Wounded Healers
Guest Sermon by Julia Corbett-Hemeyer
Unitarian Universalist Church of Muncie
Sunday, July 26, 2009

Spoken Meditation

(Nathan Walker, UU Worship Web)

“A Survival Meditation”

breathing in
i am aware of my pain.
breathing out
i am aware that i am not my pain.

breathing in
i am aware of my past.
breathing out
i am aware that i am not my past.

breathing in
i am aware of my anger.
breathing out
i am aware that i am not my anger.

breathing in
i am aware of my despair.
breathing out
i am aware that i am not my despair.

breathing in
i am aware of peace.
breathing out
i am aware that i am worthy of peace.

breathing in
i am aware of love.
breathing out
i am aware that i am worthy of love.

breathing in
i am aware of joy.
breathing out
i am aware that i am an agent of joy.

breathing in
i am aware of hope.
breathing out
i am aware that i am an agent of hope.

breathing in
i am aware.

First Reading: The Parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10: 25-37
(New Revised Standard Version)

25 Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" 26 He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" 27 He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." 28 And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live." 29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" 30 Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, "Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" 37 He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

Second Reading
Some thoughts from Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. pages 217-220

The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we all have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships: the strength of a touch, the blessing of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you just as your are and finding in you an unsuspected goodness.

Everyone alive has suffered. It is the wisdom gained from our wounds and from our own experiences of suffering that makes us able to heal. Becoming expert has turned out to be less important than remembering and trusting the wholeness in myself and everyone else. Expertise cures, but wounded people can best be healed by other wounded people. Only other wounded people can understand what is needed, for the healing of suffering is compassion, not expertise.”

“The greatest gift we bring to anyone who is suffering is our wholeness.

Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us… Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and by others. That which is hidden.

In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless.

Sermon

Introduction

I don’t know how many of us who are privileged to speak from pulpits regularly or on occasion sometimes preach the sermon we need to hear, but I do. This is one such sermon. If I thought I were the only one who needed to hear it, there wouldn’t be grounds for sharing it. However, being wounded and potentially being able to transform our woundedness are both part of our human condition. Suffering and the transformation of suffering both belong to us as human beings. And that means we’re all healers, or potential healers; that’s also a feature of our human condition. The metaphor of the wounded healer grabbed my attention the first time I came across it, in a book of that name by the Dutch Catholic priest Henri Nouwen.[1] It hasn’t let go since. It continues to be a source of strength and consolation for me. It enables me to make of wounding something more than pain, to find strength, not in spite of woundedness but because of it.

We’re All Wounded

Simply because we’re human, we’re wounded. No one gets through this life without it. That, I take it, is the point of Buddhism’s first noble truth: life always includes pain, suffering. As Rachel Remen puts simply, “Everyone alive has suffered.” The sources of our woundedness are myriad. We don’t even remember many of them; they don’t have to be “big deal” things, although some of them certainly are. And they’re very individual; what wounds one person deeply might not affect someone else nearly as much. Each of us could compile our own list, but here are a few:

• Some of our wounding is universal: We’re born, which is to say we’re expelled from a cozy, warm environment in which our every need is met before we even know we have a need, and we’re popped out into the “real world.”
• Each of us discovers, some sooner, some later in life, often repeatedly, that we are not the center of the universe, and this “dethronement” wounds us.
• People say and do things that are terribly hurtful, that wound us and cause us huge suffering. Sometimes they mean to; more often, they do not.
• Who among us hasn’t violated our own best intentions? Who among us hasn’t failed to live up to our expectations of ourselves? We all wound ourselves by some of our actions.
• Even in the best of relationships, fierce disagreements break out, and they hurt. Sometimes, marriages and other significant relationships are so badly damaged that they do not endure.
• People die.
• Pets die.
• We move, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes because circumstances force us to do so, leaving homes and communities that had been familiar and sheltering havens for us.
• Youthful vigor wanes.
• Dreams go unfulfilled. There comes a point for most of us when we realize that some of our cherished hopes and plans for our lives, or for the lives of those close to us, will not come to pass.
• Some of our wounds are more personal: The circumstances of our individual lives—growing up in an abusive family, being taunted by other children because we’re “different” in some way, dealing with a particular disability or challenge, living with family secrets, the loss of employment we took to be secure, being passed over for a desired promotion—these are more unique wounds.

But enough to make the point: we’re all wounded. We all carry the scars of our wounds.

