases of so-called "miracle healings" in modern times. He provides detailed references and suggestions for further reading at the end of each section.And now? It is society, not the condition of the "sufferer" which disables people, he argues. Mel, for example has Friedreich's Ataxia but "that definition would actually disable her". He continues: "She is wheelchair enabled not wheelchair bound". His point in devoting a chapter to Mel, an attractive petite woman in her late 20s, is that she has suffered at the hands of "healers". She now says of herself "God created me as a disabled person. I was and am a disabled person. And I will always be a disabled person. And I don't think there's anything wrong with being a disabled person".This positive emphasis on wholeness within sickness and health within disease pervades this optimistic book which doesn't, at the same time, shrink from the difficult question of why God, whatever he is, allows some people to continue painfully to decline while others get better. --Susan ElkinRead More