What Does It Mean to Be a Community of Healing?
Are our communities not just escapes from traumatic religious pasts, but healing places?
Many people who come to a UU congregation, a humanist group, or an Ethical Culture Society come from an experience of another religion. They sometimes leave because their old faith isn’t big enough for their new ideas, or because the old faith didn’t accept them as who they are, or because their old faith wasn’t shared by their new partner in life, or because they just no longer feel they belong there. Sometimes they came to understand some of the practices of that faith as abusive or hurtful or even traumatic. And some come without any experience of something like a religion, and want to find a community for themselves, and perhaps their children, to find a community of like-hearted people.
A progressive community can be a place where we are all challenged to be the best people we can be, and to have relationships where we act to elicit the best from others. Sometimes, with that challenge, we also need healing from past hurts. When we get a cut to our arm, a physical hurt, our bodies have a way to heal that wound that is automatic; we don’t have to think about it. But emotional healing requires conscious effort. And when we cause emotional harm to another – whether intentional or not – we also need to consciously work to acknowledge, heal, and repair the harm. Another function of a progressive community is as a place to learn and practice to heal and repair our relationships.
There are many aims and goals of a progressive community: being a community of healing is one of those. I invite you to consider what healing you need and what support you might find in community, and to consider how you might help in the healing of others around you, both in your interpersonal relationships and in the wider world. How can we not only recognize but heal racial injustice? The harm we are doing as people to the earth and to the humans and other living beings on the earth? To those who go to bed hungry in our city, nation, and world? To those who fear the war and violence around them?