During school holidays, Sister Maree invited me to help her with the school holiday program.  Fitzroy in those days was populated by latchkey kids and their very poor parents.  70 of these kids came to a program that alternated between craft at the church and excursions to places like the swimming baths, the upper Yarra and variety shows.

Usually the excursions were a total disaster.  Walking back from the swimming baths, we had to cross a local road.  A four-year-old rushed from my group across the road towards Sister Maree.  The child was less in height than an approaching car... at least until the car hit her and sent the girl flying higher in the air.  She suffered only a broken arm.  It could have been far worse, as could have been the near-drowning in the flooded Yarra.  A boy slipped off the muddy bank, the water carried him rapidly downstream into the tangled branches of a fallen tree, from where we were able to retrieve him.

Despite this, the kids loved Sister Maree and seemed to thrive in the atmosphere of the program.  We hoped that our care was doing something good for them.  Those expeditions certainly stick in my memory!

As theological students in the 70s, we spent five days each year in the CHN Retreat House at Cheltenham.  In those days the Sisters were shadowy figures on the edge of thing is in black habits, veils and wimples, serving meals silently, and like Muslims, rushing back to the "The Sisters' Chapel" for prayers five times a day.

On this trip, it was a delight to sit down and eat with the sisters.  Nearly all of them have discarded their habits for modest street wear.  I saw one habit only in three days' visit. That was worn by a Sister who has chosen to live a solitary life, and appears only for Mass.

Sister Josephine, the current Mother, organised my stay efficiently and caringly.  Sister Margaret-Anne and I enjoyed several conversations about matters pastoral and theological -- Margaret works as a hospital chaplain -- and I was delighted to have a half-hour phone conversation with Sister Maree.  Maree and I agreed that we were both too old to take 70 lively undisciplined kids on dangerous excursions.  Other Sisters asked about W.A. and the Third Order, and told good jokes.

Sister Josephine organised Sister Shirley to take me to the airport bus.  I was unprepared for her conversation.  I asked her what her ministry was, which seemed to be pastoral care for whoever she met, so she asked me about my back.  I started to explain about chronic pain, and she cut me off.  "There is some one in Perth you should see," she said, "Margaret Court: she has a great healing ministry, and she would be able to fix your back."

I was taken aback.  I felt it fair to take Shirley seriously, and told her the story of my anointing before major surgery in 1969.  I said that in the moment of anointing and laying on of hands, I knew myself to be totally healed, and that my life's task was to live out that healing.  Shirley was appalled at my theology.  "God does not want you to live as you are.  Maybe if you saw Margaret Court, your back would be straightened, and maybe you'll pain taken away."

I didn't find the words on that day to explain to Sister Shirley that I thank God for the way I am.  Whatever I said seemed sick to her.  "Why would God want you be that way?" The more I tried to explain that everybody is limited, imperfect, in pain, and this is what life is like, the more Shirley disagreed.

This is a most challenging argument for Christians.  The tension between God's permissive will (God allows us to suffer), and God's deliberative will (God sometimes chooses to heal individuals), cannot be resolved this side of death.  I cannot know for certain whether I am unconsciously rejecting healing that God is offering.

Part of be being healed, however, is acceptance.  Just to carry on, especially with the disabilities I carry, I need to be somewhat settled about the way I am.  The Sister Shirleys of this world disturb that peace, and one part of me is glad that they do.  Without their insistent questioning of my acceptance, I might miss out on opportunities for healing.  But I also feel that their intervention is unhelpful.  I am past the place of having my hopes are falsely raised, but I am sure that many others with chronic difficulties can be seduced by false hopes.

The level of my pain and of the success of my coping with it, vary from day to day.  If on a day when I am not coping, someone starts insisting on the need for me to present myself to some healer, I find it hard to be objective.

satan invited Jesus to change rocks into bread.  Jesus refused.  It is not always creative or good to fix things.  If someone is healed, what a wonderful opportunity to praise God.  If Jesus fed the poor with rock cakes it would be an occasion for praise.  But in the wilderness Jesus shows us that it isn't always so.  Rocks are meant to be rocks.  Some people with scoliosis and chronic pain are meant to have scoliosis and chronic pain.

For me it is unhealthy to constantly expect God to give me a straight spine and no pain.  To do so is to be ungrateful for the body I have, for the person I am.  Of course I want to be changed.  But I can be changed only as I accept myself for who I am and offer that to God for healing.

So thank you, Sister Shirley, but no thank you.  My healing is to learn to live triumphantly with what God has given, and to learn not to scrabble for what God has not given.