Quick Summary:

The entire fifth chapter of Mark is a series of healing stories and today two of them are before us: stories of a woman and a girl; one with a chronic illness, the other who lies at death's door.
I cannot read today’s gospel without remembering a woman named Jeanerette, a member of the Karuk Tribe who introduced me to the healing traditions of her people when I was just starting out in ministry. My first opportunity came when she invited me to a Brush Dance, a four-day gathering where the community comes together for the healing of a sick child. This Dance was held at Katamin, an ancient site at the confluence of the Klamath and Salmon Rivers, a place the Karuk people call “Center-Of-The-World.” That first night, as the dusk turned into dark, we gathered around the sunken Dance pit [about 30 ft diameter] where the healer and her assistant sat with the sick child and his mother. After the fire was struck, the dancers—men and boys, young women and girls—filed into the Dance pit and took up their places shoulder to shoulder along its cedar planked perimeter. The first song you hear at a Brush Dance is a Heavy Song. The word “heavy” describes both how the song sounds, and how it functions. A heavy song is sung slowly and deliberately; its somber tone is a cross between a lament and a cry. The minor melody, passed down from generation to generation, has the effect of gathering the minds of the people together and taking them down, like ballast on a diver’s weight belt, down below the surface, down deep into the realm of the sacred. This song, this Heavy Song, is also heavy for another reason: the health of a child lies in the balance. Restoring him will take care and skill. Later there will be other songs; but first, the Heavy Song must be sung.

And as the singer begins and dancers start moving together to its rhythm, the soul of the community in drawn inward and focused downward as if to say, THE PLACE WHERE WE ARE STANDING IS HOLY GROUND.

When I hear these stories in Mark, I hear the echo of the Heavy Song in the bleeding woman’s hidden crisis and in the wrenching cry of Jairus. When I hear these stories, I hear the echo of the Heavy Song reverberating at our nation’s southern border where thousands of asylum-seeking parents have been separated from their children and children from their parents.