A world in urgent need of more compassion...

In a week when the crisis in Syria escalates, and when retiring Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is quoted as saying that mankind has "lost the plot", it is sobering to reflect on the fact that man’s place in nature is unique. He is not only conscious of his own evolution, but he can shape his evolutionary future by how he behaves. And we surely behave badly!

Sure, we commit acts of violence against each other and against ourselves, of a physical and brutal nature, that is widely seen across our media. But this violence can be more subtle, such as verbal abuse and childhood bullying. There is aggression and violence in our homes, on our streets, and between communities as well as between nations.

And that is not all. We also commit acts of violence against the environment, manifested in pollution, soil erosion, species extinctions and perhaps in some of the effects of climate change we are now experiencing. We are all guilty of thoughtless and selfish patterns of behavior that can so often directly or indirectly contribute to the suffering of others.

The real problem is that on its own no amount of any rule and regulation, law or leadership, will change the way we behave. Rather than having regulation thrust upon us, we need to understand why we behave as we do and really commit our hearts and our minds to the need for change. Perhaps that means tracing our behavior back to the healing needs of our own wounds. This does not mean our physical wounds, but the wounds we have inherited and those from our own suffering, from the way we react to personal experiences that life has thrown at us: our insecurities and fears, our feelings of hopelessness and despair, that can be reflected in greed and envy, in over-consumption, violence and addictions to work or harmful substances.

Our unhealed wounds are potentially dangerous not only for our own personal well being but for the future of the world. We are in grave danger of being driven by our present behavior to spiritual bankruptcy and physical destruction. Action is urgent.

To find healing and wholeness we need to reconnect with our roots, with our souls, rediscovering our spirituality and our faith, and healing those wounds. And once we have found healing for our wounds, we may even discover that we are uniquely equipped to understand the wounds of others, to walk alongside them and assist them in their own healing process. We will feel a profound and healing compassion towards all sentient beings. This is what it means to be a Wounded Healer.  And this is surely our future. Is it too much to hope for?

I have a dream...

As we mark 50 years since Martin Luther King made his famous “I have a dream…” speech, the terrible events within the world today remind me of something else King said, in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture December 11th 1964.

He observed that ‘the richer we have become materially the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.’ He called this our moral and spiritual ‘lag’. We live, he said, in two realms:

"The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live."

Our problem today, he said, is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. He warned that we would put ourselves in peril if the former, the internal, does not grow apace of the external material realm. ‘When the ‘without’ of man’s nature subjugates the ‘within’, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.’ The result, he cautioned, is racial injustice, poverty and war, that will only be alleviated if we balance our moral progress with our scientific progress and learn the practical art of living in harmony in a ‘worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation.’

Carl Jung had already observed this in 1957 when he wrote: ‘As at the beginning of the Christian era, so again today, we are faced with the problem of the general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and social progress.’ (1)

This week Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said that we have “lost the plot” in our society, due to our increasingly secular lives. 

Religion and ethics were once closely intertwined, but the influence of religion has declined in so many lives,with potentially devastating consequences.

The Dalai Lama in 2000 warned of a ‘mounting confusion with respect to the problem of how best we are to conduct ourselves in life...(and) morality becomes a matter of individual preference.’(2)

Nietzsche called this an impending ‘total eclipse of all values.’(3) Atheist as he himself was, his observation, he claimed, was entirely objective: we need a God and the moral codes inherent in that belief to curb our otherwise unpleasant behavioral traits. Whether or not we claim a particular faith as our spiritual guide and source of hope, the deep healing need that is within each and every one of us transcends all boundaries of faith or creed. I believe that we need to reach that need and heal our hearts before we can hope to heal our world. How, I wonder, can we do this? And can a faith help?

Adapted from Chapter 3 The Hope of Faith from Healing this Wounded Earth…

1. From The Collected Works of C G Jung, 1970 pp304-305 as quoted in Claire Dunn Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul An Illustrated Biography, London: Continuum, 2000, p.199

2. .His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Ancient Wisdom Modern World: Ethics for the New Millennium (London: Abacus, Time Warner Books UK, 2000), p. 11.

3.  Friedrich Nietzsche, used a few times through his literature, for example spoken by the madman in The Gay Science (Philosophical Classics) Friedrich Nietzsche with Thomas Common (Translator)(New York: Dover Publications, 2006).

