Wounded Healers: Weekly Summary

Wounded Healers

Saturday, September 19, 2020
Summary: Sunday, September 13—Friday, September 18, 2020

When we can trust that God is in the suffering, our wounds become sacred wounds and the actual and ordinary life journey becomes itself the godly journey. (Sunday)

Until there has been a journey through suffering, I don’t believe that we have true healing authority, or the ability to lead anybody anyplace new. (Monday)

Despite the oppressive and ungodly forces applied against them, African Americans forged a spirituality that encouraged hope and sustained faith, which enabled them to build communities of love and trust. —Diana L. Hayes (Tuesday)

When you risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade you or abandon you, you can discover within yourself what Jesus called the pearl of great price, your invincible preciousness in the midst of your fragility. —James Finley (Wednesday)

Healing is learning to love the wound because love draws us into relationship with it instead of avoiding feeling the discomfort. —Lama Rod Owens (Thursday)

Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. (Friday)

Practice: Upon Thy Altar

Psychotherapist Carl Jung believed wounded healers developed insight and resilience from their experiences which enabled the emergence of transformation to occur. African American philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman (1900–1981) was a living example of such insight for this week’s Practice. With tenderness and pastoral concern, he reminds us that one of the most important aspects of healing is the process of offering our wounding to God. We invite you to take several slow, deep breaths to settle your body and calm your mind; then read Thurman’s words slowly and contemplatively, either voiced or within the silence of your heart.

Our Little Lives

Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Thy altar!
The quietness in Thy Temple of Silence again and again rebuffs us:
For some there is no discipline to hold them steady in the waiting
And the minds reject the noiseless invasion of Thy Spirit.
For some there is no will to offer what is central in the thoughts—
The confusion is so manifest, there is no starting place to take hold.
For some the evils of the world tear down all concentrations
And scatter the focus of the high resolves.

War and the threat of war has covered us with heavy shadows,
Making the days big with forebodings—
The nights crowded with frenzied dreams and restless churnings.
We do not know how to do what we know to do.
We do not know how to be what we know to be.

Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Thy altar!
Brood over our spirits, Our Father,
Blow upon whatever dream Thou hast for us
That there may glow once again upon our hearths
The light from Thy altar.
Pour out upon us whatever our spirits need of shock, of lift, of release
That we may find strength for these days—
Courage and hope for tomorrow.
In confidence we rest in Thy sustaining grace
Which makes possible triumph in defeat, gain in loss, and love in hate.
We rejoice this day to say:
Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Thy altar!

Reference:
Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart (Beacon Press: ©1953, 1981), 83‒84.

For Further Study:
James Finley and Alana Levandoski, Sanctuary: Exploring the Healing Path (Cantus Productions: 2016), CD.

Diana L. Hayes, Forged in the Fiery Furnace: African American Spirituality (Orbis Books: 2012).

Richard Rohr, The Authority of Those Who Have Suffered (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2005), MP3 download.

Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014).

Richard Rohr, “The Trap of Perfectionism: Two Needed Vulnerabilities,” “Perfection,” Oneing, vol. 4, no. 1 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2016).

Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens with Jasmine Syedullah, PhD, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation (North Atlantic Books: 2016).

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

Transforming our Pain

Wounded Healers

Transforming our Pain
Friday, September 18, 2020

If I were to name the Christian religion, I would probably call it “The Way of the Wound.” Jesus agrees to be the Wounded One, and we Christians are these strange believers in a wounded healer. We come to God not through our strength but through our weakness. We learn wisdom and come to God not by doing it all right but through doing it all wrong.

If you were going to create a religion, would you think of creating, as your religious image, a naked, bleeding, wounded man? It is the most unlikely image for God, the most illogical image for Omnipotence. None of us in our wildest imagination would have come up with it. It must expose a central problem of human existence, for God to come into the world in this form and in this way. Sadly, we Christians have become accustomed to the cross—perhaps we have domesticated it—and we no longer receive the shock and the scandal of all that this image of failure is saying. Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living.

Using a scapegoat is our much-preferred method. We deny our pain, sins, and suffering and project them elsewhere. This ancient method still works so well that there is no reason to think it is going to end or change. Until we are enlightened by grace, we don’t even see it; it remains safely hidden in the unconscious where it plays itself out. Once we spot and stop the pattern, the game is over. The cross of Jesus was a mirror held up to history, so we could spot the scapegoating pattern and then stop participating in it.

