When the doctor told Mary Fierro two years ago that she had breast cancer, she was waiting for it. Three of her nine sisters had the disease. She was scared, but she'd been expecting it. Her body wasn't ready, but her heart was prepared. She cried only once.

But Fierro, who's 54 and lives in Arizona, also was ready because this wasn't the first time she'd looked trouble straight in the eye. In 1991 she got divorced, and after three years of crying and therapy and 12-Step programs, she turned for real to God.

Instead of asking, "Why me?" Fierro began to ask, "Why not?"

"God loves us all the same," she says. "Whatever happens to us is just the way life happens, I think. If I won a million dollars, would I say, 'Why me?' Heck no. There are good things and bad things in our lives, and we have to accept both. If we don't, we are not truly loving Jesus."

She began to promise Jesus every day: "I'm not leaving you."

Right before she was diagnosed with cancer, Fierro had had a hysterectomy. People asked her, '"How do you do this/' I said if it wasn't for the Lord, I wouldn't make it. I wouldn't. You just have to trust that you're going to be OK. And if you're not, you have to trust you're going to be with him, one way or the other."

Fierro is not alone. When people find out they are sick, they worry about what's happening to their bodies, how much it will hurt, what they can do to get better. They're afraid they will die.

But getting sick, especially with a chronic or life-threatening illness, also begins for many people an intensely spiritual journey. Many of them-from Catholics who go to Mass every day to those who doubt there is a God-do sense connections between the mind and the body and the spirit. In the quest for healing, the boundaries between science and faith get blurred.

One of those studying the link is Dr. Harold G. Koenig, a psychiatrist and director of the Center for Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health at Duke University.

According to Koenig, there have been hundreds of scientific studies conducted over the last 25 years showing that people of religious faith who pray and go to worship regularly are less likely to get sick and that when they do become ill they do better.

Those who are active in a faith community, "especially those going to church regularly, at least once a week, seem to have better immune systems," Koenig says. They are more likely to recover from surgery and are less likely to die during surgery. "They live longer, are able to fight off illness, lead healthier lives, and are less likely to abuse substance."

Religiously active people also cope better with stress, experience less depression, have a greater sense of well-being, more optimism, more hope, and are more willing to forgive, Koenig says.

Some of the research is controversial and certain studies have been criticized; not all scientists buy in. Even more elusive are clear results from the relatively few studies of intercessory prayer, where people pray for the healing of another person.

But Koenig contends that the explosion of interest among medical researchers about spirituality and health-more than 1,100 studies were published between 2000 and 2002- already is starting to change medical treatment. "Even though there is still a tremendous amount of resistance against addressing religious or spiritual factors in patent care, that resistance is slowly beginning to weaken," he says.

God's mysterious healing

Father Richard Bain, now a chaplain at the Veteran's Hospital in San Francisco, has been involved in healing work for decades now and until about three years ago had what he described as an "enormous healing ministry," traveling to parishes around the country and doing three-day healing missions.

But then he developed a problem with ringing in his ears so intense he had to wear earmuffs to brush his teeth and entered a psychiatric hospital, although he hopes to resume his healing work later this year. "I prayed for my own healing, and I wasn't healed," Bain says, offering proof of the mystery involved.

Another priest with a healing ministry, Father Richard McAlear, an Oblates of Mary Immaculate priest from Massachusetts, says people naturally wonder why some get healed and others do not. His response: "It's an absolute mystery. I'm going to ask God when I see him." Sometimes there are people you really love who you want to see healed, and you pray and pray, and they die anyway, he says. "Other times, you just sort of look at them and it happens."

Both Bain and McAlear talk about the idea of receptivity-of opening up to God-and of healing not necessarily being physical, but spiritual. As one health care worker put it: "People can be cured but not healed, and healed but not cured."

Bain says he has known people who've said they were physically healed: They could walk again, or their tumor disappeared without a clear reason. But even more often, "what many people have told me is that they've left the Mass being able to accept their condition, and that's a huge healing, that's tremendous," Bain says. "And the other one is they'll tell me, 'Father, you prayed over me and I really felt the presence of God. I felt his love coming into me, and that was the beginning of my healing.'"

When people come forward after the Mass, Bain puts his hands on them, two by two, but doesn't say a word. "What I'm telling the congregation is, 'It's your prayers that are effective, not mine. When you see my hands on people, you pray for them.'"

McAlear says his healing Masses are "very basic, fundamental Christianity" - a recognition in part that some people who will come to a healing service wouldn't go to Mass otherwise. "Some come skeptical. We get cynics.

As people come forward, "sometimes they tell you what's wrong, sometimes they just look with this pleading look in their eye," McAlear says. "You see in some people a fright, a fear, a terror, a panic. Like, "Oh my God, what am I doing here?' Or, 'Help me, I'm going under for the third time, I don't have any more resources.' Then you pray, and there's a certain peacefulness, a certain serenity. . . Something happens. Nobody goes home without being blessed. You might not get what you wanted, but you're going to get a blessing."

For McAlear, the mystery comes down to this: "I really believe that Christ is here. If you come for him and he comes for you and you're open, something will happen."

A while back, McAlear ran into a man in an airport named Jerry who introduced himself and reminded the priest he had come to a healing Mass asking that the painful bursitis in his shoulder be healed. "He just wanted me to know that since that day, he's active in the parish, he's on the parish council, he prays every day, he has faith. It's helped his marriage," McAlear says.

So then McAlear asked, "how's your bursitis?" And Jerry answered, "Who cares?"