“No one knows what the “big society” is, say MPs

I just cannot help feeling people are being naïve about UK Prime Minister Cameron’s “The Big Society.” I think I call it Real Community, and that is a term more readily understood across the world.
“No one knows what the “big society” is, say MPs.” That is the headline in today’s newspaper.

In the same paper I read that “Paris bans beggars from top tourist and shopping spots,” as these vagrants upset and offend the shoppers. The poor and homeless begging in shop doorways and at entrances to the metro or underground whether in Paris or London are not part of a “big society.”And the only offence we should feel is that in 21st Century Europe there is any need at all for begging.
Kids roaming the streets out of boredom, getting involved in gangs and drugs; that’s not part of a “big society.” Over 1 million unemployed youngsters in the UK; that’s not “big society.” The filth and litter all over our streets; that’s not part of a “big society.” The elderly who are lonely and isolated at home, or abused and bullied in care homes; that’s not “big society.” The young family struggling to bring up their disabled children on insufficient income who don’t even know their neighbors, who wouldn’t know where they could knock on a door to get help or support in an emergency. The rogues stealing metal plaques from gravestones and war memorials because scrap metal dealers will pay good prices now for them; that most certainly is not “big society.”
Perhaps it is easier to say what a “big society” is NOT than what it is.

The people selling the Big Issue on the streets – now that IS part of a bigger society! At least they are aspiring for a better life and doing something about it. But they receive support, both from the Big Issue operation itself, and from those of us who stop and talk to them, get to know them, buy their magazine (fantastic value and cheaper than that hyper- caloried drink you have just bought), even on occasions buy them a hot drink (OK call me a softie). But little things like that, being nice to other people, helping them on their way, all help to make the world a little bit better and ARE one step towards a “big society”.

Real community starts in the streets where we live. It starts with our own families, with our neighbors and friends, and extends to friends at work, in our church, in our club or society. But it should never ever exclude others around us who share our “space.” We are all human beings, with the same needs and vulnerabilities, and even finding just a little time to help others is time very well spent in the huge scheme of things.
Of course we cannot personally solve all the seamier problems of our broken society. We will sometimes need help and support from local and national government, and from other agencies, whether this comes through regulation or from practical resources. Of course we cannot solve housing problems on our own, for example, or the gangs on “sink” estates. But Gandhi did say: “YOU must be the change you want to see in the world.” And for that change to come about we all have to start small. Start in our own back yard. And that way we WILL start to build a “Big Society.”

Jonathan Sacks wrote somewhere that  

‘A community is where they know your name and where they miss you if you are not there [Sacks’ italics] Community is society with a human face.’ 

In other words, Big Society.

Cathedrals of the Mind, Hospitals of the Soul.

I'm talking about libraries.

I simply love quotations. I use them liberally in everything I write. I carry my favorites around with me. Those words that were spoken or written centuries, or perhaps even millennia ago, and that still resonate deeply with us today demonstrate that some things never change, including human nature! And they show us how important and relevant many of our ancient wisdom still is - why we should listen to the sages and prophets of long ago.

But here is a lovely modern quote brought to my attention by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in a piece he wrote recently for the superb Credo column in The Times. It is from Caitlin Moran:

Libraries, she wrote, are "cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card."

Wonderful! But actually our brilliant art galleries and museums serve a very similar healing function, as long as we resist the shop on the way out!

This is Funchal cathedral in Madeira

Do we need religion?