All of Us Can Transform Our Woundedness

The good news is that we all have the potential to transform our wounds, we all have the capacity to heal. The third noble truth taught by the Buddha is that suffering can be transformed. Probably all of us have had the experience of healing from woundedness. I recently came across an interpretation of Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan that speaks to our capacity for transformation. There are a number of plausible reasons why the Samaritan was the one who stopped to give aid to the hapless man whom he saw lying by the side of the road. Perhaps he was more courageous than the priest or the Levite. This was a stretch of mountain road favored by thieves and robbers for attacking travelers. Stopping to assist the man would put any would-be helper in significant danger. Even if the priest or the Levite responded with compassion initially, maybe fear crowded it out in the end. The priest and the Levite were also both temple officials, busy men. They probably had their version of “agenda anxiety,” never quite enough time to get it all done. Maybe the Samaritan wasn’t under that sort of pressure; in contemporary terms, maybe he was among the recently-unemployed. Furthermore, giving aid to the injured traveler might well have caused the priest or Levite to become ritually unclean, a threat both would have taken quite seriously. The Samaritan man wouldn’t have had that concern.

There is another interpretation that I find intriguing. Apparently it goes back to Walter Wink, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and formerly a professor at Union Theological Seminary. Wink points out that the Samaritan was regarded as a racial half-breed. He belonged nowhere and undoubtedly endured injustice and scorn. He was very much a social outcast. Wink suggests perhaps the Samaritan was the one who stopped to offer aid because he had been able to take his own experience of suffering and use it to develop sensitivity to and compassion for others who were suffering. The Samaritan man had become a wounded healer.

Let’s be clear about one thing: There is nothing to celebrate in woundedness, in pain and suffering. Nothing whatsoever. Let’s not romanticize this. Nor is there anything inherently ennobling about it. It’s what we do with it that counts. Suffering can make us angry; pain can make us bitter. We can contract around our wounds, their scar tissue imprisoning us in cells of loneliness and disillusionment. Or we can transform our suffering and let it be a powerful force for the development of compassion and empathy.

I believe—and not everyone agrees on this—that there is in the innermost depths of our human nature something that remains untouched by woundedness, a glowing kernel of wholeness and health that we cannot lose. It is a manifestation of the Holy itself. Those who name the sacred “God” speak of the image of God in human beings. Hindus talk about the divine being as much inner as outer, the Atman or Real Self or the Witness that lies deep within every living being and is the same as Brahman or ultimate reality, the sacred One. It is untouched by the vicissitudes of our daily lives. Many Buddhists name it Buddha nature. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called it the archetype of the Self, which he said could not with any certainty be distinguished empirically from the image of God. Even when this wonderful healing resource has been deeply buried beneath layer after layer of wounding, it remains, awaiting the right moment to awaken and help us heal.

When we are able to tap into this image, this archetype, when conditions are right to allow it to emerge, we can transform our woundedness, we can heal beyond our pain and suffering. We may experience it primarily as within us or outside us, or in some mysterious and paradoxical way as both. When it awakens, we find ourselves carried on a strong current of healing energy, and we can heal. There is good reason why our words heal, wholeness, and holy all derive from the same root.

We’re All Potential Healers

Because we’re all wounded, and because we all have the capacity to transform our wounds and to heal, we’re also all potential healers, “wounded healers.” But how do we move from being simply wounded to being wounded healers?

The first step, it seems to me, is to acknowledge our woundedness and our suffering, to fully own it. As individuals and as a culture, we tend not to want to do this. We tend to react to suffering by thinking it means something is “wrong,” something isn’t as it should be. We become anxious about our anxiety, depressed because we’re depressed, frightened because we’re fearful. We’re embarrassed by it, ashamed of it. We feel weak, perhaps powerless, in the face of it. It’s something to be “fixed,” something to be “cured.” If we could just find all the right cures, we think, we could eliminate it altogether. As we come to realize that our own woundedness and suffering—whatever it is—is simply our share of the woundedness and suffering that is part of the human condition, we can begin to gain some perspective on it. It’s not just part of the human condition, either: The Christian New Testament speaks of the whole of creation weeping and sorrowing, and in the Hebrew Scriptures, Jeremiah asks “how long is the land to mourn?” Suffering, woundedness, is part of living.

Once acknowledged, once we have come to accept deep down that “curing” isn’t going to result in the complete elimination of wounding and suffering, we can set about healing it. We’re certainly called to fix what we can, to cure what can be cured. For those things that can’t be, we’re called to heal and to be wounded healers. Healing does not require curing.

We can recognize the positive potential that exists in the midst of our woundedness. Doug Smith, a hospice worker, puts it this way:

[W]henever we become victims of pain and suffering, whether by accident, through someone’s malicious intent, through our own errors, or just the result of natural phenomena, we come out of that pain and suffering quite hurt, but also always with some kind of positive potential. . . . There is a mystery here. The mystery is that wounds do not just take away from life; they can add to life as well. Wounds do not have to just take away from who we are; they can add to who we are. Wounds do not have to just take away from what we can do for others; they can add to what we can do for others.[2]

Do you recognize in your own experience the truth of Smith’s words? I do. Some of you have heard me say this before, but it bears repeating here: If someone with the power to make it happen were to come to me and say that I could live my life over, but this time without the experience of growing up with a father who was emotionally, sexually and physically abusive [and thus without what I gained from working through his legacy] I’d say “thank you, but no thank you.” It would be too much of a Faustian bargain.

