There’s a conversation that keeps not happening in contemporary therapeutic culture—not because it’s forbidden, but because the category for it has been quietly removed from view.
The observation isn’t new, but it keeps surfacing in different forms. Not as polemic, but as lived experience seeking language. This isn’t an argument against medicine, therapy, or psychiatry. It’s a noticing: something about the architecture of modern healing assumes suffering is always a malfunction requiring external intervention, technique, expertise, optimization.
This works beautifully for many people. But there’s a remainder—and the people in that remainder aren’t arguing that grace replaces medicine. They know medicine saves lives. They’re pointing out that grace has been removed from the list entirely.
(This isn’t about replacing therapy with religion—that’s its own problem. Grace isn’t a technique that competes with clinical care. It’s something else entirely.)
The Franciscan Apple
A recent theological reflection quoted Francis de Sales: wounded apples must be dipped in honey to be preserved. Unwounded apples can be dried, stored, optimized. But a bruised apple will rot unless it’s immersed in something preservative.
Technique dries. Grace preserves.
Modern Christianity—especially institutional Christianity—has quietly decided it prefers dried apples: functional, shelf-stable, productive, low-maintenance. Wounded people don’t fit the supply chain.
Secular therapeutic culture has made the same choice, for different reasons.
What the Cross Actually Does
Some theological work being done in this space isn’t proposing a new self-help system.
It’s recovering something older and more dangerous: the cross is not a solution. It is not optimization. It is not functional restoration.
It’s God saying: “I am with you here, not after you become acceptable.”
That’s not therapy. That’s accompaniment. And the difference matters enormously for people whose suffering is chronic, structural, relational, moral, spiritual—or bound up with power, dependence, and humiliation.
For people who are wounded rather than merely malfunctioning, technique alone is not only insufficient. It can be alienating. Sometimes violent.
The Modest Proposal
The claim being made isn’t that the cross should replace everything. It’s far more modest—and therefore more devastating:
Any account of healing that cannot make room for the wounded without first demanding competence is incomplete.
A sane, humane checklist would include:
- Medication, when indicated
- Professional care, when helpful
- Community support, when available
- Spiritual grounding that does not require improvement as a prerequisite
Right now, that last item is either sentimentalized, privatized, or treated as decorative. Not operative.
The omission is not neutral. It causes harm.
What Gets Lost
Modern theological discourse has become so dissociated from anything human that we’ve forgotten there’s healing at the foot of the cross. Not metaphorically. Actually.
One writer puts it plainly: “Philosophically, I think it’s the only thing. Practically, I’m just asking that it be on the checklist.”
That’s not heresy. That’s humility.
And the fact that such a statement sounds radical—that insisting grace at least belong on the list of healing resources feels like a dangerous claim—tells us something about how completely the monopoly on meaning has been ceded to models that cannot account for accompaniment.
The Quiet Explosion
None of this invalidates therapy or medicine. Both have saved countless lives.
But consider the vision: bringing burned-out survivors of institutional religion together to attach their wounds to Christ’s wounds, creating fellowship precisely in the places where technique has nothing left to offer. This isn’t competing with clinical care.
It’s naming what clinical care, by design, cannot do: meet people who will never be optimizable and say, “You belong here. As you are. With no improvement required.”
That’s the hole in the system. Not a flaw exactly. More like a category error that has calcified into common sense.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The question isn’t whether grace belongs in healing. The question is how we ever convinced ourselves we could have a complete account of healing without it.
Boyd Camak 