The world is a rich tapestry of many different faiths, religions and spiritual ideas. The rules and customs of ancestral religions still give meaning, purpose and spiritual nourishment to most of the seven billion people on the Earth today. Something like 84% of the world’s population have a faith or religion, often with deeply held convictions, and of the remaining 16% one half claim to be theistic even if not religious. And surely spiritual nourishment is necessary for human flourishing, as recognised by the many who do not feel the need to join any organised religion on a regular basis but still pursue spiritual practices of one sort or another.
But the secular materialism of the West seems to hold the moral high ground, has the cultural initiative. And religion sometimes, indeed often, comes in for disdain. Worse still, there is a huge amount of intolerance or even persecution for religious beliefs in some countries, even in this 21st Century.
But why is this? Why can we not all respect each others' beliefs and ideas? Why can we not live and let live? Why do some atheists so passionately argue for the abolition of religion, as if that were possible? It is certainly not desirable. Yes it is true that religions have not always been forces for good in the world. But I think it was the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who pointed out once that humans have always been able to find excuses for violence and war without religion. And the religions historian Karen Armstrong has also reminded us that wars are mostly about greed, envy, ambition, land ownership, even if they are often cloaked in religious rhetoric to give them “respectability.
Why throw out religion? Religions are a huge force for good in the world. They are behind much of the humanitarian aid made available to those suffering across the globe from disasters however caused, and they have between them some amazing and enviable global networks, both interfaith and intra-faith, all working for the good of humanity.
And religion also provides spiritual nourishment and support at the all important individual and local level. UK Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has been derided in some quarters for his ideas of a Big Society. Some profess to be unable to understand what he means. But we have a Big Society writ large in our own church and community, everyone looking out for each other, extending hands of friendship and support to those in need, enjoying fun together in community events, and generally feeling a strong sense of belonging in what can otherwise seem a confusing and harsh world out there.
There is also so much in common between many of the world’s faiths. For a start they share what is called “The Golden Rule,” expressed in its positive format as “do to others as you would wish others to do to you.” For Jews this is expressed as: “What is hurtful to yourself, do not to your fellow man.” One of the Ten Commandments is after all “Love your neighbour as yourself,” and Jesus reminds his followers that this is the second great commandment (Matthew ch 22. v. 39). In Jainism they say: “In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self.” Hinduism expresses it thus: “Do not to others, which if done to thee, would cause thee pain.” And so on. Just imagine if everyone, religious or not, actually lived out that maxim. Surely at an individual level we do not want others to hate us, to hurt us, be rude to us, kill us, treat us with disdain, etc., etc? A good video to watch on this is Karen Armstrong’s TED talk, Let's Revive the Golden Rule.

But we should also celebrate our differences, and learn from them. We can learn and enjoy so much about other faiths and cultures if we open our minds. And here let’s extend this beyond religious differences, to differences of culture, sexuality, politics. We all need each other, whatever our beliefs, and we should use our multiple resources for good, not for violation and destruction.
Over the next few months I shall be exploring these issues in more detail, and looking at why so many see religion as a “bad thing,” why religion or at least spirituality is in fact so very important for the flourishing of the world, what obstacles prevent our tolerance and understanding of others’ ways of life, the emergence of new wisdoms, and a greater understanding of human consciousness and its interface with religion, and what we can all do to work towards a more peaceful, spiritual and happier world.
Comments welcome.

The End of Faith?

In his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris calls in the epilogue for the abolition of religion. This is not a hopeless dream, he believes, and says that an “utter revolution in our thinking” could be achieved in a generation if parents and teachers simply gave honest answers to the questions of children. Really?!
I think Harris may be conveniently forgetting that the rules and customs of ancestral religions still give meaning, purpose and spiritual nourishment to most of the seven billion people on the Earth today. 84% of the world’s population have a faith or religion, often with deeply held convictions, and of the remaining 16% one half claim to be theistic even if not religious. And only a tiny minority are involved in illegal acts in the name of religion. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has reminded us that in spite of what Harris and other angry atheists say, humankind does not need religion to perpetrate ghastly crimes against its own kith and kin. And it is also widely accepted that spiritual nourishment is necessary for human flourishing, within or without a religious faith.
So with these facts and statistics how could religion possibly be abolished?
Today Christian men, women and children throughout the world will be going to church. The UK media love to say that churchgoers are declining in numbers but overall this is simply not true. Since the turn of the millennium across 42 Church of England cathedrals in the UK, numbers attending services have steadily grown by a total of 37%, around 4% on average each year, and 7% just in the last year. Perhaps it is just unfortunate that the secular materialism of the West has the cultural initiative.

Nevertheless it is true that total congregations today, even though on the increase, are still a shadow of the numbers flocking to church even 100 years ago. And this causes a problem with moral values. Religion and ethics were once closely intertwined, but since the influence of religion has declined in so many lives, there is, warns the Dalai Lama, ‘mounting confusion with respect to the problem of how best we are to conduct ourselves in life…morality becomes a matter of individual preference.’(1) Nietzsche called this an impending ‘total eclipse of all values.’

