"Wounded Healers "

READINGS

The concept of a “wounded healer” comes to us from a Dutch priest, Henri Nouwen, who lived all over the world, taught at Yale and Harvard divinity schools, and spent the last decade of his life working at l’Arche Daybreak, a community for disabled persons and their assistants, in Toronto. He died suddenly in 1996 at the age of 64.

“Making one’s own wounds a source of healing . . . does not call for a sharing of superficial personal pains but for a constant willingness to see one’s own pain and suffering as rising from the depth of the human condition which [all people] share. . . .

“It is healing because it takes away the false illusion that wholeness can be given by one to another. It is healing because it does not take away the loneliness and the pain of another, but invites [the other] to recognize [this] loneliness on a level where it can be shared.”

"The Wounded Healer." New York: Doubleday, 1972.

Rachel Naomi Remen is a physician whose work in the mind/body health field has been widely recognized. Her 1996 book, Kitchen Table Wisdom, was a national bestseller.

“We all can influence the life source. The tools and strategies of healing are so innate, so much a part of a common human birthright, that we believers in technology pay very little attention to them. But they have lost none of their power.

“People have been healing each other since the beginning. Long before there were surgeons, psychologists, oncologists, and internists, we were there for each other. 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 you 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.”

"Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal." New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.

WOUNDED HEALERS
A sermon by the Rev. Judith Meyer
Unitarian Universalist Community Church
Santa Monica, California
January 13, 2008

Henri Nouwen’s small but compelling book "The Wounded Healer" influenced a generation of religious leaders, sending them out to build communities grounded in soulful relationships. Nouwen envisioned religious community as a safe haven where people could be honest about their loneliness and suffering; where the recognition of each other’s pain was the starting point of healing and recovery. In the course of his lifetime, Nouwen lived and worked in a Trappist monastery, a poor neighborhood in Peru, several theological schools, and a residential center for developmentally disabled adults. He wrote frequently of his own loneliness, and found hospitality and refuge in his work.

Though you may not have heard of Henri Nouwen before, his concept of the “wounded healer” has shaped contemporary spirituality, as well as the expectations many of us have when we join a congregation like this one. People today are like “the Semitic nomads,” Nouwen wrote, “we live in a desert with many lonely travelers who are looking for a moment of peace, for a fresh drink and for a sign of encouragement so that they can continue their mysterious search for freedom.”[1] It is that desert hospitality: the oasis, the shelter from the storm, that people are seeking when they come to us. Once refreshed and renewed by energy and hope, they are ready to serve others. They find healing in a community where it feels safe to be who they really are.   

This is a place where you don’t have to pretend that everything is fine when it isn’t. If you stay with us long enough, you learn that every one of us has suffered – no matter how we may appear on the outside. Knowing each other’s pain can create a strong bond. It is the strength we gain together, Nouwen would say; the awareness that we are not alone. It brings hope and power to our collective task.

This is the mission of today’s congregation: to care for each other so that we are strong enough to do the work the world needs us to do. If we fail to do the first part – to care for each other – we won’t have the power to do our good work together. It is as simple as that.

Rachel Naomi Remen, the doctor whose book of "Kitchen Table Wisdom" has made her a well known wise woman, carried Nouwen’s concept of the “wounded healer” into her own life and work. She wrote of the “wisdom gained from our wounds and our experiences of suffering that makes us able to heal.”[2] That wisdom is compassion. It shows us that however we may feel broken, we are whole, just as we are. The “simplest of human relationships” has the power to reveal this truth.[3] This is what healing can be.

Ever since I moved to California almost fifteen years ago, I have suffered from headaches. Whatever their cause, allergies, the waxing and waning of hormones, something I’ve eaten or drunk, I’ve never really been certain. Perhaps all of the above.

