Infinite Grace: Where The Worlds Of Science And Spiritual Healing Meet. - Review - book review

INFINITE GRACE: WHERE THE WORLDS OF SCIENCE AND SPIRITUAL HEALING MEET by Diane Goldner. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 1999. Pp. 346. $23.95 (hardcover). ISBN 1-57174-125-9.

Thomas Merton (1968/1993) expresses well the difficulty of comparing Zen Buddhism with Christianity. "Studied as structures, as systems, and as religions," Merton points out, "Zen and Catholicism do not mix any better than oil and water." On the other hand, to regard Zen Buddhism as "merely and exclusively a religion" is to "falsify it and, no doubt, to betray the fact that one has no understanding of it whatever." Merton profoundly understands that the real drive of Buddhism is toward an enlightenment, which is precisely a breakthrough into what is beyond system, beyond cultural and social structures, and beyond religious rite and belief.

Merton says, "The trouble is that as long as you are given to distinguishing, judging, categorizing, and classifying -- or even contemplating--you are superimposing something else on the pure mirror" [of Zen].

This "trouble" applies equally when we speak of science and spiritual healing. Science is a tool, but it is also a social structure, with dogma, laws, hierarchy, and councils. It is the citadel of "...distinguishing, judging, categorizing, and classifying." Spiritual healing can be examined in this way, but we may lose something by doing so. Like Zen, spiritual healing may be -- in more than one sense -- beyond belief. While it is common these days to define the schools of healing, to try to pin them down, to catalogue the specific practices and judge the outcomes, we may be "...superimposing something else on the pure mirror..." of spiritual healing. This may be why, as with Zen, there are so many schools, branches, and even individuals who practice this art outside of the confines of any system.

This said, I am delighted to welcome a new book on spiritual healing, by a journalist instead of a scientist or healer, about the healers rather than their outcomes, that puts science in its place, by using it as a tool to make a point rather than trying to contribute to it or influence the social structure with it. I like the tide, Infinite Grace, and its subtle tautology -- as if grace could be finite or infinity anything but graceful.

By contrast, most other works on spiritual healing are written by healers themselves, to explicate their systems, or by scientists and medical professionals, to explicate theirs. Most are written from an insider's viewpoint. Most aim their tomes toward fellow professionals, with a sight wide enough to entrain a curious public. Most reflect the authors' well-argued points of view and grasp at theory of one sort or another.

Dossey (1993), Benor (1998), and Radin (1997) are the most commonly cited scientific sources. Healers such as Rosalyn Bruyere (1989) and Barbara Brennan (1988) have written about their own personal views, and Judy Orloff's book (Orloff, 1997) might be mentioned here as well. Hampton Roads Publishing Company (www.hrpub.com) lists a number of other tides of this latter sort. Dora Kunz edited a volume (Kunz, 1995) which attempts to bring science and spirituality together, featuring chapters by a number of clinicians and scientists.

Russell Targ and Jane Katra have recently contributed two very readable books on spirituality and science (Katra & Targ, 1999; Targ & Katra, 1998), with the earlier one dealing directly with healing. It centers on a detailed personal account of the remarkable personal healing of Targ's own life-threatening illness (liver cancer) with Katra's spiritual healing and guidance. It takes off from there to discuss the patient's and healer's personal experiences through the process, summarize diverse research findings, and move toward a theoretical understanding of how healing might work. The reader gets Targ's and Katra's views, common for this genre. It is a very thoughtful and thought-provoking work, which I highly recommend, especially for those of us in parapsychology who have followed Targ's work over the years.

Diane Goldner, however, takes a different approach in Infinite Grace. Goldner, a journalist, conducted four years of investigative journalism on this topic and this book is her final report. It documents the healers, the backgrounds, the practices, the patients, as well as the relevant scientific studies. It does not cover, of course, all forms of spiritual healing, as Goldner explains in the introductory pages:

I have focused on one interrelated group of healers--a soul band if you will. This is not an endorsement, but an exploration. There are many other healers practicing and teaching in the United States at many skill levels. No matter who the healer is, or what the healing style, however, the same principles apply, just as the laws of electricity and magnetism are the same in Europe and Asia (in "To The Reader").

The "soul band" is Rosalyn Bruyere and Barbara Brennan, their students and graduates, and "spinoff" schools such as Jason Shulman's Kabbalistic healing and Amy Skezas' Flow Alignment and Connection. This focus is not too restrictive, since Bruyere and Brennan have trained thousands of healers who now practice and teach others throughout the United States and Europe. Moreover, their energy healing approaches, together with Dolores Krieger's conceptually similar Therapeutic Touch, form the basis of the national Healing Touch training courses (offered through the American Holistic Nurses Association) which currently attract a growing number of nurses and health care professionals.