Category: Healing

Grief, Healing, and Action

Many of us are grieving the reelection of Donald Trump to the office of president of the United States of America. We have seen his cruelty. We remember his separating children from their parents at the border. We have seen how he demeans and taunts others. We have seen his racism, sexism, and xenophobia. We have seen how he hooks into people’s fears, grievances, and prejudices. He manipulates and abuses human weakness for his own purposes.

So we grieve. We grieve the state of our union, our relationships to one another, our divisions.

Joe Biden has often said “That is not who we are,” when speaking of the kinds of actions and attitudes expressed by Trump. And yet the extent of our embrace of Trump makes him a mirror that reflects us as a nation. He certainly is not the only mirror, but he is one that reveals something of what is valued and pursued in our nation and how we view one another.

The truth is we are all broken. We need healing. We need deliverance. From anger. From self-absorption. From fear. From grievances. From the way we view and judge one another. We need to be freed from the hooks that a Trump can hook into.

We need to love one another. Those of us who are followers of Jesus have learned from Jesus that we are to serve one another with compassion and to witness to the love that is near and available.

When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (Matthew 9:36)

Harassed and helpless describes the human condition. In our helplessness, we need compassionate action in our lives. When we have come to know that compassion, we must share it. We must exercise it.

Compassion does not judge others; it does not write them off. But it does discern. And it does not remain silent. We must speak the truth in love. We must speak to the underlying egotism and self-absorption that alienates us from one another, alienates us from knowing or caring about what others are going through, confines us to our own felt needs and agendas and views of the world. Alienates us from Love. We must speak deliverance.

And then the compassion we experience must continue to move us outward in doing justice. When, for example, Trump starts rounding up millions of undocumented people, putting them into internment camps, separating them from spouses and children, in order to process them out of the country, we must stand in the way. We must speak out. We must call others to give witness to the injustice and work to make right what is wrong. Rather than add to the darkness, we must be light in our society.

Filed under: Compassion, Healing, Love, Serving, Society, WitnessTagged with: ,

A Spirituality for Ending Gun Violence

You do not need guns. It is possible to live without them. And yet you are very possessive of your guns. You feel that you cannot give them up. But that is an addiction, a false dependency. As an addiction, it looms large in your life. It constrains you to give yourself reasons why guns are necessary and to fight for your right to own the guns of your choice. But you do not need guns; you need a Higher Power.

We can live without the second amendment. Other nations do. It has not made us a better or more exceptional nation because we have it. We can live without it; we cannot live without Love.

Our children can grow and flourish without guns and without violent video games and entertainment; they cannot grow and flourish without Compassionate Love.

Weapons of war will never secure us. They have only added to our insecurity, whereas, the One in whose image we are created holds our lives together, even in the midst of trial and tribulation. Rooted in God, our true center, we find that, rather than live in fear of others, we can enter into the suffering of others in order to serve them in love—even in the face of death.

By the love of God, we can grieve with those who grieve. We can grieve in a way that is true to grief, to the way the Spirit of God grieves. We can grieve with compassion that engages others, not with platitudes, but with repentance and change that moves toward healing.

Love constrains us to act. It will have us act in concrete ways that align with true needs. Love does not pit one addiction against another. Love does not pit one kind of politics against another, one ideology against another, one set of beliefs against another. Love responds to the needs present in a way that is timely and real.

With the love of God, we are freed from trying to force others to conform to our way of thinking (or to our addictions). As St. Paul says, “Love does not insist on its own way.” Love does not have us fighting others over beliefs and values as if they too were addictions that we cannot live without. Rather, love will simply direct us to the actual needs of the moment and will have us work for true life-giving change.

The change we desire for our nation, the end of the stream of mass shootings, will make little progress without the relinquishing of our addictions, our political tribalism, and our insistence on having our own way—surrendering these (and ourselves) to the God who is Love. Let love act! Do what love directs us to do!

Filed under: Healing, Love, SocietyTagged with: , ,

Getting Real About Racism

In response to recent racist tweets from President Trump, many of his supporters have reiterated his claim that what he was communicating was not racist. Trump tells us that there is not a “racist bone in his body.” Even though Trump’s racist expressions are blazingly obvious, he and these supporters operate in denial.

Anyone who has become increasingly aware of their own dishonesty, will not find this denial surprising. If we have become mindful of our inner life, our feelings, attitudes and motivations and have been willing to examine and confront fear, envy, jealousy, selfishness, prejudice, lust, greed, and so on, we have recognized also how hidden these things are until we are willing to be self-aware. The more we grow in mindfulness, the more we see that to which we were previously blind. We find ourselves on a journey of coming out of denial.

Racism, like any sin, hides until we are open to the Spirit of truth and willing to confront it. In the same way that no one escapes sin, no one escapes racism. Growing up in a racist society, we are all under the influence of and affected by racism. We may be affected in different ways (dependent on whether we grew up white or as a person of color), but we are all affected. Coming to recognize our own racism, or how racism has hurt and diminished us, happens as we are increasingly aware of our inner selves.

Our inner life, of course, affects our outer actions. If we do not recognize racism in ourselves, or its effects, we will still act out of that inner reality and rationalize our actions. When we do begin to see, and as our insight grows, we gain clarity with what is occurring, not only within us but, around us. We see with increasing clarity and subtlety the racism in our society. We become open to hearing from those who have been affected by racism. We seek those who give voice to their experience. We find that we need the voices of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib. We need what they see from the vantage point of their experiences in the United States of America.

