A Note re the Passing of Famed Spiritual Healer Dr. Willard Fuller, D. Th.

I wish to report that my friend and colleague Dr. Willard Fuller, the hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist minister turned internationally-famed beyond-religion non-denominational spiritual healer, died on April 8, 2009 at the age of 94, at a hospital near his home in Lloyd, Florida, after a short illness. Dr. Fuller had been active until the last weeks of his life in teaching seminars in divinity and healing from his home in Lloyd. He had become widely known as a spiritual healer starting in the 1960s and over the next 40 years, as he traveled the USA, and particularly the east coast, holding revival-style non-denominational meetings in tents and conference centers where many hundreds of persons each year experienced spontaneous healing of dental problems and broken bones. Dr. Fuller had been a traditional hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist minister throughout the 1950s, and then, in the late 50s, he became very ill with a serious chronic illness. When Western medical doctors informed him that they could not help him, he went into the forest alone for a 3-day fast without food or water, and, during that fasting meditation, his illness disappeared, never to return. However, in the aftermath of that healing experience, he found that he was a changed man. He quickly became totally disenchanted with the limitations and proscriptions of the Baptist religion, and he was guided by Divinity to go out and start preaching a much broader non-denominational theology, and to start performing spiritual healings in public, at revival-type tent meetings, as a way of demonstrating the power of Holy Spirit and Divinity.

He was further guided by Holy Spirit that while there were a number of spiritual healers who demonstrated their abilities in public, none of them ever tackled challenges such as missing or broken or infected teeth, nor broken bones, as these were widely viewed as "too difficult" to respond quickly to spritual healing. And so, he was asked to start offering public demonstrations of spiritual healing, but focusing primarily upon repairing or replacing broken, damaged, missing or infected teeth, and also on fixing broken bones.

I communicated with Dr. Fuller by phone, email and postal mail occasionally from about mid-2001 onward, and we met in August of 2004, when I flew to Florida to visit with him and his wife and to take a seminar with him across a long four-day weekend, during which time I stayed at a tiny, tired and care-worn but delightful motel located at a highway truck stop named Big Bend Auto Truck Stop just off Rte. I-10/SR-8/SR-59 near Dr. Fuller's home. The truck stop also sported a very unique restaurant (its name changed, and continues to change, every few years, so I will not bother to give it a name here, as it would be meaningless), located just yards from my hotel, which had been in business for over 60 years, and I quickly fell in love with the people at the diner and with the food at the diner.

During my visit, I met some folks who were what I tend to call "health nuts", that is, they were primarily fundamentalist and militant followers of Donna Gate's Body Ecology Diet and/or Sally Fallon's Traditional Diet version of the Weston A. Price diet (now, there is nothing at all wrong with either of these diets, but I do tend to have an allergy to anyone who is a fundamentalist purist follower of anything. Once I mentioned how much I loved the diner, they were uniformly "grossed out"; they each quickly and loudly announced that they despised the diner and its worn shabby interior and also the food, which they labeled as "deadly, greasy, artery-clogging American junk food", and they loudly complained that the food would likely kill them in short order were they to eat there. Much to their dismay and obvious disapproval, I simply smiled, and quietly and steadfastly maintained that there was nothing wrong with eating such foods at times, so long as it was eaten with Love, Grace, gratitude and appreciation, and I reminded them with great glee that I made a point to eat a hearty breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon and homefries each morning at the restaurant during my stay!

Interestingly, on the last day of my visit with Dr. Fuller, I happened to mention to him my appreciation and enjoyment of the motel and the tiny diner and its food, and his face immediately lit up with glee as he informed me that this diner (located near his home) had been his favorite eatery for over 30 years, and that each visit to the diner was, for him, a visit to a Paradise on Earth. It seemed to mean a lot to him that I had enjoyed the little motel and the diner whereas, he told me, many of his other visitors over the years had apparently treated both establishments with scorn and derision.

Interestingly, Dr. Fuller also mentioned to me at least twice that it is well-known in the spiritual healing world that it is always much more difficult for a spiritual healer to perform spiritual healing work for themselves than for others, and, as one reminder of that, he pointed to my many missing teeth and broken teeth (they are due to the fact that at one time I had 48 amalgam fillings, which were removed back in the early 1990s, and I have never bothered to wear cosmetic dental appliances such as partial bridgework to cover up the gaps in my smile) and told me that he too had a great many missing and broken teeth and that he had finally resorted to having his mouth fitted by a dentist with upper and lower bridgework.

Dr. Fuller's website, at www.willardfuller.com is still "on the air", and his wife, the Rev. Althea Fuller, will continue carrying out part of their non-denominational spiritual ministry over the upcoming months.

with care,
--Vinny