Restoring Sister Administrations for Healing and Blessing in the LDS Church: Part 1

Relief Society Healing, Anthony Sweat

It's becoming increasingly difficult to be a woman in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints without encountering the long and emotionally fraught history of women's healing blessings. 

It went from something that most of us had never heard of or talked about openly before, except in mixed company with women who had left the Church, to being something you can now casually encounter in the Gospel Library app.

Today and tomorrow, I want to talk about what a return to healing practice for women in the Church would look like. It involves no changes in policy, no necessary permissions from priesthood leadership at any level, and requires only the same faith and worship from women they already use currently. 

What Happened?

What I'm about to share came to me through Women and Authority by Maxine Hanks and Mormon Feminism by Joanna Brooks et al., which is bound to give some people (who mistake being more conservative with being more religiously orthodox than me) a reason to pass me a deeply credulous side eye. But some of the same material from those books is scattered throughout The First Fifty Years of Relief Society, which was published by the Church Historian's Press and is available right here on the Church's website.

I'm not going to recite all of that history for you. There isn't time and that's not why I'm here. If you would like to read more about it, I've told you where to go. Here's an article from Sunstone Magazine that will even hit the highlights for you. But a summary will have to do for now.

Women in the LDS Church used to be able to perform healing blessings for each other and their families. They would do this with washings, anointings with oil, and providing spoken blessings complete with the laying on of hands. They could do all three for each other in a variety of circumstances: preparing each other for childbirth, blessing elderly women as they lose their mobility and independence from age and ill health, and any other occasion of illness women might experience. They could also administer in the laying on of hands together with their husbands when blessing their children. This went from something that every woman in the Church was able to experience to something no modern woman in the Church has experienced. Not because women are incapable of performing healing blessings anymore, but because time and error have conditioned us into think we cannot do it anymore.

I've studied this history carefully. I understand the progression of how we got to now, enough to understand how to undo it. Women deserve to have the gift of healing restored to them. That is my goal today and tomorrow: to outline and explore what a return to women's healing can and should look like in the modern LDS Church.

The White Handbook

Any woman who has served a mission will be familiar with the White Handbook. It was the book of rules every missionary was required to read and study daily to ensure compliance with standard operating procedures for missionary service. It included Appendix B, which instructs on how to perform each ordinance of the Church—complete with numbered steps, wording, and who could participate in each one.

I would like to create Appendix C for women who wish to exercise the gift of healing. These will rely on and apply all that has been revealed from previous church leaders on the practice of female spiritual healing. It will cover the appropriate use of wording, the laying on of hands, the use of consecrated oil, and washing with water. All of these are open to women as tools for healing work. Nothing necessitates or restricts their use only to male holders of the Aaronic or Melchizedek Priesthood. 

Why?

Nothing in scripture restricts the gift of healing to men alone. Like every other spiritual gift listed in 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, healing is not gendered. The Holy Ghost can and does extend the gift of healing and being healed to disciples of Jesus Christ, not their genders. Women have been cut off for too long from healing in their spiritual practice, thinking the only way they can magnify the gift of healing in their lives is through the secular practice of medicine and its modalities of treatment.

Women need to be able to heal themselves and each other as part of their worship and discipleship, without dependence on men. They have gifts of healing they must exercise and develop for themselves, which cannot be developed if spiritual healing belongs exclusively to men as a priesthood function. 

This was something that men and women alike understood in an era of the Church's history that never should have ended. Women deserve to ask for healing from those they trust and have access to, including when those they trust and have access to are women and not men. There are matters in women's experience in which women do not want the inconvenience of calling upon men, the requirement of trusting them to answer and come, the necessity of hearing their voices, or submitting to be touched by them.

I've been in positions like that in my life before. I am a survivor of sexual abuse and violence. When I struggle with the lived experience of being a survivor, the last group of people on the planet I want to speak to at all are men. I have gone to women in Relief Society and found the support and relief I need as a survivor. Women in that organization already participate in the gift of healing all the time. I've also had the privilege of doing the same for women around me at Church. But we have to do it without ever calling it "the gift of healing," without any of the tools or praxis that exist in our community—which women actively and successfully used for a century!

The Church will be a better place for everyone when women understand and exercise the gift of healing. That is a good enough reason to examine how to reintroduce the practice of spiritual healing to women in the Church. Women deserve to exercise all the gifts of the Spirit which God has entrusted to them. They shouldn't have to go outside the community to experience those gifts. It only encourages women to leave the Church to meet their needs for growth and personal development, which never would've been necessary had previous male leadership not interfered with the good works women were already doing.

The best time to have addressed that was in the decades that followed that decision to disempower our women, robbing their spiritual lives of so much power and purpose.

The next best time is now.