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There is no life without illness and death, as there is no illness and death without life. This is Siirala's crucial message in The Voice of Illness. Illness bridges life and death, both ways. Truly hearing and heeding the voice of illness leads to an increasingly abundant life. Even Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death can become sickness unto life, providing the voice of illness gets an adequate hearing. Death, illness and life—all are intermingling processes. Directing them toward increased healing makes the difference beween life and death.
Prominent among the early participating listeners to the voice of illness were Luther and Freud, both increasingly recognized as central figures in the development of Western culture. Both were alerted to listen to the voice of illness in their encounters with their own and other patients’ illnesses. They found that neither patient nor therapist had enough data to move from illness to health unless the voice of illness was first heard. In such a therapeutic encounter with illness one is in fact in a prophetic situation although it is difficult, according to Booth, to hold on to the prophetic word. “It shatters the words and the life forms which have seized us in our unfaith and hopelessness.”
Siirala speaks of the “symbolic” function of words, meaning the unifying function of words as they create unity in the human organism. “The ‘diabolical’ words are those which dissolve the unity and wholeness. When the symbolic function of a word is perverted, the word becomes diabolic The living word has to be sought beneath the words which have become distorted in the sick life situation.” Obsessive thinking, for example, operates in the same rut, in only one dimension, as linear thinking. At best, it rises to two-dimensional, circular, “diabolic,” flattened forms; pathological slices, cut off from multidimensional living reality.
Siirala says that, according to Erickson, Luther encountered God's reality in the afflictions and conflicts of hi