Book Review: Healing Touch and Saving Word: Sacraments of Healing, Instruments of Grace

Abstract

Healing Touch and Saving Word: Sacraments of Instruments of Grace. By Linda M. Malia. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2013. xx + 256 pp. $30.00 (paper).A recent flurry of books on rites with the sick have covered the topic from a plethora of approaches, but rarely have these publications brought together pastoral practicality and thoughtful contemporary sacramental theology. Linda Malia's book does that in a surprisingly effective way, making it an appealing text for a wide audience.Malia begins with a solid overview of sacramental theology, attentive to recent scholarship and presented in an accessible tripartite structure that builds on the relationships between sign, symbol, and sacrament. Adding to that the essential nature of liturgy for Anglicanism-the Anglican community is established in ritual and worship (p. 16)-Malia weaves in a brief overview of ritual, worship, the corrected etymology of liturgy, and a balance between the essential divine action and human response. Then follows a conversation on the sacraments, turning finally specifically to rites of healing with a brief historical overview from the letter of James to scientific era of medicine (p. 34). These first two chapters are worth the price of the book by themselves, especially with charts and prose defining the differences between old school and school understandings of sacraments, grace, church, liturgical celebrations, sacramental effects, and the relation of Word and Sacrament. While this primer on the organic nature of traditional Anglican sacramental theology is almost half the book, it is both well done and particularly necessary to avoid the too-common Episcopal jump to the cookbook approach to healing ministry.Malia moves onto a review of specifically Anglican rites of healing, first comparing the 1549 Visitation of the Sick with that of the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer (with their attributes of old school understandings) and then the theologically differentiated new rites (here charted as the 1979 BCP Ministration to the Sick, the 1991 Book of Occasional Services' A Public Service of Healing, and the 2000 Enriching Our Worship 2 s A Public Service of Healing) compared one with another. While a good portion of this third chapter is given over to this comparison, the changing understandings of sin and sickness and individual ritual and corporate rite are also briefly presented.It is in the substantial fourth chapter that Malia weaves together the lessons to be learned from her earlier general reflections on sacramental theology and the profound shifts in the theology of healing and the rituals which manifest those changes. …