(2) Atheist as he himself was, his observation, he claimed, was entirely objective: we need a God and the moral codes inherent in that belief to curb our otherwise unpleasant behavioral traits.
Is that right?

And there is another issue – that of so-called “progress.” ‘As at the beginning of the Christian era, so again today,’ wrote Carl Jung (3) in 1957, ‘we are faced with the problem of the general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and social progress.’ Martin Luther King called this our moral and spiritual ‘lag’. He observed that ‘the richer we have become materially the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.’ We live, he said, in two realms:

“The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.”

He warned that we would put ourselves in peril if the former, the internal, does not grow apace of the external material realm. ‘When the ‘without’ of man’s nature subjugates the ‘within’, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.’ The result, he cautioned, is racial injustice, poverty and war, that will only be alleviated if we balance our moral progress with our scientific progress and learn the practical art of living in harmony in a ‘worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation.’ (4)
And how do we achieve that?
A question I will continue to explore in the weeks and months ahead. All (constructive and polite) comments welcome.



1. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, 2000, Ancient Wisdom Modern World: Ethics for the New Millennium (London: Abacus, Time Warner Books UK, 2000), p. 11.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, used a few times through his literature, for example spoken by the madman in The Gay Science (Philosophical Classics) Friedrich Nietzsche with Thomas Common (Translator)(New York: Dover Publications, 2006).
3. From The Collected Works of C G Jung, 1970 pp304-305 as quoted in Claire Dunn: Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul An Illustrated Biography, London: Continuum, 2000, pp. 149, 199.
4. Martin Luther King, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture December 11 1964

Why we need the Sabbath

The Sabbath is a Quiet Antidote to Web Chatter.
This was the title of Jonathan Sacks’ column in last Saturday’s Times.

“The soul needs its silences,” he wrote, “in the midst of the web chatter and the electronic noise.” He was writing of the Jewish Sabbath, a time for putting technology aside, a time to spend with family, to focus on the important things in life, on relationships, building communities, strengthening marriages, giving parents and children, he writes, undistracted time with one another. Time that we tend to call “quality time.” And this time is becoming ever more precious, as we all become slaves to Twitter, Facebook, E Mails, and all the other distractions we face every day.


But it is not just technology we need a break from. Mass consumerism is equally insidious, with its effects on our planet, our pockets, our sanity.

