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"A Time to Heal: The Process of Beginning Again" On the other hand, it is equally clear that the dictum could also mean that there's a period of time in every human life when the process of being healed, of coming beyond my own woundedness, may itself be life's greatest project. Isn't the implication, then, that personal healing, the cauterization of personal wounds, is part of the natural rhythm of life? That we must all go through it someday or run the risk, ironically, of never being whole because we have never known what it is to be wounded but healed, to be struck down but survive? Suffering, after all, is surely not for its own sake. "Calamity is the human's true touchstone," Beaumont wrote. Calamity, in other words, lets loose the fire that tries the gold, the wind that tests the tree, the water that sweeps away everything in life that is not anchored, not grounded, not imbedded in the firmament of our souls. Without calamity what shall we ever be and how shall we ever know it? There is, indeed, a time to heal, important to the healthy, essential to the strong, waiting its moment in each of us. Healing eludes us, however, at every level of the personal and the political spectrum. People die and leave us aching. Old hurts still sear. Around us, like ghosts stalking in the night, our world erupts in tiny sores of violence and brutality while we watch helpless on television screens in every pub and waiting room in the land. Inside ourselves we feel the pain; outside ourselves we wear a calloused look. We have learned to yawn our way through suffering in volumes unimaginable to generations before us. Healing has become the art of political deals and military violence masking as righteousness on the public level or showing as anger and distance on the personal level. What we cannot resolve we repress. What we cannot control, we constrain. But we do not heal. Too often, the pain remains embedded in the human psyche, raw and inflamed, waiting only to vent itself again. We build up our defenses, personal and public, higher and higher, indeed we do not heal; we simply contain the diseases of the soul under thin veneers of pious virtue as we lie in wait to take vengeance on those who were vengeful toward us. One of the most health-conscious cultures on earth, we spend huge sums of money on physical well-being all the time being battered in soul. In a society driven by immensely unhealthy motives of achievement and power, profit and personal acceptance, we find ourselves so bent on winning we are surely doomed to fail. We run faster every day and accomplish less despite it. Worse, perhaps, when we have ground ourselves to the psychological pulp that follows competition and precedes loneliness or rejection or the isolating consequences of success, we sit down in the midst of the pain around us and quit. We lose friends and lose energy and lose hope. We lose the family or the race or the security we had taken for granted. We find in its place a cold, stiff copy of the life we once knew, full of hurt and rupture, tormented forever by a bruised heart. The work fails, the relationship ends, the future clouds, the sand shifts. We come to the point where we would rather die inside than try again to reshape what would not bend. The question is why? Why do we hold pain to the breast like a fox under a toga that eats our insides out even as we smile. "I'm fine," we say when we do not mean it. "Nothing's wrong," we say When we seethe with hurt. "That's life," we snap when life has struck so hard we would prefer no life at all. "Just ignore it," we say when hurt drives out joy, stampedes trust, consumes our hearts and saps our every thought. Then, because we have not attended to the wounds in ourselves, we have no capacity for the pain of others. Because we ourselves have too often refused to heal we cannot heal others. It is a fearsome carousel this anesthetizing of the human soul. It jades and blocks The question is, how, once battered, shall we learn to live again? Who has not known what it is to be hurt by either hate or neglect, who has not known what it is to be targeted for scorn or rejection or jealousy or misinterpretation? What is the process, then, of coming to wholeness again, once the bonds of human community have been broken. What repairs the breaking of a golden cord? There are two obstacles to being healed. The first lies in our attachment to the pain. We cannot heal ourselves of the pains to which we cling. We have to want to be healed. We cannot wear injustice like a red-badge of courage and hope to rise from it. Even before we are vindicated, even before restitution comes—if it ever comes—we ourselves must move beyond it, outside of it, despite it. Healing depends on our wanting to be well. I may not forget the blows I have suffered in life but I must not choose to live under their power forever. Most of all, I must not choose to imprison myself in my own pain. Whatever has mutilated us—the betrayal, the dishonesty, the mockery, the broken promises—there is more to life than that. The first step of healing, then, is to find new joy for myself to tide me through the terror of the abandonment. It is time to get a new life instead of to mourn the old one. When the beating is over, there is nothing to do but to get up and go on, in a different direction to be sure, but on, definitely on. The second step in healing is to find new ideas in which to live. Whatever we needed before the breakpoint came—security, love, connectedness, certainty, identity—we must now find someplace else. We must put our hope in risk and find it challenging, in self and find it strong, in newness and find it enough. The third step to healing is to trust ourselves to someone else just when we think we cannot trust anyone or anything at all. Just when we are not sure who the enemy really is, we must risk confidence in someone again. Healing comes when we step across the lines in their minds and hope that this time, in this person, they will find