{"id":16030,"date":"2017-09-22T09:39:23","date_gmt":"2017-09-22T13:39:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=16030"},"modified":"2017-09-22T09:40:26","modified_gmt":"2017-09-22T13:40:26","slug":"healing-our-social-wounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=16030","title":{"rendered":"Healing Our Social Wounds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/gdhAdz6wHWc\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Healing Our Social Wounds   (Richard Rohr)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Today\u2019s meditation is longer than usual, but important. Many people associate the word \u201cjustice\u201d with the penal system and retributive justice. Yet the prophets and Jesus clearly practiced what we now call \u201crestorative justice.\u201d Jesus never punished anybody. He undercut the basis for all violent, exclusionary, and punitive behavior. He became the forgiving victim so we would stop creating victims. He \u201cjustified\u201d people by loving them and forgiving them at ever-deeper levels.<\/p>\n<p>Punishment relies on enforcement and compliance but does not change the soul or the heart. Jesus held out for the heart; he restored people to their true and deepest identity. When the church itself resorts to various forms of shaming and punishment for \u201csin,\u201d it is relying upon the retributive methods of this world and not the restorative methods of Jesus. We have a lot of growing up to do in the ways of Christ.<\/p>\n<p>Our current criminal \u201cjustice\u201d system has more to do with making a profit (through unpaid labor and filling quotas) and oppression of the marginalized than restoring individuals to wholeness and health. Though the United States holds only 5% of the world\u2019s population, it houses 21% of the world\u2019s prisoners. African Americans and Hispanics are imprisoned at much higher rates, in spite of similar rates of drug use and crime as whites. [1]<\/p>\n<p>Today a friend of the Center for Action and Contemplation, Ray Leonardini, shares his own observations and experience teaching contemplative prayer in prisons: [2]<\/p>\n<p>People in prison commonly live with a sense of personal failure. Most prisons and jails foster, even amplify, this sense of failure by dehumanizing practices like constant herding and extreme over-crowding. Prisoners\u2019 efforts to cope with these humiliations result in behaviors similar to those identified with veterans as PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder).<\/p>\n<p>The violence in a war zone, like the threat of violence in a maximum-security prison, creates a chronic debilitating state of fight or flight for the individual. To simply cope, the prisoner develops the ability to avoid and numb feelings and represses intrusive memories. This leaves many of them with enormous anxiety and a deep sense of personal shame.<\/p>\n<p>When their basic sense of personal worth is stifled in this way, the sufferers are driven to further extremes of self-loathing. As penal institutions perpetuate a culture of dehumanization, the symptoms of PTSD proliferate. Though they can be visible (angry outbursts, aggressive behavior), they also fester in secret (night terrors), buried in the deep crevices of the psyche.<\/p>\n<p>As one prisoner describes it, \u201cThe external reality and climate of violence that dominates one\u2019s existence and sense of self in these high-security prison environments cuts a prisoner off from any sense of personal interiority.\u201d [3]<\/p>\n<p>Experts tell us that the deepest wound of PTSD is a \u201cmoral injury,\u201d that is a wound to the soul, caused by participation in events that violate one\u2019s most deeply held sense of right and wrong. The perpetrator or victim realizes how wrong it was. The irony, of course, is that this \u201cdisorder\u201d is actually an appropriately normal response to an overwhelmingly abnormal situation. No wonder medication and talk therapy are less effective in addressing this \u201cmoral injury,\u201d researchers say, than Yoga and meditation, which by-pass the mind and unlock the unconscious wounds of the spirit, where the core wound of PTSD resides.<\/p>\n<p>My experience teaching Centering Prayer in prisons for ten years supports this conclusion. Receptive, contemplative practices like Centering Prayer are uniquely suited to healing deep psychic wounds of this kind. [4] Centering Prayer bypasses the mind with its horrific memories and trauma and invites practitioners to \u201cdetach\u201d from their narratives and \u201clet go\u201d into the spaciousness of Silence. There they can encounter God or Divine Reality through the deep longings of their hearts. The silence pulsates with a compassion and warmth that other remedies cannot replicate. The deep sense of moral injury and shame no longer needs to be repressed. They can begin to forgive themselves and feel like they just might be lovable.<\/p>\n<p>Gateway to Silence:<br \/>\nLove your enemies.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Missionary\u2019s Master and Teacher<\/strong><br \/>\nBy Oswald Chambers<\/p>\n<p>You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you say well, for so I am \u2026.I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master\u2026 \u2014John 13:13, 16<br \/>\nTo have a master and teacher is not the same thing as being mastered and taught. Having a master and teacher means that there is someone who knows me better than I know myself, who is closer than a friend, and who understands the remotest depths of my heart and is able to satisfy them fully. It means having someone who has made me secure in the knowledge that he has met and solved all the doubts, uncertainties, and problems in my mind. To have a master and teacher is this and nothing less\u2014 \u201c\u2026for One is your Teacher, the Christ\u2026\u201d (Matthew 23:8).<br \/>\nOur Lord never takes measures to make me do what He wants. Sometimes I wish God would master and control me to make me do what He wants, but He will not. And at other times I wish He would leave me alone, and He does not.<br \/>\n\u201cYou call Me Teacher and Lord\u2026\u201d\u2014 but is He? Teacher, Master, and Lord have little place in our vocabulary. We prefer the words Savior, Sanctifier, and Healer. The only word that truly describes the experience of being mastered is love, and we know little about love as God reveals it in His Word. The way we use the word obey is proof of this. In the Bible, obedience is based on a relationship between equals; for example, that of a son with his father. Our Lord was not simply God\u2019s servant\u2014 He was His Son. \u201c\u2026though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience\u2026\u201d (Hebrews 5:8). If we are consciously aware that we are being mastered, that idea itself is proof that we have no master. If that is our attitude toward Jesus, we are far away from having the relationship He wants with us. He wants us in a relationship where He is so easily our Master and Teacher that we have no conscious awareness of it\u2014 a relationship where all we know is that we are His to obey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Healing Our Social Wounds (Richard Rohr) Today\u2019s meditation is longer than usual, but important. Many people associate the word \u201cjustice\u201d with the penal system and retributive justice. Yet the prophets and Jesus clearly practiced what we now call \u201crestorative justice.\u201d Jesus never punished anybody. He undercut the basis for all violent, exclusionary, and punitive behavior. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16030"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16030"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16032,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16030\/revisions\/16032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}