Religion: Healer of Memories

Sometime Lay Evangelist Jimmy Carter is not the only member of his Southern Baptist family to plunge into religious work. His younger sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, 46, has been on the Gospel trail for nine years both preaching and practicing what she calls “healing of memories.” She works not only with her fellow Protestants but with Roman Catholics as well; 5,000 of them attended one of her healing sessions in Atlantic City last October. She also conducted spiritual workshops in 75 other U.S. cities last year, as well as in Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and England.

Stapleton goes on the road neither as a stump preacher nor as a faith healer dispensing supposedly miraculous cures. Rather, she seeks to remove crippling emotional scars through a blend of inspiration and psychological methods she learned while in group therapy herself. Coaxing people to relive harmful childhood memories through “guided daydreams,” Stapleton then asks them to bring Jesus into the imaginary scenes. When this is done, she says, love and forgiveness neutralize emotional damage.

She has described her work in a recently published book called The Gift of Inner Healing (Word Books; $4.95). In it she tells about Mary Anne, whose marriage she saved, Jeff, who had trouble relating to women and Jody, who came to her because he was troubled about his homosexuality. Feeling that he needed to identify with a father figure during his childhood, Stapleton led him back through his memories to the time he was six years old, sitting in his mother’s kitchen. “Now the doorbell rings. Go to the door and open it,” Stapleton directed. “Who’s going to be there?” asked the grown-up Jody, a bit frightened. Answered Stapleton: “Jesus is going to be there. He’s got a baseball bat and glove with him. He wants you to play ball with him.” Thus, writes Stapleton, “through the prayer of faith-imagination I slowly, verbally took six-year-old Jody through an entire ball game,” with both Jesus and Jody going up to bat. Through further sessions, she helped Jody create a new and more supportive “memory bank.” As a result, she says, he gave up his homosexual habits.

Spirit’s Scalpel. Some clergymen object strenuously to Stapleton’s ministry on the ground that there is no biblical basis for her technique or that she is practicing psychotherapy without a license. Most psychiatrists seem to be unaware of her work, although she offers a version of her standard workshop for secular therapists. To critics, she insists that it is legitimate to probe into “the subconscious depths with the scalpel of the Holy Spirit.”

Stapleton’s unusual career began after she recovered from a period of deep depression. The wife of a Fayetteville, N.C., veterinarian and the mother of four children, she suffered black moods that led her to “the point of total desperation.” At that time she went into group therapy and later attended an interdenominational retreat at a North Carolina resort hotel. Though a devout Baptist, for the first time she “experienced God as a God of love.” After spending three months in a backwoods cabin, she attended a second retreat. While there she had a session with a pioneer in the Neo-Pentecostal movement that was just then beginning to introduce healing and other “gifts of the Holy Spirit” into mainstream churches. In a private ceremony she knelt to receive the “Baptism in the Holy Spirit” through the laying on of hands, the Pentecostal initiation rite. She later experienced speaking in tongues.

Like other Neo-Pentecostalists, Stapleton believes in miraculous physical healings, but has played down her own involvement in them. When her son Scotty, then 13, received a concussion in a 1965 auto accident, she prayed for him. The next day she says, he recovered. Since then she claims that her prayers and memory healing sessions have helped hundreds of others with various physical afflictions. “I have seen a person blind from birth healed, a lame person who walked for the first time and three deaf mutes who were healed and are now in therapy.” The press naturally calls her a faith healer but she rejects the label: God alone, she says, does the healing.