As I was saying, I went to the CiS conference in October 2016 in Oxford. Peter May gave a talk at this conference entitled Miracles in Medicine. He published an article by the same name based on the talk in the October 2017 issue of Science & Christian Belief. I’ve just got round to reading it. I’m going to make a reply to Peter May’s article on his reflections on physical healing.
Can and does physical healing occur in a miraculous way on occasions through prayer?
Peter May suggests the exercise of caution when people make claims about miraculous healings from diseases. I understand completely what he is saying, and agree with most of it. He spoke of having a serious disease himself that may have been a misdiagnosis. I also had a disease as a child from which I could have died.
I had osteomyelitis, a bone disease, of the left femur aged two. On the night that I was operated on, my life hanging in the balance, it not being known whether I would live or die, my parents asked the nuns in a convent to pray for me. In the night they prayed. I survived the operation and lived. My mother said it was the prayers of the nuns that night that saved my life.
I remained ill for six years as a child, until my mother took me down to the Anglican parish church in the village for the laying on of hands and unction with holy oil. She told me I’d no longer be ill, and it was so. The recurrent abscesses on my leg healed up and stopped recurring.
I do not claim to have had a miracle of healing, but I did thank God for the gift of life. And, although I was last at every sports event at school, this bothered me little and I had a happy childhood while having a prolonged illness.
Merry and True 