Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 25

I am speaking of love as a supernatural force, given that I believe not only in God, but that God is love. Fundamentalist and Evangelical Atheists may pause to take their medication, if they wish. As may the fundamentalist Christians, who really aren't that different from the atheists, I'm afraid, and really, are cut from the same polyester. If you want a written record of love in action, then you need only turn to and read carefully the four Christian Gospels. Everything in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ point to the same cosmic mural: love in action. Never mind that you don't believe, have doubts, that you believe that all religions are equal, that you believe in religious pluralism or in no religion at all, (we are spiritual-not-religious-please-and-thank-you!) I am not asking you to believe, and I am not expecting you to become a born again Christian, nor a born again anything! Just read the bloody Four Gospels if you want to see love in action. It is really the most powerful force in the universe. I see this in my own work. Peer Support Workers have a unique role to play, in that we are able to get right beside our clients in a way that union staff often cannot, and for many legitimate reasons. Because we have been there ourselves, if not actually mentally ill then certainly hobbled for a while with stigma, we are able to express love to our clients. This is why peer support workers are far more effective towards client recovery than other workers, with one simple exception: those workers who will dare to love their clients, not romantically, and not possessively, but with empathy, compassion, respect, and beingness. By beingness, I mean the ability to be with others in a spirit of love and solidarity while they are suffering and working through their issues of unwellness and recovery. Here is a lovely definition for beingness, courtesy of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary online: the quality, state, or condition of having existence It has a crystalline, heartbreaking purity, that ontological beauty … of each object resonating in its beingness … —Phillip Lopate, Slate Magazine, 19 Mar. 2001 Whether or not you are Christian, religious or not at all religious or spiritual, all that matters is to let ourselves become channels and vectors of love in our interactions with others. The only requisite for becoming such channels of love is that we allow our own selves, our own lives to be inhabited by love. I am not asking you to believe in any religion or creed here, simply to open your heart and life to Love. This is not going to be easy. It will mean a surrendering of ourselves, and there could well be difficult experiences ahead that will help break us open, but this is what it often takes to get us ready to participate in this enormous and daunting but not impossible task of bringing to our troubled and broken humanity lasting healing and restoration.