The Healing Light

Book excerpt: The Healing Light (1947) by Agnes Sanford is a personal exploration and explanation of prayer and healing. By becoming a channel for God's love and power, Mrs. Sanford explains, we can heal ourselves, each other, and the world at large. Agnes Sanford (b. 1897, d. 1982) was born in China, the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary. She spent her youth and teen years in Shanghai, until leaving for the United States to attend college. After completing her schooling, she returned to China in 1919. It was while working as an English teacher at Soochow Academy in Shanghai that she met and married her husband, the missionary Edgar Sanford. The pair, along with their young son, returned to the U.S. in 1925, where Edgar received a job as a pastor in New Jersey. More children followed, but Agnes found herself depressed-a condition she suffered from for many years. When an Episcopalian priest, Hollis Colwell, laid hands on her and prayed over her, she found immediate relief from her symptoms. Convinced by his healing abilities, Agnes began sending others to Colwell for healing. But he suggested that she, too, could channel the healing power of God. As she began to study God's Word in depth, she found that her prayers also could heal. Agnes began to teach and write on the subject of healing. Her first book, The Healing Light, shares her simple techniques for creating the right environment within ourselves to welcome God's healing. A recurring metaphor that she uses is that of electricity. If you flip on a light switch and the light doesn't come on, you would logically conclude that there is a problem with the lamp-not that electricity doesn't exist. Similarly, when our prayers aren't answered and healing doesn't come, it's not because there is no God, but because we are not properly connected to His love and energy. She writes, "...just as a whole world full of electricity will not light a house unless the house itself is prepared to receive that electricity, so the infinite and eternal life of God cannot help us unless we are prepared to receive that life within ourselves." Written in a friendly, conversational tone, Mrs. Sanford shares dozens of anecdotes of successful healing methods. While some of these modern miracles were accomplished through her own prayers, many others were the result of her sharing her techniques with others and allowing them to heal themselves. While Mrs. Sanford was raised Presbyterian, her healing does not only live within the rigid confines of religious ideology. Her stories of healing include Jews, Roman Catholics, and children too young to understand any particular theology. As Glenn Clark explains in the introduction, her healing powers came "through simple exposure to the climate of faith and love." A decade after its release, The Healing Light became a foundational work of the Charismatic Movement. This theological movement within Christianity holds that baptism with the Holy Spirit can lead to a new awareness of reality, as well as gifts from God including gifts of healing, miraculous powers, prophecy, and speaking in tongues. This is in contrast to the more mainstream cessationist theology, which states that God's miracles only briefly existed in New Testament times, and ceased during the early centuries A.D. Mrs. Sanford was a prolific writer and speaker. She wrote over fifteen books and traveled extensively to minister in New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, Holland, and England. In her later years, she devoted her prayer energy to steadying the fault lines of Southern California, hoping to prevent or lessen the impact of earthquakes in the region. Interestingly, there were only three major earthquakes in the area in the 17 years that she lived and prayed there.