Anybody Know Anything About Reiki?

Somebody sends along a link to some Dominican Spirituality Center in Grand Rapids. As you can see, it’s a mix of Dominican stuff, with somebody at the Center offering training in Reiki, which looks to be some sort of Asian method of healing massage or something.

My reader is worried about this, since she takes it for New Age spirituality. It may well be (the Midwest Province of the Dominicans are the people who gave you Matthew Fox).

However, before jerking the knee, I note several things. First, until we know that the various disciplines on offer there are actually spiritually harmful (as distinct from morally neutral) we need to know what they involve. Merely “being Asian” is no proof of anything. What needs to be established is a) do they involve us in pagan belief systems contrary to the teaching of the faith and/or b) are they quackery that don’t actually help people feel better. If neither is true, then I have no problem with a retreat center offering, say, aromatherapy. Whatever floats your boat.

This latitude extends even, I should think, to such jargon as “chakras” if all that is intended by that word is to express some notion of intangible yet real bodily experiences according to the idiom of the Asian tradition that invented the discipline. An analogy would be a medieval Christian physician adopting the Greco-Roman concept of “humors”. It may not be language that is according to the canons of Western medicine, but it’s not anything contrary to the Faith, which is what concerns me as a Catholic. People can and do devise explanatory categories for their disciplines which are rubbish (such as “humors”) and yet they can also be capable of doing things that help people feel better. A medieval Jewish mother who prescribed chicken soup may have imagined she was rebalancing the four humors of her sick child’s body. She was wrong. But the chicken soup still made him feel better. There may be no such things as “chakras”. But if lots of people report feeling better after Reiki therapy, then there’s probably something to it.

However, feeling better isn’t the sine qua non. If Reiki involves us in some form of pagan worship of other gods, or teaching something contrary to revelation about the human person, then those false teachings need to go. Similarly, one can practice Yoga exercises without buying into the spiritual practices that are sometimes attached to it. If you do, I see no harm in it. So: does anybody know anything about Reiki? I know nothing about it.

By the way, the Midwest Dominicans are living proof that when you’ve met one Dominican, you’ve met *one* Dominican.

Update: Ah! I see the folks at CUF have already looked at this stuff. Yeah, it sounds pretty dodgy. There’s 50 other ways to get healing that don’t involve fiddling about dodgy Eastern mysticism. The Midwest Dominicans should stick with them instead of inviting theological quacks in.