The Healing Path by Dan B. Allender, PhD
Book Review By Bryan Knedgen
Dan B. Allender received his M. Div from Westminster Theological Seminary and a PH.D in counseling from Michigan State University. He is the former president of Seattle School of Theology and Counseling, is currently a professor there, in addition to heading up the Allender Center, which provides counseling courses online. Allender originally worked with sexual abuse victims for years which allowed him to mine the depths of his soul and see both ravages of sin and beauty of redemption. The Healing Path is the fruition of many years of listening, learning, counseling and caring for people.
Since walking through the tragedy of losing the hope to have additional children biologically, I thought it was time to reread this book and process it outside of the crazy winds of seminary. The book is broken into four parts; Suffering as a Sacred Journey, Exposing the Intentions of Evil, Allure of Redemption and Embracing Redemptive Relationships. In each part, Allender uses stories from his own life or a patient he has treated to help create a narrative that displays the themes and glues each part together. He weaves insight, exposition and story together throughout the book. His overall frame work is found in the triad of faith, hope, and love.
In the first part, Suffering as a Sacred Journey, Allender begins with how we often approach sorrow and pain. He calls us escape artist. We lean into our escape in four different ways: paranoia, fatalism, heroism or optimism. These categories provide us with how we deal with the pain and sorrow we are given but are all obtuse. The desire to flee actually robs us of our joy when God’s desire is for us to enter into the pain and still hope in him in the midst of it. To supplement this ideal, Allender uses the image of desert to describe how God draws us into painful situations so that we can actually deeper relationship with him.
In the second part, Exposing the Intentions of Evil, Allender highlights how betrayal can cause us to lose faith. He states that “Betrayal involves harming the dignity of the other. We do so when we efface, mar, mock, manipulate or ignore a person’s glory.”(54) He then transitions into how powerlessness from the world, our flesh and the devil conspire against us to lose hope. The last focus of this part is on ambivalence, or the emotional battle of two warring desires that attacks our ability to love. All of these forces, betrayal, powerlessness and ambivalence are trying to rob us of who we are in Christ.
After studying how evil forces ruin our ability to have faith, hope, and love, Allender takes us to the Allure of Redemption. He focuses on the story, our own and God’s story, underlining that every day we must ask the question “Is God really telling a good story and is my life one of his great stories?” (119) The next focus of the redemption section is dreaming about hope. While faith comes from looking back to where God has taken a person, hope is looking forward to where God is taking them. Allender ends this section by asking us to begin the dance of love fueled by faith and hope because love apart from these is exhausting.
Finally he walks us through Embracing Redemptive Relationships. Where we are called to live radical lives that display the true humanness of Jesus; Allender argues that our purpose is not to become more divine, but more human. Jesus has shown us the way to become truly human. When we live like this, we can invite others to live this way and invite them into the grand story of God and his relationship with his people.
In reviewing this book I can admit I am bias. This book has helped me whilegoing through a tragedy and scrambling to figure out how to deal with pain these past few months. One of the most impactful statements for me he makes in his section on four elements of embrace:
1. “Opening the heart rather than cynically shutting down
2. Waiting with anticipation rather than killing hope
3. Encircling the other instead of standing alone
4. Letting go of the moment.”
This framework has helped me to move towards people and God when I desire to escape from the pain and sorrow and run to broken cisterns that cannot truly satisfy. His triad of faith, hope and love is a wonderful framework through which to describe our vitality with God and those around us. Pain and sorrow can ether steal that vitality or strengthen it. I heartily affirm Allender’s complex view of humanity which displays the greatness of our glory and yet also the depths of our depravity.
I only have two critiques for the Healing Path. First, there is a lot of content, theory, and angles. This is the second time I read this book and I still feel I need to read this book again to have a better grasp of the intricacies of our sorrow. The second critique is that his book is written to an upper class culture, where food, skiing, travel, and culture are the norm. Most of his stories (except for the examples used from The Bluest Eyes), are of upper-class problems and stories that might exclude those who don’t have access to the things Allender enjoys.
This book has been a healing balm to the ache of my soul. I highly recommend it. The Healing Path provides a road map, names and gives a voice to pains, sorrows and escapes so that we can have more joy in Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.