Is There a Balm in Gilead?

By: Joe McDaniel, Jr.*

The Rev. Michael Curry, former presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church, built many of his sermons around a single, aching question from the prophet Jeremiah: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?” (Jeremiah 8:22, New Revised Standard Version). It is one of the rawest lines in Scripture, not a statement of faith but a cry of grief. Jeremiah looked at a nation fractured by injustice, exile, and moral collapse, and he did not pretend the wound was small. He named it. He asked, aloud, whether healing was even possible.

Curry took that ancient lament and turned it toward the present. He knew that the question is really an invitation, that naming the wound honestly is the first act of faith, and that the old spiritual which answers Jeremiah’s despair with a defiant “there IS a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole” was not written by people who had it easy. It was written by the enslaved, by people who had every reason to conclude that no healing was coming, and who sang anyway.

That tension, between the prophet’s despair and the spiritual’s hope, feels close to home for anyone carrying real grief. It shows up in ordinary places: in a family stretched thin, in a friendship strained past repair, in a young person who has quietly stopped expecting things to get better. Jeremiah’s question is not a relic confined to scripture. It is still being asked, in different words, at kitchen tables, in hospital waiting rooms, and in the quiet of a pew: is there no balm? Is there no physician? Why is there no recovery?

What Curry understood, and what the spiritual insists on, is that lament and hope are not opposites. The prophet’s grief is not weakness; it is honesty, and honesty is the precondition for healing. A country that cannot admit its wounds cannot treat them. So, the despair many feel right now is not something to talk anyone out of. It deserves to be spoken plainly, the way Jeremiah spoke it: without spin, without the easy comfort that papers over real loss.

But the spiritual does not stop at grief. It answers Jeremiah’s question with a verse he never got to hear: “Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my works in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.” That is not naivety. It is a discipline, a decision, made and remade, to keep showing up for the work of healing even when the evidence for hope is thin. The balm was never a guarantee that suffering would end quickly. It was a promise that the suffering was not the last word.

That is the pivot the life of faith calls for: not less honesty about what is broken, but more resolve about the work of mending it. Balm in Gilead was, historically, an actual remedy, a resin harvested and traded, applied to real wounds by real hands. Healing was not passive. It required someone to notice the wound, name it, and do the slow work of application, again and again.

Michael Curry has spent decades telling congregations that love is the way through despair, not a sentimental love, but the hard, patient kind that shows up in service, in listening, in the refusal to give up on one another. Jeremiah asked his question over two and a half thousand years ago. It is still worth asking honestly. And the answer, sung by generations who had far less reason for hope than we do, is still worth believing: there is a balm. It is made, in part, by those willing to apply it.

*Mr. McDaniel serves as co-chair of the diocese’s Commission on Racial Justice & Reconciliation. He also serves on the Executive Council for The Episcopal Church.