The doctors returned to their place 'way back in line and had been standing there almost an hour. The line didn't seem to be moving at all. Suddenly there was a bit of commotion and the line parted for this figure in a long grey beard with a white smock coat and a stethoscope stuck into the pocket. He passed everyone by and when he got to he head of the line, the doctors were amazed to see St. Peter wave him on into heaven. They stormed up to the front and said, "an hour ago you told us we had to wait in line like everyone else, but then you just let that doctor in!" St. Peter replied, that was no doctor, that was God, he just likes to play doctor once in a while."

Well, that joke is dated. It comes from an era when the doctor was right next to God as the guardian of your well-being. When I was a child, I included my family doctor in my evening prayers, and once, in an asthma attack in the middle of the night, I asked my mother to call her up even though I knew my mother was doing everything for me that the doctor would have recommended. I said just to hear Dr. Haynes' voice would give me comfort.

We are a long was from that role of doctors today. Few of us now have the luxury of a doctor who follows us for years, who knows our body and its peculiarities. Rather, most doctor visits today are rather like visits to McDonald's – you wait for a long time and then you get maybe 5 minutes of interaction and then you're out the door and you're all the way home before you remember the question you were supposed to ask the doctor.

This dehumanizing system is not the fault of the doctors, they are as victimized by it as we patients. It was interesting to see in Bill Moyers' excellent series on death last week a physician who had an incurable disease express his disgust at the dehumanizing treatment he received in the hospital, which fueled his determination to die on his own terms at home.

Western medicine is, of course, based on science and modern science is a product of the Enlightenment, as is liberal religion. Generally a theory doesn't get accepted unless it can be verified by tests, and the therapies, the healing techniques that are favored are ones with proven track records and mechanisms that are understood, at least partially.

The advances in medicine are probably the most unambiguously good of all the advances in science. We can cure many diseases and conditions today that killed untold numbers of our ancestors. For persons living in industrialized countries, the average life span has risen from 35 to 40 years of age at the end of the Eighteenth Century to almost twice that age today (75.1 years in the United States in 1990).

We live longer than ever before. Modern medicine can save us from, can cure us of more life-threatening diseases than at any time in human history. And yet our doctors, as healers, seem more distant from us than at any time in our history.

Now we have plenty of people who would be healers. The yellow pages of any town in this Commonwealth abound with practitioner of what are loosely called "alternative therapies." These range from chiropractors and homeopathic physicians to herbalists to aromatherapists, breath specialists, acupuncturists, massage therapists, and Reiki practitioner. Most of these folks practice in the interstices of Western Medicine, treating conditions that fly beneath your local physician's radar, such as chronic pain.

Or Bell's Palsy, that mysterious affliction of the facial nerves that seems to be running its course in me. While the condition might have cleared up on its own without any active intervention, in the middle of the summer I became discouraged by the stagnation in improvement, and followed a recommendation for an acupuncturist skilled in treating this condition. The one recommended turned out to be not only an experienced acupuncturist but also a psychotherapist and a self-described UU-Jew-Bhu, that is, a person who in a life of seeking had explored Buddhism and his native Judaism and had found his present religious niche in a UU church. To his work I credit the fact that I can basically smile today.

Now its fortunate that you don't have to believe in acupuncture for it to work. The theory of acupuncture is that it releases energy, or chi, so that it can flow from one part of your body to another. The channels through which chi flows cannot be seen on autopsy, but this didn't bother traditional Chinese doctors because they didn't perform autopsies anyway.

From the point of view of a secular Western scientific perspective, acupuncture doesn't make sense. But it seems to work. And this by itself should teach us Western rationalist skeptics a little humility. As Hamlet said, there are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your poor philosophy.

One of the most sensible, down-to-earth people that I know recently surprised me by relating in detail to me an out-of-body experience she had during a surgical procedure. You never can tell.

You do not find good scientists claiming that they know everything about the way the world works. You find good scientists proclaiming the wonder of how it all fits together and humble before the amount we have yet to learn.

To get back to my acupuncturist, I think his value to me as healer is not just in the fact that I've gotten good results, but in the fact that he took a personal interest in me and seemed to suffer alongside of me. I sensed an engagement, a concern that I rarely sense in the physicians with whom I deal.

But the point here is not to trash physicians or to exalt alternative healers. It is to inquire into what healing is and how it relates to our happiness. We casually link the two in a toast when we raise our glasses to "health and happiness." If we have these two, we feel we have won at the game of life. If we don't have one or the other, we strive to get them.

I want to offer a story for its perspective on happiness. One of my favorite authors is the neurologist Oliver Sachs, who writes about people with various kind of brain impairments, and the bizarre things these impairments do to their minds. In the mid-eighties, Sachs wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books that has stuck with me ever since. It was called "The Last Hippie," and it was about a fellow about my age or a little younger, who had left his comfortable suburban home on Long Island as a rebellious teenager in the mid-sixties. He had several years on the streets doing a lot of drugs before he got taken in by the Hare Krishnas. His parents lost contact with him for several years, and then tracked him down to the Hare Krishna temple in New Orleans. They discovered that the other Krishnas looked up to their son as a holy man, in part because he radiated an aura of eternal peace. They got him to a doctor and discovered that th cause of this aura was that he had a tumor in his brain the size of a goose egg. The tumor was not cancerous, and it was successfully removed with surgery, but it had basically destroyed the connection between long-term and short-term memory. He could remember clearly things that had occurred before 1968, but new knowledge just went in one ear and out the other. Moreover, he was totally blind, but in a remarkable twist, did not seem aware of his blindness.

