Our own experience with loneliness, depression, and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care. As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away. But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others.
When we experience the healing presence of another person, we can discover our own gifts of healing. Then our wounds allow us to enter into a deep solidarity with our wounded brothers and sisters.
Emphasis mine.
**
This devotional, dear friends, is why I speak to reconciliation. First, God loved me, when I was yet a sinner. Second, he allowed me to experience the fact of my own racism (that I foolishly believed was gone with the 60s). Then, He gave me strong teachers and time to study on my own. That is why I, like Nouwen, see myself as “a wounded healer,” though some readers may see me as a fool. God loves everyone, which is why King (God’s prophet to America) told us to fight racism, poverty and war. These are the sins that still divide us. It is through the black church that America will be redeemed, if we are to be redeemed.
Yes, God loves everyone and, through Jesus, wants to reconcile us all to Himself and to each other.
5 comments
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July 10, 2008 at 3:14 am
Jana Allard
I don’t see America being redeemed through the “black church” because labeling by color always keeps segregation alive. Rather, America will be redeemed by laying aside every weight that so easily besets. Wounds never heal when they are picked at but need soothing ointment and time. It is up to us to apply the soothing balm to wounds or we can keep it aggravated by constant picking.
July 10, 2008 at 11:56 am
Karen Hopper
It is my belief that no wound will heal, unless the person wounded makes an effort to allow for healing. If we continually pick at a wound, we will never start a healing process. We are a country that needs healing for we lie wounded as a country. Helen, I feel that the wounds go beyond our black brothers and sisters – the wounds filter to the poor, the homeless, the hungry starving children, the aged, the abused, and the list could go on and on. Yes, I want equality for the black people but I also want equality for all mankind. Peoples and nations over the entire world are suffering, and I believe that equality is equally due them. (Just my thoughts).
July 10, 2008 at 12:04 pm
helenl
Yes, to equality for all of humankind.
That’s why King said we need to fight racism, poverty, and war simultaneously. Leadership does not come from the black church because they are black (or divisive) but because they have been tending black wounds all these years (as they rightly labeled racism as a sin) and know how to tend the wounds of the nation (because of this discernment and experience). Healing cannot come except by those who understand forgiveness. Once we deal with our own (national) wounds, we can take this healing abroad. To the world. To all of humankind.
July 11, 2008 at 12:55 am
Eve
Helen, I believe that we all carry -isms within us, even after our egos think they are gone. We see them whenever we judge others, throwing “judge not, lest ye be judged,” and “there is one lawgiver and one judge.”
(And I’m not it.)
I am enjoying your posts; they’re thought provoking and helpful.
July 11, 2008 at 11:31 am
helenl
Eve, I’m sure we do carry our -isms. That’s why we must “pray without ceasing.”
Thank you.