Only the Great Self, the True Self, the Godself, can carry the anxiety within us. The little self can’t do it. People who don’t pray can’t live the Gospel because the self is not strong enough to hold the anxiety and the fear. If we do not transform our pain, we will always transmit it. Always someone else has to suffer because we don’t know how to suffer; that’s what it comes down to.

Most people are like electric wires: what comes in is what goes out. Someone calls us a name, and we call them a name back. That is, most people pass on the same energy that is given to them. Now compare an electric wire to those big, grey transformers that you see on utility poles. Dangerous current or voltage comes in, but something happens inside that grey box and what comes out is, in fact, now helpful and productive. That is exactly what Jesus does with suffering.

That is what Jesus did: he did not return the negative energy directed at him—not during his life nor when he hung on the cross. He held it inside and made it into something much better. That is how “he took away the sin of the world.” He refused to pass it on! Until the world understands that, there will be no new world.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 78–80.

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

Healing Is a Process

Wounded Healers

Healing Is a Process
Thursday, September 17, 2020

I have been recently introduced to the work of Lama Rod Owens, a Black, queer, American-born, Tibetan Buddhist teacher, who was raised in the Christian church and graduated from Harvard Divinity School. Perhaps it is because of his many identities that his teachings on love, self-compassion, and justice seem to be drawn from the perennial wisdom of Reality itself. He writes here of the needed work of healing our own wounds so that the healing can be passed on:

Healing is being situated in love. Healing is not just the courage to love, but to be loved. It is the courage to want to be happy not just for others, but for ourselves as well. It is interrogating our bodies as an artifact of accumulated traumas and doing the work of processing that trauma by developing the capacity to notice and be with our pain. If we are to heal, then we must allow our awareness to settle into and integrate with the pain and discomfort that has been habitually avoided. We cannot medicate the pain away. We embrace it, and in so doing establish a new relationship with the experience. We must see that there is something that must be befriended. This is the true nature of our experience, and in finally approaching this experience we contact basic sanity. . . .

Healing is movement and work toward wholeness. Healing is never a definite location but something in process. It is the basic ordinary work of staying engaged with our own hurt and limitations. Healing does not mean forgiveness either, though it is a result of it. Healing is knowing our woundedness; it is developing an intimacy with the ways in which we suffer. Healing is learning to love the wound because love draws us into relationship with it instead of avoiding feeling the discomfort.

Healing means we are holding the space for our woundedness and allowing it to open our hearts to the reality that we are not the only people who are hurt, lonely, angry, or frustrated. We must also release the habitual aggression that characterizes our avoidance of trauma or any discomfort. My goal is to befriend my pain, to relate to it intimately as a means to end the suffering of desperately trying to avoid it. Opening our hearts to woundedness helps us to understand that everyone else around us carries around the same woundedness. . . .

Perhaps what I have come to understand, finally, is that somehow I have become the one I have always wanted. This is why I do the things that I do. There is a fierce love that wakes me up every morning, that makes me tell my stories, refuses to let me apologize for my being here, blesses me with the capacity to be silent, alone, and grieving when I most need to be. You have to understand that this is what I mean when I say healing.

May all beings be seen, held kindly, and loved. May we all one day surrender to the weight of being healed.

Reference:
Lama Rod Owens, “Remembering Love: An Informal Contemplation of Healing,” in Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens with Jasmine Syedullah, PhD (North Atlantic Books: 2016), 64–65, 67–68, 74.

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

A Mutual Vulnerability

Wounded Healers

A Mutual Vulnerability
Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Earlier this year, my colleague and dear friend Jim Finley gave an unpublished talk to Illuman, an organization that supports men in authentic spiritual development. Jim shared some stories from his own life, including how he began to heal from his own childhood abuse and trauma with the help of Thomas Merton, who was his novice master and spiritual director at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

When I went in to see Merton for direction, I was eighteen years old, I was just out of high school. Because of my trauma history I had this issue with authority figures. So when I went in to try to talk to him, I hyperventilated; I had a hard time breathing. And he said to me, “What’s going on?” I told him, my voice was shaking, and I said, “I’m scared because you’re Thomas Merton.”

I can remember being so ashamed, because I wanted him to think well of me. . . . He said to me something that really was a turning point in my life. . . . I worked at the pig barn at the time. . . . He said, “Under obedience, every day after afternoon work, before vespers, I want you to come here every day and sit down and tell me one thing that happened at the pig barn each day.”. . .

I remember thinking to myself, “I can do that.” And it leveled the playing field. . . . Just two men sitting in a room, talking about daily work. And he became a father figure for me.