Last Sunday we went to have lunch with some of our family in London. We would have gone by train, but we drove because we needed to pick up some heavy and bulky essential DIY materials at one of those huge stores in a shopping mall on the way.
We had started the day by going to our early Eucharist service in the local church: essential nourishment for the soul. But my peaceful state of mind was soon shattered by the sheer awfulness of the frenetic shopping we experienced all around us when we entered the store. And I was reminded of another weekend, a half term weekend many years ago when our boys were still young.
It was a rain soaked Sunday, and we had the misfortune to visit another large shopping mall outside town to return some goods and get our money back.
All those years ago the elder of our two boys was in a religious studies lesson at school. They were discussing Sunday Trading. “It is just wrong,” he said. No reason was needed – it was simply wrong!
Ever since it was introduced I have abhorred Sunday trading, and actually I also loathe those big soulless monuments or temples to consumerism and materialism we call superstores and shopping malls. But as I said we needed to change something and thought we could save gas by calling in on our way to visit a local house and garden of historic interest with the kids. Again, I had completed my morning duties at the Sunday service in our local parish church. This trip to the shop was meant to be incidental only, en route to our traditional Sunday afternoon family excursion, this time to Down House, the country home of Charles Darwin for the last 40 years of his life until he died in 1882.
Now I realize that for many Christians who like me abhor Sunday trading the mention of Darwin and his views on evolution may itself open up a fairly passionate discussion about The Origin of the Species and his theories of Natural Selection. I’ll take that risk, but that isn’t the point of this story.
The car parks around the superstore were practically gridlocked, cars jostling for the scarce, almost nonexistent empty parking spaces, tempers were frayed, and families with their children were pouring into and out of the store, those on the outward home bound journey pushing trolleys loaded high with consumable goods. There were several thousand cars there, with perhaps 3 or 4 or more in each car. The arithmetic is simple and the disquieting effect on my previous feeling of spiritual calm was very real!
The damage to the environment inflicted through our collective behaviours around that one store on that one day must have been colossal. It doesn’t bear contemplation to multiply the effect by the number of other similar stores around the country presumably displaying the same patterns of greed and consumerism! These places have become for many the new religion, shopping malls replacing the church as the Sunday venue of first choice.
At least I was trying to economise that day and avoid two car trips where one could suffice; and our shopping trip was intended to be fleeting! And my sense of spiritual uplift and sustenance nourished by the liturgy and Christian fellowship of the morning’s church service, was in no real danger of being permanently destroyed by that retail experience. But let’s consider the shoppers themselves. For how many was this outing their main Sunday family entertainment? Next weekend how many of those same families will be burdening our already overflowing landfill sites with the goods displaced by their latest retail bonanza? What sort of long term satisfaction do they obtain from their shopping frenzy, from their obsessive accumulation of material goods? Such behaviour is simply not healthy or sustainable and certainly does not make for any lasting and real happiness. On the other hand, as soon as we could we escaped the gridlock and the obvious tempers and aggressions of many of the trapped drivers, and the onward drive to Down House, not more than a few miles away, took us through some of the most beautiful autumnal colours in the Kent country lanes, a spiritual joy to behold, and food for the soul. How sad therefore that during that whole day, a half term weekend, we were informed by the staff that Darwin’s house, with all its interest and artefacts, its gardens and greenhouses, and brilliant exhibits of his life and work, with plenty of child friendly diversions and so close to the conurbation that is Greater London, had been visited by only an estimated 150 people! Yes, 150 people in the whole day!
I have been reading again the book by Jim Wallis, Rediscovering Values – on Wall Street, Main Street and Your Street. Part Two, How We Got Here, writes of our culture of greed, not need, of self- interest without the restraint of ethics, of it being “all about me,” of mass consumption and consumerism being a part of the American identity (and it is no different in Britain I can assure you). He explains how such behaviour has brought us to where we now find ourselves, struggling out of the Great Recession.
He writes of the loss of values within our modern economy and suggests that the financial Market, with a capital M, is our “idol of ultimate allegiance,” the modern day equivalent of the Golden Calf that Moses found being worshipped when he came down from Mt Sinai with his Tablets. He argues that the market, without the capital letter, must serve us, not the other way around. The first commandment of The Market, he writes, is “There is never enough.” This, he emphasizes, must be replaced by “the dictum of God’s economy; namely, there is enough if we share it.”
This book is a call to us all to rediscover values in our lives, as individuals and together, to work for an economy that is for the “common good,” not just for Me. This book has a strong and sound message for us all.

Whatever our faith, or none, how about we all set aside one day of "quality time" at the weekend with our families as a quiet antidote to the chatter and noise of technology and consumerism.

More on the Wounded Healer

It was the Jungian psychoanalysts who probably first started referring to the Wounded Healer archetype as a recognized tool in the healing process. But it was the Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen who really popularized the term within a wider spiritual and pastoral healing context when he wrote his own bestselling book The Wounded Healer in 1979. In it he identifies the loneliness that he himself so keenly felt as the most painful of our human wounds, leaving us craving for love and attention. Loneliness, he tells us, is recognized in words such as alienation, separation and isolation. (1) But Malcolm Langford identifies four other basic types of wound: those resulting from the evil of our own life experiences and of others with whom we are involved, those from our own broken personalities and motivations, from our personal prejudices and fears and those which reflect our emotional and spiritual poverty in such a materially wealthy world. (2) We can all relate to some if not all of these examples of woundedness. And there is plenty of need for healing in the world!