We need not, however, be surprised at the degree of blindness present in our society. How can we be surprised, when we ourselves have had the experience of going from blindness to sight (a journey on which we must continue). If we do not recognize that gaining insight into ourselves is a gift—a matter of grace, then we become self-righteous and judgmental, unable to reach out to others with our witness. We write them off as if they were incapable of change. (We can be grateful that God does not write us off.) If we have changed we know that change is available to others as well.

To put this in the language of recovery from addiction: If we are recovering racists, we go to other racists with something like a 12 step program which starts with coming out of denial: “We admitted we were powerless over racism—that our lives had become unmanageable” when it came to seeing the needs and hurts of others and having empathy and compassion. And we “turned our will and our lives over to God,” to the Source and Mystery of our lives, to the gracious Presence.

Paul, in Romans 8, reminds us to be mindful of the Spirit. “To set the mind on the flesh (disoriented attitudes, desires, and values) is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” In the Spirit there is oneness. The dividing walls come down. We cannot simply continue to justify our divisive attitudes and rationalize our motivations of fear, resentment, and prejudice. We can no longer construct a religious facade over these elements of our inner life, nor give support to them in our social life.

The unexamined self is capable of a great deal of ignorance and hurt, and without the Spirit of truth, we operate unaware of what drives our actions. We operate blindly and full of our rationalizations (all of which appear good to us). As we read in the Gospel of John, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:13) With the Spirit, there is openness and receptivity for what is true and real. We are given eyes to see and ears to hear, which is where all change starts. The Spirit (and this openness) will lead us to be witnesses and agents of change in our society.

Filed under: Healing, Mindfulness, Racism, Spirit, WitnessTagged with: , , , ,

A Memorial for Healing

Last month, my wife, her sister and I journeyed to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the National Peace and Justice Memorial which opened last year. It is a memorial to the thousands of African American victims of racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. It provides an opportunity for this nation to confront its past violence and its legacy.

We walked through an open rectangular building among columns of metal blocks hanging from the ceiling on poles. On each block of metal were engraved the names and dates of individuals who had been lynched in public gatherings, often announced and reported in local newspapers. The names were listed by county. Some counties had multiple blocks.

At first these blocks were at eye level, but as we turned the first corner, the floor moved downward and the hanging blocks moved upward. There were over 4000 names engraved on these blocks as well as a memorial to the unknown victims of this terror.

When we first entered this memorial area, there were signs indicating that this was a sacred place, and we experienced it that way. We could see that people who had come in groups often divided up as we did. It became a solitary experience as each of us meditated on what was before us.

There were also signs that indicated that this place was a healing place. Healing often starts by looking into the darkness. After all, it is the light that enables us to see into the dark places. Our problem is that we often turn away before we can be healed. As Jesus tells us, “All who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.” It is when the deeds are exposed that we can begin to change and be healed.

Standing before the columns of engraved names, I felt and reflected on our inhumanity toward other human beings—a condition of inhumanity we all share. It was like looking upon the cross of Christ and realizing that it was our sin that put him there. The cross and the lynching tree call for repentance and conversion into the way of life that God provides.

I also imagine that African Americans experience another movement toward healing through this memorial as they confront a history of abuse, addressing the effects of the sins of others against them, experiencing grief and anger and release into action. There is healing in gaining historical clarity and a vision for the way forward.

The importance of memorials like this for those of us who are white is that they provide another opportunity to confront racism and its legacy. We need these confrontations for our healing. We need light in the darkness to expose our racism so that it does not remain active while hidden from us. After all, like all sin, racism hides. We would like to think it resides in ideologically white supremacist groups or overt racists. But racism is so thoroughly a part of our society, its attitudes and structures, that we are all participants.

To truly confront it, we have to come out of our comfort zones. We have to become self-aware and socially aware and historically aware. We have to be willing to explore ourselves and our society in unfamiliar ways. We have to become aware of our “whiteness”—what whiteness does for us, how it privileges us in a racist society.

It was, after all, people of European descent who came up with the notion of various human “races” as human types (rather than acknowledging gratefully a diversity of peoples and cultures) with white people as the supreme norm. An ideology of whiteness was born that would support the institution of slavery. The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings and the present mass incarceration of people of color is the legacy of whiteness as a construct that dehumanizes others. And those of us who are white cannot simply step out of that history and socialized ideology. It is pervasive to the society of which we are a part.

For people of faith, there is the awareness that the Spirit of Truth brings to the light what is hidden in darkness. So, we can pray:

“Gracious God, give us eyes to see and ears to hear. Shine your light into the dark and hidden places of our lives. Give us willing hearts to hear the voices of those harmed by our racism. Help us to keep listening and to not excuse ourselves from the problem. Help us to fast from listening to ourselves and to other white people and instead free us to listen to the voices that our racism has dismissed. Lead us to confess our sin and deliver us from evil. Liberate us from all ways of thinking and acting that separate us from the one human race. Heal us and raise us up to do justice, love mercy and live faithfully. Amen.”

Filed under: Healing, Racism, SocietyTagged with: ,