I learned a big lesson, which later really was to affect me in my own therapy and as a therapist, that when you risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade you or abandon you, you can learn not to invade or abandon yourself. Even deeper down, when you risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade you or abandon you, you can discover within yourself what Jesus called the pearl of great price [Matthew 13:46], your invincible preciousness in the midst of your fragility.

So through humility and through vulnerability, the true strength of being empowered, my manhood came forth, sitting in this room. Out of all the studies I’ve done with Merton, and my talks on Merton, I think nothing went deeper than talking with him about the pigs. Because that’s compassion. . . .

So this is my sense of manhood, I guess: a radicality, a spirituality, that gives me the courage to face the most broken and lost places within myself, discovering through that acceptance the oceanic tender mercy of God that sustains us in that brokenness, so that by learning to be this way ourselves we can pass it on to others. We can be someone in whose presence it’s safe to be vulnerable and to be open, and truly courageous and strong and powerful, as Jesus was strong and powerful, in the truest, deepest sense of the word.

Reference:
Adapted from James Finley, “An Illuman Watering Hole Zoom Event,” (June 18, 2020), unpublished presentation. To learn more about this organization and its work, see www.illuman.org/about/.

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

A Healing Community

Wounded Healers

A Healing Community
Tuesday, September 15, 2020

While all Christians are called to follow Jesus, some communities have been brought deeper into the Paschal Mystery of death and resurrection through unjust and unrelenting collective suffering. Dr. Diana L. Hayes, an African American Catholic theologian and scholar, describes the “wounding” of the African American community and their faithful courage which has brought forth so many sacred gifts in the United States and beyond. She writes:

African American spirituality was forged in the fiery furnace of slavery in the United States. The ore was African in origin, in worldview, in culture, and in traditions. The coals were laid in the bowels of ships named, ironically, after Jesus and the Christian virtues, which carried untold numbers of Africans to the Americas. The fire was stoked on the “seasoning” islands of the Caribbean or the “breeding” plantations of the South where men, women, and children of Africa were systematically and efficiently reduced to beasts of burden and items of private property. Yet those who came forth from these fires were not what they seemed. Despite the oppressive and ungodly forces applied against them, they forged a spirituality that encouraged hope and sustained faith, which enabled them to build communities of love and trust and to persevere in their persistent efforts to be the free men and women they had been created to be. . . .

The African American spiritual story is one of hope in the face of despair, of quiet determination in the face of myriad obstacles, of a quiet yet fierce dignity over against the denial of their very humanity. Theirs is a spiritual history literally written in the blood, sweat, and tears of countless foremothers and forefathers who died under the lash, were sold as commodities, were treated as less than human beings, but who struggled and survived despite and in spite of all the forces arrayed against them. It is the story of their encounter with Jesus Christ who enabled them to find a “way out of no way,” who justified their self-understanding as children of God, and who enabled them to persist in the belief that one day they would be free.

The spirituality of African Americans expresses a hands-on, down-to-earth belief that God saw them as human beings created in God’s own image and likeness and intended them to be a free people. . . .

It is a contemplative, holistic, joyful, and communitarian spirituality. This means that it is expressed in prayer through a deeply conscious prayer life that is not passive. . . . This spirituality sustained and nurtured them and enabled them to hold their heads up and “keep on keeping on” when all and everything seemed opposed to their forward movement. It is a spirituality expressed in song, in dance, in prayer, in preaching, and most important, in living each day as best they could in solidarity with one another and their God over against the principalities and powers of their time.

Reference:
Diana L. Hayes, Forged in the Fiery Furnace: African American Spirituality (Orbis Books: 2012), 2, 3, 5.

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

God Uses Everything

Wounded Healers

God Uses Everything
Monday, September 14, 2020
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross

The genius of Jesus’ ministry is that he embraces tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself to bring us to God. There are no dead ends. Everything can be transmuted, and everything can be used. Everything.

It seems that everybody wants to take easy sides. It’s so consoling for the ego to have an answer; to be sure that my position is the final and only true answer. Yet, as Paul says, on the cross Jesus becomes the sin and the problem. He identifies with the wound, the pain, and the suffering (2 Corinthians 5:21). He does not stand apart from it but enters into it. What a paradox, what a mystery!