As time has gone by, they have become less frequent and less severe. And I’ve learned how to cope, not just because I have various remedies. What also helps is knowing how many of you get headaches too. On any given day, if I wake up with my head throbbing, I can think of any number of people who may be experiencing the same misery. I can call someone up and commiserate. “You’ve got a headache too? It’s not just me?” And though I don’t hope that anyone else is suffering, I’ve noticed how comforting it is to have company.

Suffering together is a mysteriously powerful bond. It bucks me up. My head may hurt, but I feel better about myself.

This is a small healing experience. Pain diminishes us in many ways. Sharing it with others helps us feel whole again.

Healing, however, is not a cure. A cure is the most desirable outcome, what we hope and pray for. But not everyone can be cured.

People we know and love are living with all kinds of chronic conditions. Some will get better; others will not. Ultimately we all must learn to live without a cure for something, but everyone – at any stage of life – can be healed. Rachel Naomi Remen notes the difference. “Expertise cures, but wounded people can best be healed by other wounded people,”[4] she writes.

Several years ago, around the time that my husband David was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, we both read the memoir "Lucky Man," written by the actor Michael J. Fox. He tells the story of living without a cure – and finding healing anyway. Fox had already been living with Parkinson’s for a decade when he realized that what his doctor could not tell him – “what no one could,” he wrote, “is that these last ten years of coming to terms with my disease, would turn out to be the best ten years of my life – not in spite of my illness, but because of it. . . .

“Coping with the relentless assault and the accumulating damage is not easy,” he continued. “Still, this unexpected crisis forced a fundamental life decision: adopt a siege mentality – or embark upon a journey. Whatever it was – courage? acceptance? wisdom? – that finally allowed me to go down the second road (after spending a few disastrous years on the first) was unquestionably a gift – absent this neurophysiological catastrophe, I would never have opened it, or been so profoundly enriched.”[5] Many people, including David and me, have found encouragement in his words. From his story it seems clear that Michael J. Fox has found a sense of his own wholeness – has been healed, you might say – by having an incurable disease.

Still, it’s not fun to have Parkinson’s or any other illness. I can think of any number of times in my ministry when I have stood by helplessly as someone suffered more than anyone should ever have to. My compassion may have been sincere, but I could not relieve the pain. At such times only expertise can make the difference, and sometimes expertise can’t help. Such is our human condition. Henri Nouwen, a Roman Catholic, found hope even in suffering. For at the end of the road he saw a liberating God who would free people of their oppression, whatever it was, poverty, pain, loneliness, anguish. But I am more of an existentialist. I agree with Albert Camus, who wrote in his novel "The Plague" that even a simple country priest would rather relieve suffering than point out its excellence.

A good friend of mine, who was treated for cancer about fifteen years ago and has been in remission ever since, once shared an important insight with me. She had found companionship in the Wellness Community, a local support network for people living with cancer. She told me that everyone in her group agreed that they would never wish their experience on anyone. But then she went on, “We also agreed that our lives were better because of what had happened to us.” Something I have never forgotten.

Suffering is never excellent, always to be avoided or relieved. But having suffered – and with the wounds to prove it – an exquisite renewal may come about; a clarity, perhaps, or a sense of gratitude, that heals the larger wounds of life and makes us free. This is what brings us wholeness and peace.

Here is how Henri Nouwen expresses that truth: “We do not know where we will be two, ten or twenty years from now. What we can know, however, is that [human beings suffer] and that a sharing of suffering can make us move forward.”[6] It is that moving forward, the result of healing that comes from our honesty and caring for one another, that leads us to become who we hope to be. This is the power and strength we generate together, wounded healers every one of us, that move us out into the world to do works of compassion and justice. Every one of us can begin today.

______________

1 Henri J.M. Nouwen, "The Wounded Healer" (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p.89.
2 Rachel Naomi Remen, "Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal" (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), p. 217.
3 Ibid., p. 217.
4 Ibid., p. 217.
5 Michael J. Fox, "Lucky Man" (New York: Hyperion, 2002), p. 5.
6 "The Wounded Healer," p. 100.