SOUL FOOD:

“Your faith has made you well,” Jesus said to one woman who sought him out for healing after being ill for 12 years. “Go your way; your faith has made you whole,” he said to Bartimaeus just before the blind man received his sight.

And so it is in story after New Testament story. The sick are healed and the dead are raised, and Jesus proclaims their faith — or at times the faith of a persistent relative — has made it so.

I pondered this as I pondered the healings said to be associated with the so-called wonderworking, Myrrh-streaming Hawaiian-Iveron Icon that visited several churches in Orange County late last month. Which led me to a question that others, after hearing of the icon, also put to me.

Is it the myrrh or the icon that heals or is it the faith of the person who is healed? Or is it God who heals?

I was fortunate to find one professor, a subdeacon and one layperson willing to share their wisdom on this question as well as several other questions put to me by skeptics. Peter Bouteneff, associate professor in systematic theology at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, was the first to be so gracious.

He even addressed the questions as “completely justified.” And he expressed some concern that his answers might be more frustrating than the questions themselves.

I did not find them so, and I hope you will not either. His insights and those of Gregory Hendry and Debbie Mariano, who also spoke with me, may not satisfy all inquirers, but I think many of you who wrote with questions will find them gratifying.

“It’s not the [myrrh or the icon] that heals, but God that heals through it,” Bouteneff wrote in an e-mail. “And the faith of the person being healed is important, but so is the faith of the entire community surrounding him or her.”

It’s not a transaction, he explained, in the sense of putting a “‘coin’ of prayer into a vending machine.” Coin in, healing out. It doesn’t work that way.

“It is a holistic phenomenon,” Bouteneff wrote, “relying on (and testifying to) the profound communion among people, and of God with his people.”

Hendry, a subdeacon raised from the cradle in the Russian Orthodox Church, took exception to the English-language translation of Greek and Slavonic terms that results in such an icon being called wonder- or miracle-working. The icon is miraculous, he said, but it does not, of itself, work or induce or perform miracles.

Hendry has been in the presence of many miraculous icons beginning early in his childhood. Some, like the Hawaiian Iveron, streamed myrrh. Others have wept tears.

Some exuded a heavenly perfume that, like the myrrh of the Iveron, had the scent of a rose he describe as a rose of a higher order. Some did none of these things at all yet still brought reports of healing or protection from those in their presence.

Why are some people healed and not others was another question asked of me. I could only say, probably for the same reason that some fall ill while other stay well — whatever the reason that may be.

Bouteneff referred to the question as the “‘why good things happen to bad people’ and vice versa” question, saying, too, that such a question is very understandable. And perennial.

“There is always the question of why some events touch some people and not others,” he said. Affliction, Hendry reminded me, is sometimes integral to our salvation. “We go beyond ourselves through our suffering,” he said.

Many stories in Scripture make this point. St. Paul had a “thorn in his side,” which remained, in spite of his prayers to be rid of it.

Some afflictions, such as those of Job, suggest a far more cosmic or, as Bouteneff put it, holistic dynamic. While God deals with each of us in unique and personal ways, in community nothing is really ever all about us.

One of the questions asked of me particularly resonated with my own skepticism.

Why on Earth would God create and employ such things as weeping or myrrh-streaming icons?

From a Christian perspective, Bouteneff suggested, the question may not be so hard. “Believing Christians will interpret any event, great or small, in terms of divine action, divine providence.” But he conceded, “It is very hard to give a clear and universally comprehensive rationale.”

Nevertheless, God does speak in various ways, he noted, then said, “Well, a picture speaks a thousand words, and I guess a weeping picture probably speaks a whole lot more.”

For those who are listening, it seems to. Debbie Mariano, a parishioner at St. Barnabas Church where the icon was venerated Jan. 23, said the icon helped to confirm her faith.

“I believe [the icon] came from Heaven to us for healing of soul and body,” she said. “It’s unexplainable.”

Hendry drove home with a friend after venerating the icon.

Taking stock in polls that estimate that 80% of Americans are Christians, he wondered at how comparatively small an audience the icon had had.

For him, the icon represented a moment when “you could see for yourself the veil being opened between Heaven and Earth.” It reminded him of another event when the local people were too busy too notice — the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.

Hendry put it this way: “[The icon] will be other-worldly. This is again another reaching out by God to bridge this gap between what’s here and what’s there.”

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].