Savannah Teegarden, the current Miss Indiana, is a good example. She has transformed the horrific experience of having had her sister raped and murdered into strong advocacy for the Survivors of Homicide group, a support group for people who have lost someone to homicide.

Those who are hurting can sense a particular kind of authenticity and congruence in those who have hurt where we hurt. This is why support groups—grief groups, Alcoholics Anonymous, eating disorders groups and the like—are so helpful for some people. But “hurt where we hurt” doesn’t necessarily mean having gone through the same things we are going through. It means someone has experienced life’s hurt, life’s suffering, and has acknowledged it for what it is. Nouwen notes, “Making one’s own wounds a source of healing . . . calls not for a sharing of superficial personal pains but for a constant willingness to see one’s own pain and suffering as rising from the depths of the universal human condition.”[3] We cannot heal unless we acknowledge our wounds, and it’s easier to do that when others acknowledge theirs and are willing and able to be with us in the shared vulnerability that is the human condition. I sense this spaciousness, this openness, this congruence, when I sense that another person can truly be with me, not simply beside me, in my share of the suffering that we all endure.

Listen again to Rachel Naomi Remen: “Expertise cures, but wounded people can best be healed by other wounded people. Only other wounded people can understand what is needed, for the healing of suffering is compassion, not expertise.” The healing of suffering is compassion, not expertise.” Powerful words.

Healing and Community

What might all this mean for us as a community of faith? That the positive dwells as potential within our suffering points to the importance of community. We need to be a community in which wounded people—that is to say, all of us—are enabled to heal and also to become wounded healers. We do this first of all by simply being a caring community. We cannot offer to others what we have not first received. We will not allow ourselves to be vulnerable unless we first of all feel we are safe. I believe we excel at this as a congregation. We already are and must continue to be a community in which those of us within the community, and the “stranger within our gates” as well, can own our suffering, our woundedness. To lay claim to our woundedness requires an act of courage. Everyone needs a place where they can speak the hard truths of their lives:

• I’ve lost my job
• I have an alcohol abuse problem
• My child is using illegal drugs
• My spouse abuses me
• I’ve beaten up on my spouse
• I was raped
• I stole from my employer
• I’m divorcing
• I’ve abused my kids
• I have a prison record
• I’m gay
• The bank is foreclosing on my house
• I was sexually abused
• I have PTSD

These are things not easily spoken. Because often times we are not safe or do not feel safe with out woundedness in the culture at large, or even within our families and social groups, ours must be a community in which any of us can acknowledge whatever our woundedness is—personal or familial—and be accepted. We must be a community to which those who are not a part of us can come and find welcoming hospitality, respect, and acceptance. We must also encourage the changes needed for transformation and growth, and support people through that process. Only so can woundedness and suffering be transformed.

To speak the truth of our lives and have that honored, respected, and received with compassion is freeing, liberating, and shame-and-fear removing. It is life-affirming, it breaks through the prison of isolation and the burden of feeling as if we’re indelibly marked off as “different” from the rest of the [normal] human race. It is conducive to human wholeness, and can literally be life-saving.

We have a solid focus on social justice here—both as a congregation and in what we do as individuals. Social justice, social action, is one way we go about healing our society so that fewer people are being wounded by the circumstances of their lives. The examples are endless—EPIC, CASA, MOMs, SOS, Rebuilding Together . . . . Each month our Social Justice Committee recommends an action to promote social justice both locally and globally, and the Action Center on the Association’s Web site offers many additional opportunities.

Healing ourselves and others is difficult work. In addition to being a welcoming, safe and accepting community, a community that encourages growth and transformation, and a community that actively cares about social justice, we need to be a place where we and other persons receive spiritual sustenance, where we can “recharge our spiritual batteries” so to speak. This, too, happens here. Being here, in this woods, is a great start. This is a sustaining place. We’re also sustained by the music, the food and the fellowship. We’re sustained by the variety of small group opportunities we have, such as discussion groups, the Wednesday revival hour, and dining for dollars. We’re supported by the weekly opportunity to come into communion with whatever is holy and life-sustaining for us.

We also need opportunities to hone our skills, to become better listeners, to learn how to better show the empathy we feel, to learn how to work most effectively for social justice. As a community, we can provide shared strengths, with different ones of us bringing different strengths that work together to help ourselves and others heal.

We are all wounded; we all suffer. We can all transform our woundedness and suffering into the capacity for healing ourselves and others. We are a community in which we and the stranger within our gates can find strength and support. We be challenged and encouraged to grow in empathy and compassion translated into effective action.

[1] Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society, in Ministry and Spirituality (Continuum, 1996)

[2] Douglas C. Smith, Being A Wounded Healer (Psycho-Spiritual Publications, 1999, pp. 22-23.)

[3] Henri J.M. Nouwen, Ministry and Spirituality (Continuum, 1996, p. 162.)