the acceptance the enlightenment needed to join the human community one more time. It is a false and hollow cure that ends with a sterile handshake. Healing comes when I have been able to desensitize myself to the indignity of hurt by telling it to death until I have bored even myself with the story. For this I need the listeners, the healers, who by taking me into the arms of the heart to let me cry, transcend their own small lives and learn about the human condition what they themselves would never have come to, perhaps, without me. We need the listeners who understand. It is not the wounding that kills, after all; it is lack of understanding that paralyzes the soul. It is, after all, understanding which every soul on earth is seeking. The final step in healing is a matter of time itself. To honor the fact that there is "A time for healing" means surely that we come to peace with the notion that healing does not come before its time, that healing takes time, that time itself is a healer who comes slowly bringing new life and new wisdom in its wake. It is the spiritual power of the healing process in each of us that goes unnoted and so unappreciated. We fly the hurts—ignore them and dismiss them and detest them—and so miss the values of the healing time itself. "Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground," Wilde teaches. It is in the healing process that we come to a new appreciation of life. What the human being survives is the mark of the mettle of humanity. What we manage to transcend is what we have triumphed over. What we have wrestled with and won is what measures in us the quality of our lives. The wounded who walk away from their pain into dark and destructive ways, unknown and unsought perhaps, forfeit the opportunity to transform it, to make it the fuel of the future. Life upon life awaits those whose minds are made up to live, whatever the beatings, whatever the losses, whatever the muggings along the way. "Pain is life," Charles Lamb wrote. "The sharper the pain, the more evidence of life." Pain, we learn as life goes on, is simply one more entrance into life, one more challenge to change things. Ecclesiastes was surely right: in every life there is a time to heal. Why? Because it is only when we decide to heal ourselves of whatever it is that is tying us to the past that we can begin to live again, to live anew. Floyd Brown: That was just a marvelous talk that you gave today! We've all had pain. As a matter of fact, there's an old saying that it isn't how many times you get knocked down, it's how many times you get up that counts in life. But there is a residual effect, I think. Every time you get knocked down you might get up and it doesn't hurt as bad, but a little of the pain is still there, and it becomes cumulative. How do you deal with it when it becomes cumulative? Maybe you can get us some very short steps into healing. Joan Chittister: Well, Floyd, you're making a very good point. The accumulation dimension is that residue that we allow to collect there, because we don't leave pain. We don't leave the hurt behind. We carry that hurt into the next situation. What I am talking about today are four basically simple and forthright things. When I am hurt at "Point A," I've got to move out of it. I've got to make "Point B" my new life, I've got to get interested in new ideas. I've lost my job, I've been left out of this company, I'll find a new company. I've been hurt by this person, I've got to trust another person. But if I've been hurt by a person, I'll tell you all your life what so-and-so did to me. I've got to talk this thing to death until I've bored myself with the story and then I've got to understand that in this hurt, there is a wisdom. There is a God-message; there is a reason; there is a shaping of the clay that is me and I have to give that the time to happen. But I can't wait to go on until I am feeling that everything is perfectly resolved from the past. Brown: I think people reach out and want somebody to help them with their pain. They want them to feel their pain. But that's not necessarily the answer is it? Chittister: No, but there's another thing. When people come to us with pain, we resent pain. We will tell people, "Come on, you've got to get over that. Now just shape up." We don't want to listen. And, yes, there is such a thing as continual obsession with my hurt, but for most people, they are not obsessed with hurt. They are dying for understanding. "Just tell me that you're here where I am." And they may talk about it for a year; they may talk about it for two years. Ask anybody who has been through a funeral. When everybody leaves the funeral, nobody wants to ask them again, "How are you doing?" Brown: Absolutely. Chittister: And if they ask, they don't want that person to answer. As healers, we fail those who need to be healed and when we need to be healed, we fail to trust somebody to hear us through this, and hear us through this, and hear us through this until we can hear ourselves. Brown: You've got to give me a "how to." What do I do? Do I get the Bible and read it, or do I say to myself, "I realize I have this pain and I've got to get beyond it, but it hurts so bad."? Chittister: The "how to" is: I have to realize this is a closed and final event. The guy who left me is not coming back. The woman who died is dead. I know that. It will hurt forever, but I am now in a new space, in a new world. I've got to start at Point Zero and rebuild that way. Brown: It's marvelous message and a marvelous answer that you've given me. It's just wonderful. So many people in the world, though, feel that they are beyond help. Is anybody beyond help? Chittister: Absolutely nobody as long as they have decided that they will be new despite this. Brown: Thank you very much, Sr. Joan. That's a wonderful, wonderful message and we've all been confronted with that same problem somewhere. Chittister: Did I tell you the truth or not? Brown: You told me the truth, absolutely. |
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