spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

on the Holy Spirit enabled the discovery of particular dimensions of healing that refer to God’s
involvement in creation and address life in the African context.
When we think about who God is amidst our illness and suffering, we may focus on the work of
the Spirit, because then we can discover that God is with us. As sons and daughters of God, we
are assured of His faithfulness through His Spirit. Just as She filled our lungs with the breath of
life when we were born, so will She continue to empower and inspire us throughout the heights
and depths of our lives. When we experience illness, the Spirit shares God’s life with us, just as
She once did with Jesus on the cross. She is present in our loneliness and embraces our despair,
groaning and praying within us until the pain subsides and relief comes. She gives us the power
to act upon our healing by enabling us to relate to others. She is the One who leads us to people
who strengthen, love and bless us so that our well-being and healing are embedded in these
relationships. That is the gracious work of the Spirit. We can experience the agency of the Spirit
when She touches our vulnerability. We humans detest the weakness and vulnerability that we
experience in our illness. In the confrontation with our vulnerability, we focus on being fit and
healthy, and usually see healing as a return to our physical or mental fitness. However, while we
simply want our bodies to be restored, the Spirit wants our identity to be restored. She challenges
the idea that our identity is determined by fitness or illness, and therefore bestows us with her
gifts that will lead us to our true identity: that is, that we are the ones who are loved by God and
that we fully depend on Him. That is healing according to the ways of the Spirit. When we learn
to live in the Spirit, we may experience that God’s faithfulness is beyond non-survival and
impossibility, for the Spirit will make a way where we cannot discern one, and help us to become
who God meant us to be.
After reaching the conclusion that a pneumatological perspective on healing holds the promise of
new, contextual ideas on healing, there is one further observation that should be mentioned at the
end of this study. It concerns the fact that health and healing is a very complex topic to undertake
due to the many different dimensions of (the meaning of) health. During the exploration of new
theological responses to healing, I discovered how this differentiated nature of health was
undermined regularly due to my dominant biomedical understanding of healing as an objective
process of restoration and physical recovery so that the body can function properly again. It
happened frequently that I realized after some time that the biomedical construction had
prevailed over other constructions of health, and that I was searching for theological articulations
of healing in terms of physical relief, absence of pain, and retrieval of the situation as it was
before. It took some effort to become conscious of this mechanism, which proves how governing
the biomedical frame of reference is. In acknowledgment of the prominence of scientific
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