Jesus on the Mainline: Exploring the Light of Healing Prayer

Illuminated by Agnes Sanford’s hands-on teachings

My friend and fellow Middle-Pause editor, Debbie Walker, is in bed with unbearable osteoarthritic hip pain today. We often pray together, she to Jesus, and me to whatever words flow into my mind to describe the Infinite Life Force we often call God.

But she hurt so bad she just asked me to pray for her.

So I did.

And will continue to do so.

I prayed for her with all my heart, baring my soul to God, or Spirit, or the Divine Creative Allness and Isness I’m counting on to hear my prayer and respond quickly, in the affirmative.

While I prayed, a gospel song popularized by the Staples Singers among others popped into my head and got me singing and snapping my fingers. Jesus is on the mainline, tell him what you want….Call him up and tell him what you want.

Could it really be that simple?

Some new thought churches, including ours, tip-toe around Jesus.

He’s acknowledged as a great teacher and healer. His life reminds us that he wasn’t the exception, everything he did we can do, too, through what’s called Christ Consciousness. Which is less about Jesus, and more about our co-creative capacity when fully aligned with Spirit.

But very little about the personal life of the Jesus who lived, taught, fought, and died for his beliefs.

Until Christmas.

While the message tends to focus on the birth and rebirth of the Christ Consciousness in each of us, we love to tell the nativity story and celebrate his humble birth. We hang lights, decorate a tree, deck our halls with boughs of holly, and sing carols by candlelight on Christmas Eve.

Our church, metaphysical as we are, even has a beautiful wooden creche set we set up around our tree. It’s got about ten wooden figurines, including animals surrounding the holy family.

The camels are my favorite.

They don’t always come to mind when imagining that barn long ago where Mary swaddled her baby and nestled him in the manger. But they brought the magi from afar, following yonder star.

Sitting by the tree, caressing their polished flanks, laughing at their cartoonish mouths, transports me into the scene. It comes alive in my heart, and a sense of holy awe surges through me. The healing energy of this powerful story touches my soul.

So I let it.

Without worrying about whether or not the story is to be taken literally or metaphorically. Either way, it fills me with the peace, comfort, and joy we sing about as I bask in its warmth and light.

Sometimes I envy the faith of traditional Christians.

Their route to God appears vivid, direct, and accessible.

The songs are powerfully explicit. With instructions like, Call him up and tell him what you want!

Or My heart needs a surgeon, my soul needs a friend. So I run to the Father again and again.

What these and other songs evoke in me is a personal connection. A loving, healing presence for sure. But also, a father or a brother, mother or sister we can tell our troubles to, and get a palpable response.

Something that may or may not happen when I’m trying to feel a connection with Infinite Divinity.

Especially when we’re hurting, we need to connect with the Intimate nature of God. We need to feel and be held in those Everlasting Arms. The God of my understanding is a formless Life Force that contains all form. The Jesus of my understanding has arms for embracing and a heart for loving, and of course, a direct connection to the Divine from which he draws his healing power.

The Path of Affirmative Prayer

I’ve been carefully taught to pray the five steps of treatment, the Ernest Holmes, Science of Mind way. AKA affirmative prayer.

In order to manifest, they taught us, we have to first recognize that God is all there is, then unite with that Allness and Isness.

And then and only then are we to declare our desire in the affirmative.

Not my hip hurts, but the vision of healing. My hip is full of light, moving freely and I’m dancing.

Finally, we give thanks for the blessing as if it’s already happened. Wait. What?

That’s right. We’re declaring to the Universal Creative Consciousness we are one with that our desire is already so.

Does that declaration make it so?

Yes, in my experience, but not always instantly. If I believe that the healing I’m declaring is possible. This is where the rubber of my prayer meets the road of reality.

If I’m in so much pain I can hardly move, it’s hard to imagine anything different.

This is where faith comes in.

But if my faith feels weak or I’m really hurting, I seek help.

Help from Agnes Sanford and her very readable, bestselling book, The Healing Light. I just ordered a copy for Debbie. I know it will lift her spirits and bring light back to her usually radiant faith.

So who was Agnes Sanford?

For me, she’s a welcome missing link between metaphysical thought and more traditional Christianity. Born in 1897 to Presbyterian missionary parents in China, her life and work demonstrated that miracles and healing are entirely possible.

For years Agnes suffered from chronic depression. But after a minister laid hands on her and taught her a healing prayer, the depression gradually lifted.

After marrying the Episcopal priest Edgar L. Sanford, she was able to legitimize hands-on healing prayer and take it to a wider audience. She did this with the help of science, comparing the use of spiritual power to the use of forces like electricity. She founded the Inner Healing Movement, a type of prayer geared toward healing memories and emotions.

What’s her secret about healing prayer?

First of all, before we declare to God what we want, we need to be connected to that Divine Life Force. If we want the lights to come on, we have to hit the switch that gets the electricity flowing into the bulb. If we want God’s Light to shine blessings on our lives, we have to consciously connect.

We have to connect our thought vibrations to God’s. How? By focusing, not on ourselves and our problems, but on the healing Light of the Divine. One way for this to happen is through Jesus. Agnes wrote:

“The next step of our prayer, the step by which we translate the divine love into human terms, is for those of us who know Jesus to think of that most loving Son of Man, our friend. He stands before us when we think of Him, forever receiving the life of God, and forever transmitting that life to us through love….Uniting our hearts with His heart (by loving him), let us ask in His name that the life of God be increased in us.”

In other words, when the Allness and Isness of God feels too vast and impersonal to have a ‘Pooh and Piglet’ conversation with, forget about the five steps. I can simply talk to Jesus and/or Mary, and through their intimacy, connect to the Infinite.

A true metaphysician, Agnes taught the importance of visualizing that which we wish to see. And after doing that, to give thanks. In her words:

“Let us thank Him [or Her] for His life in our hearts, ordering and controlling our emotions and filling us with His love. And let us give thanks for His [or Her] life in our bodies, recreating them after the image of His perfect health and strength. How easy this becomes when we know our bodies are made of His own energy and full of His own light!”

I take that to mean since we’re made out of the same photonic Light Energy God is, it’s not too much of a stretch to picture our bodies flowing with vibrant God-Light, bringing the healing we need. For myself as well as my loved ones.

Thanks to Agnes, I don’t have to envy my Christian friends’ direct connections. They’re mine to use. With or without the personal conduit of Jesus or Mary.

Simply by knowing and remembering the Healing Light of God is also in me. God doesn’t have to bring it, ’cause it’s already there. I can speak creativity into it with my internal ‘mainline,’ and direct its flow. And know that as I ‘see’ and touch my vision, the healing has begun.

Marilyn Flower’s a sacred fool who writes every day — fiction, poetry, and blogs — inspired by a process called SoulCollage®. She’s the author of Creative Blogging and Bucket Listers: Get Your Brave On. Follow her Sacred Foolishness or SoulCollage® for Writers, and Stay in touch!