Sachs began treatment of this patient in the late seventies. For the patient, the world had stopped in 1967; he talked of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in the present tense. Sachs took him to a Grateful Dead concert. In the first half of the concert, the band played all their hits from the sixties, and the patient sang along enthusiastically. In the second half, they did their newer stuff, and at each song, a look of bewilderment would cross his face, and then a look of resignation and peace.

What struck me forcibly about this person, and continues to haunt me, is the question, is he the paradigm of happiness? Is he perfectly happy? I think a case can be made for it. What suffering he undergoes, he does not know. He is not even aware that his vision doesn't function altogether.

Let's assume that he has achieved perfect bliss, as the members of his Hare Krishna temple supposed. Which one of us would volunteer to trade places with the last hippie?

None of us, clearly. And the reason is that even if he is perfectly happy, there are other dimensions to human life than happiness. There is depth, there is perspective, there is consciousness. And indeed there is suffering. You may not agree with the Buddha that everything is suffering, but surely suffering is an important component of human life. It is part of what makes us who we are.

At first glance, suffering seems to be the exact opposite of happiness. Either you're happy or you're suffering, right? No, it's not that simple, and the last hippie shows that. With one important exception, if we are focused on our true best interests, we don't want his version of happiness because it's more important for us to know what's going on and to be able to sense ourselves as beings in time than to experience either joy or cessation of suffering.

The exception is those conditions which are so exquisitely painful, often near the end of life, that we will choose high doses of opiates that all but blot out conscious thought in order to avoid the physical pain. Some of us, of course, use alcohol and drugs to blot out pain at other times, but this is on the long run against our better interests.

For we need to know ourselves as beings in time, to measure how far we've come and project where we're going. One of you told me recently that you thought you were having a relapse of a condition you thought you had beat years ago. This is certainly discouraging, and this discouragement is the flip side of the optimism we feel when we can sense each day that our condition is improving.

But what do we hold onto to get us through those periods of despair? This is the question that I asked every day in my two stints as a hospital chaplain. I found a lot of difference in spiritual orientation among the different types of patients I encountered. The cancer patients often had their lives transformed by the brush with death. Every day, every hour, from then on was going to be lived in a new light, as an incredible gift.

The heart attack patients, on the other hand, saw their condition as a mere inconvenience, a plumbing problem which should be fixed as quickly as possible so they could get back to the golf course.

And the diabetics, who have a tough row to hoe trying to maintain a sugar balance in the face of defective regulating mechanisms in the body, usually felt guilty because they had succumbed to temptation or neglected to take proper care of themselves and landed in the hospital as a result. They were very hard on themselves.

Those who did best were the people who at some level kept faith in something. The statistics show that people who are regular church attendees have quicker recoveries and shorter hospital stays across the board than non-attendees. I think this is because a certain amount of faith pulls you through.

When the woman with the hemorrhage touches the hem of Jesus' garment, her hemorrhage stops. At this point this looks like a tale from the supernatural: Jesus’ supernatural powers, his aura, somehow mysteriously cures her. But he takes great pains to find out who it was that touched him, and when he does he tells her, woman, your faith has made you well. Not my supernatural powers, but your faith.

Now we think of healing as curing, as restoring a person to the health he or she had before. But sometimes we cannot get back there. Sometimes the facility we lost will never come back. As we age we are always losing the ability to do what we could before, but sometimes an illness or accident deprives us of some ability all at once. Healing is not just recovery of the status quo ante after an injury, it is also learning to adjust to losses which may be permanent.

When that happens, it seems to me that the most important thing is to mourn the loss. Here is where healing and happiness may get in each other's way. If you are focused exclusively on the question of whether you are happy, or on trying to convince yourself you are happy, you cannot properly grieve the losses. Sometime you have to abandon the pursuit of happiness and just walk that lonesome valley in the shadow of death.

And that is what we come to finally. Life is a terminal illness, and no one survives. This insight may be the foundation of all religion. Certainly it tells us that being preoccupied with whether we are winning at the happiness game is shortsighted. The healthiest, most able of us will eventually die. We never completely recover from anything. We never beat the grim reaper. So if he comes for a little part of us early, our smile, or our hair, or our eyesight, he is only collecting what we will all have to pay in toto sooner or later.

And yes, I think I do believe in faith healing. In some sense and at some level, all healing is faith healing. Healing, real healing, is not possible without some sort of faith. Some of you will articulate your faith as a faith in Jesus, either Jesus the man or Jesus as an emissary from the divine. Others of you will name your faith as a faith in God. Others may follow Emerson and call it faith in the "Soul of the Whole." Some may feel it as faith in other humans beings or groups of other human beings such as family, town, church, or in that abstraction called humanity itself. Some of you will simply have faith in yourselves.

But you need to have faith in something in order to heal. And that faith, in Jesus' words, will make you whole. Not necessarily happy. Not necessarily the same person you were before you had the accident or got sick. But whole.

For here's the paradox, my friends: It's only by being broken that we can be whole. It is only by acknowledging our brokenness, our vulnerability, to the object of our faith, be it Jesus, God, our fellow humans or ourselves that we can begin to be healed.