ABSTRACT
Healing, like most other words, has a variety of meanings depending on the context in which it is used. Healing has a long historical and religious background and we need to explore this dimension if we are to honour the concept. Certainly religious sites and ceremonies have been inextricably linked to attempts to heal. The scientific vision of specific cures for specific diseases has become such a successful human enterprise, particularly over the past millennium, that healing is in danger of becoming an irrelevance. The rise in the appeal of science during the twentieth century was accompanied in the Western world by a decline in religious belief. In the fragmented, pluralistic modern world, anxiety increasingly is free floating and requires personal processes of creating idiosyncratic meaning to supplant the shared moral and religious significance that guided our ancestors on how to suffer.
