Healing the Forgotten
Time does not heal all wounds. In fact, time often masks wounds or dismisses them (once they get too old). I am not speaking in the abstract: time can be a real obstacle to healing. This is painfully obvious in everyday life.
On other occasions, time is credited for healing when it is at best a secondary cause. When the body needs healing, we often say: “It will just take some time.” This is partially true in a certain way of speaking, but the cause of the healing is not time passing: it is the physiological process that is taking place.
Time can also make the need for healing relative to the proximity of harm. When time passes and puts harm at a distance, the desire for healing fades away. But the wounds remain. And the pain.
In a culture that has fragmented human life into “public” and “private” spaces, it is easy to hide our wounds away from the sight—and touch—of others. It is no wonder, then, that we live in a culture in need of radical healing. Literally: we need healing roots—radis, in Latin.
The myth of progress allows time to rule the day; healing is put aside for moving ahead, for getting along. In this process, we have forgotten many things along the way—including each other, and God. And what we do remember we often do not remember well.
How do we heal what we cannot remember?
When prophetic voices remind us of the pain caused and harm inflicted, our culture invokes the politics of time and repression. We politicize the relational. But this is surely more than politics: it is the ancient desire for love, for touch, for communion. The tired voices that argue over our cultural memory cannot be trusted because they do not offer healing to the forgotten.
We cannot heal until we learn to dwell in the pain, to refuse the absence and alienation of our modern lives by making oneself present to others, to God, in love.
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“We cannot heal until we learn to dwell in the pain, to refuse the absence and alienation of our modern lives by making oneself present to others, to God, in love.”
You have beautifully put into words what I felt after my wife died. Thank you.
Dear Paul,
Your heartfelt comment moved me to tears.
In thanksgiving,
Sam
Great post Sam. There is so much research on interpersonal neurobiology to support your insights. The truth is we all are in pain. Those who are more dissociated from their pain are those who tend to be extroverted and aggressive with their problem-solving style and lack sensitivity as to how they harm others with their aggression and competition. Their faith tends to be built on the law rather than on Loving one’s neighbor through the empathic understanding of that neighbor’s life story. They will not dwell on their pain because it frightens them too much but, they will be the influence who sends the more sensitive souls into counselling offices. They will tend to be leaders of organizations because they know how to manipulate and compete more effectively because of their primitive defensive mechanisms which prevents them from feeling high levels of anxiety. Sorry I digress
Christ withdrew from his disciples a second time in Gethsemane to pray in agony.
- Matthew 26
“We cannot heal until we learn to dwell in the pain, to refuse the absence and alienation of our modern lives by making oneself present to others, to God, in love.”
Yes, Sam.
There is a woman I know named Hope, who had two grandchildren, and she lost both of them in two separate murders (about a year apart) in East Oakland.
I have sat in a room with her, held one of her hands as inconsolable tears rolled down her cheeks, her other hand gently holding a Kleenex sodden with her bleary grief.
She spends her days reaching out to other kids in her neighborhood, doing everything she can to prevent any other mother or grandmother from having to suffer as she has. For her to do this is almost incomprehensibly brave, given the burden of her suffering; and yet she can’t do otherwise.