Three Names, One Act

A young woman named Michelle knelt at my husband's head. She had a rosary in her pocket, the way she always did, and she called on Our Lady before her hands ever moved. Then she asked me to picture a white light. I watched that light with my own third eye, plain as day, travel down through him and land at his knee. Two days later he walked into his doctor's office on his own feet. Nobody in that room had a word ready for what had just happened. I gave them one anyway: I said it was charismatic. The truth is I still do not have a better word, because what happened that day was not one thing wearing one name. It was three things I already knew, all moving through the same set of hands at once.

I have spent enough years now watching hands move over the sick and the dying to say this plainly: Reiki, the laying on of hands as the Church holds it, and what my own grandmother called the Natural Arts are not three different practices that happen to look alike. They are one act, worn under three names. Strip away what each tradition calls itself and what remains every time is the same thing — a person gathers their whole will toward an outcome, believes it can move something, and directs it. Say that sentence slow and you have just described prayer. You have also just described intention. Both words are only two more names for the very same act.

Reiki

Reiki is Japanese in origin, developed by Mikao Usui in the early 1920s. The word splits into two pieces — rei, universal, and ki, life force, the same energy called chi in Chinese practice or prana in Sanskrit. A practitioner does not claim to generate this energy. They are taught to be a conduit, a set of open hands the energy passes through on its way to wherever it is needed, following the body's seven chakra points from the crown of the head to the base of the spine. What actually moves that energy is the practitioner's focused intention. The hand position is only the vehicle.

The Laying On of Hands

Under the Church, this same working goes by more than one name, but it is a single thread. Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. James 5:14-15. Paul laid hands on a sick man on Malta and the man was healed, Acts 28:8. And the Divine Mercy Chaplet, prayed each day at three o clock, the hour of mercy, is the laying on of hands turned into a spoken practice — mercy asked to pour, through the one praying, into the one who is suffering. Michelle taught me that Chaplet in 2007. I have prayed it daily since, and I say it now at the bedside of anyone who is passing, because the promise handed down with it is that mercy carries a soul straight through in that hour, if it is spoken. The rosary in her pocket and the hands on my husband's head that day were never two different things. They were one intention, held in two forms at once.

The Natural Arts

My grandmother never called herself a witch. She called herself a Practitioner of the Natural Arts, and that title carries into everything under this craft, not only the workings aimed at the body. A protection spell, a name paper folded three times, a jar buried at the property line — none of it is separate from prayer. It is prayer, spoken in a different room, dressed in salt and alum and thread instead of a rosary. My intention is my prayer. When I write a name and pinch alum onto it, I am not casting something apart from what Michelle did with her beads or what a Reiki master does with her hands. I am doing the same thing they are doing, in the language my own grandmother, and her mother before her, and the Appalachian hollers before them, gave to it. Pennsylvania German folk healing keeps this same thread under the name Braucherei, and in other traditions the same woman would be called a bruja. Different rooms, different tongues, the same act of gathered will moving toward someone who needs it.

A Japanese energy tradition, a Catholic prayer said at the hour of mercy, and a grandmother's Natural Arts — three names for one act. Gather your whole will toward an outcome, believe it can move something, and send it. Call that prayer or call it intention. It was never two different words.

Two Women Who Carry It

I did not have to go looking for this thread. It has been laid across my own life twice, by two women I love.

Michelle

The home health aide who came to help me care for my husband after his strokes. She carried the rosary in her pocket and prayed it with every patient she had. She practiced Reiki quietly, almost in secret, worried what it might cost her professionally if it got out. Under one roof, in one pair of hands, she carried all three names at once — and it was Michelle who first taught me the Divine Mercy Chaplet, a practice I have kept every day since.

Nancy

My mother's cousin, a Reiki master with more education behind her than most people in a room full of doctors. Nancy and I have always shared a bond where one of us knows, without being told, when the other is not doing well. She has carried this gift for years, quietly, the way the women before her carried theirs, whatever name she puts to it.

Two women, one prayer running under both of them, and a third name for it that has been mine all along. I do not know exactly what passed through Michelle and into my husband that day — the light, the rosary, the intention, or all three at once, indistinguishable from each other the moment her hands touched him. I only know what I saw with my own eyes, what the doctor could not explain, and what I have believed ever since: that the gift is real, it is old, and it does not much care what century, what church, or what name you happened to find it in. Reiki, the laying on of hands, the Natural Arts — three doors into the same room.

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From the Hollers Then they will lay hands on the sick,
and they will get well.
Mark 16:18