Wounded healers - Vic O’Callaghan

For many, the joy of seeing hundreds of thousands of young people sway through Sydney’s streets singing and embracing all during the events that formed part of World Youth day was inspiring. This was especially so when the memory of our secular celebrations, such as New Years Day and some grand sporting events, can be characterised by confused minds acting out in drunken and sometimes destructive behaviour. Yes, these visitors—pilgrims—offered us a real insight into what is possible when young people pray and reflect on the wonder and awe of our creator.

On another level, those two weeks were akin to being on board a rollercoaster. The deep dives of loss were like lightning in a dark sky as stories of those suffering the effects of sexual abuse were blocked into headlines. My conflicted emotions confronted a steep path when a spiritual leader described the suffering as ‘dwelling crankily on old wounds’.

Yet, all this is a part of our journey. It reveals something about ourselves as a people. I was struck by the frustration of the hierarchy when they pleaded for the media to give them a break. This for me was a telling moment, for it revealed something that I had not seen before.

The suffering we experience when we are drawn out of our safe place by trust and then abandoned to fall into the strangeness of intense pain, became evident in small ways on the faces of many people. The tragedy of abuse has in fact been built into a wall at which many are wailing. Brick by brick, touch by touch, denial by denial, the barrier has been laid across our land.

The Hebrew people knew themselves well. They knew how to self critique and to ritualise their need for healing and to cleanse the deeper shames. Their creation of the scapegoat was ingenious. One animal was placed in the centre of the village and the people were invited to cast stones at the goat and cry out their shameful past as the goat was freed to run and make its way into the desert. The goat escaped with the pain and shame of the people on its back.

The tragedy of today is that many who have been abused tell of the secondary and often more painful stoning at the hands of what they had imagined to be the source of compassion. Instead of journeying deeper into the mystery of God where they feel safe enough, secure enough and loved enough to admit such things, they find themselves directed away to somewhere else—and where can one stumble but to the wall? There they sway, often unconscious of the whimpering within.

How, as a church, can we follow the Spirit into the mystery and come to know the freedom of standing with the outcasts? True, it is scary, but why is the notion of this freedom so foreign to so many of us?

I offer one observation of the Toward Healing protocol. When an abused person is brought into an encounter with the Body of Christ in this formal manner, this person has not just walked in off the street with one dominant matter in their past. The truth is that each one of them has come from a family and it is within this family that we will be healed. Sounds logical enough. But it is at this point that I believe the church is missing one of the most vital opportunities to illustrate to the world what it means to be a part of a healing community. It is within the families of those wounded that the flame of healing can be ignited.

Like the Hebrew people, we are a creative lot. There are ways families can be initiated into new ways of life, new ways of responding to whatever life throws into the mix. It is about leading family members to become, as Jean Vanier so eloquently describes, wounded healers. By learning new ways to gather, to embrace and to confer, we become the candle in the dark for those who are closest to us. It is about guiding people to new understandings. It is about offering families ways of dealing appropriately with their pain through conferencing.

What an insight this would offer the wider media-fed community! Could it dare to be as powerful an image as that of Jesus struggling with his cross around Sydney Harbour?