Jesus tells Peter, “Peter, you must be sifted like wheat. And once you have recovered, then you, in your turn, can strengthen your companions” (Luke 22:31–32). Until there has been a journey through suffering, I don’t believe that we have true healing authority. We don’t have the ability to lead anybody anyplace new unless we have walked it ourselves to some degree. In general, we can only lead people on the spiritual journey as far as we ourselves have gone. We simply can’t talk about it beyond that. That’s why the best thing we can do for people is to stay on the journey ourselves. We transform people to the degree we have been transformed. When we can somehow be compassion, not just talk about compassion; when we can be healed and not just talk about healing, then we are, as Henri Nouwen said so well, “wounded healers,” but not before.

It always comes through the wounding. What we do when faced with our deepest wounds determines whether there is authentic spirituality at work or not. If we seek to blame other people, accuse, attack, or even explain and make perfect, logical sense out of our wounds, there will be no further spiritual journey. But if, when the wounding happens, we find the grace and the freedom to somehow see that it’s not just a wound, but a sacred wound, then the journey progresses. Then we set out to find ourselves, to find the truth, and to find God.

It’s all about what each of us does with the wound. If we ourselves have never walked through some kind of suffering, whether betrayal, abandonment, rejection, divorce, loss of job, struggles with sexuality, we probably will give people “head” answers. We don’t touch or heal their hearts because our own have not been transformed. I don’t think it’s any accident that in most of Jesus’ healings, he physically touches people. He’s showing that healing cannot be done through the head, through explanations, theories and theologies, or quick, “logical” conclusions. It must somehow be a communication of life and love energy, held even at the cellular level.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Authority of Those Who Have Suffered (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2005), MP3 download.

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

Our Sacred Wounds

Wounded Healers

Our Sacred Wounds
Sunday, September 13, 2020

Ministry can indeed be a witness to the living truth that the wound, which causes us to suffer now, will be revealed to us later as the place where God intimated [God’s] new creation. —Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932–1996)

Christianity, in its mature forms, keeps pushing us toward the necessary tragic: “the foolishness of the cross,” as Paul calls it (1 Corinthians 1:18). Normally, the way God pushes us is by disillusioning us with the present mode. Until the present falls apart, we will never look for something more. We will never discover what it is that really sustains us. That dreaded falling-apart experience is always suffering in some form. All of us hate suffering, yet all religions talk about it as necessary. It seems to be the price we pay for the death of the small self and the emergence of the True Self—when we finally come to terms with our true identity in God. Many Jungians describe this in psychological terms as the “necessary soul suffering” that comes from the death of the ego. Jesus would say, “Unless the grain of wheat dies, it remains just a grain of wheat” (John 12:24). By avoiding this legitimate pain of being human, we sadly bring on ourselves much longer lasting and, often, fruitless pain.

In the work I have done with men’s spirituality, we call that suffering in its transformed state “the sacred wound.” The sacred wound is a concept drawn from classical mythology, but also from the Christ story. In mythology, the would-be hero is always wounded. The word innocent (innocens, “not yet wounded”) is not a complimentary term in mythology. The puer is the young boy (puella for the young girl) who refuses to be wounded. More precisely, he refuses to recognize and suffer the wounds that are already there. He’s just going to remain nice and normal so everybody will accept him. In our culture, he might smugly remain white and middle class, healthy, “sinless,” Catholic, good-looking, and happy. Maybe he will drive a fancy car or wear the latest clothing. He refuses to let things fall apart. He refuses to be wounded, much less to allow the humiliating wound to become sacred and sanctifying. Yet, I personally believe that the Gospels are saying there is no other way to know something essential. Allowing our always-unjust wounds to, in fact, become sacred wounds is the unique Christian name for salvation. We always learn our mystery at the price of our innocence.

We must trust the pain and not get rid of it until we have learned its lessons. The suffering can be seen as a part of the great pattern of how God is transforming all things. If there is one consistent and clear revelation in the Bible, it is that the God of Israel is the one who turns death into life (see Isaiah 26:19; Romans 4:17; 2 Corinthians 1:9). When we can trust the transformative pattern, and that God is in the suffering, our wounds become sacred wounds. The actual and ordinary life journey becomes itself the godly journey. We trust God to be in all things, even in sin and suffering.

References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Franciscan Media: 2020), 67‒68.

Wounded Healers: Weekly Summary

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

Transforming our Pain

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

Healing Is a Process

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

A Mutual Vulnerability

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

A Healing Community

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

God Uses Everything

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

Our Sacred Wounds

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

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Wounded Healers: Weekly Summary

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

Transforming our Pain

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

Healing Is a Process

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

A Mutual Vulnerability

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

A Healing Community

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

God Uses Everything

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

Our Sacred Wounds

Wounded Healers

Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly living. —Richard Rohr

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