Christouch

A March 25, 2009 negative evaluation in GUIDELINES FOR EVALUATING REIKI AS AN ALTERNATIVE THERAPY seems to have provoked as one of several responses the short 2011 book by Lauri Ann Lumby - CHRISTOUCH:A CHRIST-CENTERED APPROACH TO ENERGY MEDICINE THROUGH HANDS-ON-HEALING. GUIDELINES was issued by the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. That document found Reiki "not compatible with either Christian teaching or scientific evidence." Over time, I suspect, GUIDELINES will be defeated by CHRISTOUCH much as Charles Kingsley's critiques of John Henry Newman were annihilated by Newman's APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA. *** In rebuttal of GUIDELINES, relying primarily on passages from Scripture (mainly New Testament -- principally the four Gospels but also I Corinthians) author Lumby makes a very creditable and useful first effort to Christianize Reiki. That Oriental approach to hand healing originated in early 20th Century Japan with marked Buddhist thought components and related Eastern origin hand healing methods. Reiki stressed that the healer is merely a channel for "divinely guided energy" ("Rei Ki") to heal the sick. *** Having learned Reiki herself from a Roman Catholic Reiki Master Practitioner, Lauri Ann Lumby makes an outstandingly good preliminary, cutting through the underbrush effort of showing that Reiki and related hand healing can be understood using completely Christian, Bible-based thought processes by which to frame and baptize originally Buddhist/Hindu expressed aspects of Reiki and related non-traditional healing methods. *** Obliquely, Ms Lumby raises such questions as why the Roman Catholic Church does not place more emphasis on Jesus the healer. For the great Galilean beyond doubt healed the sick who flocked to him precisely in order to be healed. He empowered his followers to heal as they simultaneously preached the Good News. Perhaps not every Christian is individually gifted to heal. But some surely are within the context of 1 Corinthians 12: 4 - 11; 22-27, "Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good...to one ... to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit" (the healing gift is explicitly distinguished from the next listed gift of miracles). ***The creative author gives advice on how to discern spirits and to determine whether God is calling an individual reader to healing ministry. She limns no less than Jesus himself as the model for Christian healing. Ms Lumby also, citing Rocco Errico, argues that prayer -- which she commends as a staple of daily living --is itself a form of Reiki's "attunement." As with a radio tuning dial, one who prays adjusts the dial until it resonates with "a clear connection with God." *** In Chapter Four Lauri Ann Lumby intertwines Christian doctrine and Eastern Energy medicine by way of "baptizing" the Oriental chakra system of energy flows. In Eastern medicine the seven major chakras of the human body are seen as channels (1) to observe the human body, (2) to diagnose its ills (energy blockages) and (3) to cure them. Ms Lumby interprets the sacred symbolism of Judaeo-Christian use of the number 7 (e.g., deadly sins, sacraments and on and on) as expressing wholeness, completeness as an ideal human basis for relating to the Divine, as when Jesus cast seven demons out of Mary of Magdala. *** Chapter Five, "The Protocol" speaks of how to deal with a client who has asked for healing. It displays 12 black and white photographs of hand positions in relation to the seven chakras to facilitate God's healing through the praying practitioner of Christouch. Chapter Six relates hand healing to the great Christian experience of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit in tongues of fire. Three Appendixes (A) relate the Chakra system, within a Christian framework, to a general theory of human wholeness; (B) present a suggested Christouch "Commissioning Ceremony; and (C) give a checklist of "The Practical Stuff" to bear in mind in hand healing (e.g. liability insurance, ad hoc tables and chairs, music and atmospherics. The book concludes with a one-page Suggested Reading list, most of it thoroughly unfamiliar to this reviewer. *** As a pioneering effort to Christianize Eastern Reiki and related hand healing alternative healing techniques, Lauri Ann Lumby's CHRISTOUCH treads a path gone along before her by Saint Augustine when he integrated the Gospel with the thinking of pagans Aristotle, Plato and Plotinus or when Saint Thomas Aquinas unearthed and baptized the core of Aristotle in the writings of Muslim Avicenna and Averroes. Whatever its flaws (if any) in terms of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, CHRISTOUCH is a bold original attempt at cross-cultural, religions-spanning framing of Reiki and her energy healing sisters -- which boast plenty of anecdotal evidence that they work. If it is any consolation to the author, even Saint Thomas Aquinas, if memory serves, was once excommunicated by an Archbishop of Paris. -OOO-