What Does it Mean to Be a People of Healing?
If your body won’t do what it used to, for right now let it be enough.
If your mind won’t stop racing or can’t think of the word, let it be enough.
If you are here utterly alone and in despair, be all that here with us.
If today you cannot sing because your throat hurts or you don’t have the heart for music, be silent. …
The world won’t stop spinning on her axis if you don’t rise to all occasions today.
Love won’t cease to flow in your direction,
your heart won’t stop beating,
all hope won’t be lost…
Rev. Vanessa Southern
Often we hunger for healing but don’t know what it will take to make our way there. The goal is elusive. The path is unclear.
Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.
bell hooks
But what if the work is to travel toward our suffering? What if proximity to pain, not distance from it, is the real route to healing?
When we hold our suffering in a way that opens us to greater compassion, heartbreak becomes a source of healing, deepening our empathy for others who suffer and extending our ability to reach out to them. – Parker Palmer
Remember that healing words aren’t always easy or immediately comforting. Sometimes the words we need to hear the most are the ones that are hard to hear or grab us by the shoulders and shake us awake.
The truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
Pema Chödrön
Until we widen our view and notice that there are circumstances wounding us both, the painful gap between us will never heal.
Rev. Kaaren Anderson
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.
Wendy Mass
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Each month, WUUC is exploring a theme suggested by the UUA program Soul Matters. Materials are provided for small groups and for worship themes related to each topic. The reflections above are from those materials, and compiled by Linda Sherry.