Ian McEwan reflected on the Twin Towers collapse on 9/11:

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity [my italics]. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality…The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanizing hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination. (3)

And as the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explains, when bad things do happen to us, we can use these experiences to sensitize us to the pain of others. Rather than allowing such wounds to make us victims of circumstance, let them turn us into potentially life changing agents of hope. (4)


1. Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Wounded Healer, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994, p. 83
2. Malcolm Langford, draws much of his inspiration from Henri Nouwen. Langford, Malcolm, Waking the Wounded: Facing our own Poverty. This was on World Vision site at
http://www.worldvision.com.au/getinvolved/faithinaction/files/grid2000_wakingthewounded.pdf sourced 17 February 2009.
3. McEwan, Ian, The Guardian 15 September 2001, ‘Only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against their murderers.’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2 sourced 19 February 2009.
4. Jonathan Sacks, The Times, 5 January 2008, Count your Blessings and Begin to Change your Life.

Chiron the Wounded Healer

Pain and loneliness are forms of energy that can be transformed if we turn them outward, using them to recognize and redeem someone else’s pain or loneliness.
This is quoted from Jonathan Sacks book: To Heal a Fractured World- the Ethics of Responsibility.

Many people outside the healing professions of pastoral care and medicine have not heard of the expression The Wounded Healer. So here is a brief story from Greek mythology, where there was a Centaur called Chiron. Centaurs are normally portrayed as clumsy and brutal beasts. Chiron was different. He was kind, gentle and well educated and tutored many of the Greek gods. Famous pupils included Jason, the leader of the fifty Argonauts, who sailed aboard the Argo to bring back the golden fleece to Pelias. Another was Achilles of the vulnerable heel legend, killed by an arrow from Apollo’s bow.

Much of Greek mythology is highly intricate and complex and the myth of Chiron varies in precise details depending on its source. The story goes that he was the love child of an affair between the Greek God Cronus and the Earth Nymph Philyra. Before making love to Philyra, Cronus changed her into a horse to allay the suspicions of his wife Rhea. And so the centaur Chiron was conceived. Abandoned by his parents at birth, Chiron was adopted and brought up by Apollo, The Divine Physician, who trained him to be a great and wise teacher, physician and healer.

Centaurs were known for their over indulgences and Chiron was probably no exception. One day there was a bloody fight between Centaurs over a carafe of wine and Chiron was accidentally shot in his knee by a stray poisoned arrow from the bow of Heracles (or Hercules). The wound would not heal and it gave him much pain. Centaurs also had the gift of immortality. Such was Chiron’s suffering, from both the mental wounds of his abandonment at birth and from this painful physical wounding, that he prayed to the gods to let him surrender his own immortality and die. He then spent the rest of his life trying to find a cure for his physical wound and became an expert in the healing power of plants, particularly the herbal remedies he developed for war wounds. But the healing abilities for which he was renowned came especially from the empathy he developed for the suffering of others, acquired from his struggle to overcome his own physical and mental wounds. Chiron allowed his own wounds to be a source of healing for others. He became a Wounded Healer.

What became of Chiron? His prayer was eventually answered and after his death he was placed in the sky by the king of the Greek gods, Zeus (the Roman Jupiter and the only surviving son of Cronus and Rhea), where he can be seen in the night sky as the constellation Sagittarius (the archer), otherwise known as Centaur (the man/horse).
Greek mythology is of course a collection of fables, of the Greek gods, goddesses and heroes. But many of them encompass a deeper wisdom about human behavior even if few have any basis in fact.

One of the legacies left by the analytical psychologist Carl Jung was the idea that in our psyche we all share deep inherited and unconscious ideas and images together known as our “collective unconscious.” This collective unconscious, Jung said, is made up of different recognizable human models or archetypes. He saw in the Greek myth of Chiron a reflection of the archetypal Wounded Healer of the indigenous medicine man or shaman, first recorded in the earliest known hunting and fishing communities of Siberia and Sub Arctic North America. In fact it was probably from the language of a small group of hunters and reindeer herders from the Arctic Tungus that the name shaman comes, meaning “he who knows.”

The true shaman was both priest and healer and prophet. The essential prerequisite of the shaman was that he would have suffered a serious mental or physical illness or both, which would often be long and drawn out. As healing progressed, the shaman acquired the capacities for inspiration and healing and with recovery he came to understand the spirits and how to master them. He would also train and initiate assistants into the role of healer. Shamans can therefore be seen as people who have come through their own serious illness as a result of which they are stronger in themselves and more able to safeguard the souls of others, either into the next world or to heal them in this world. Michael Lerner has aptly called them “spiritual midwives.”

This then is the concept of the Wounded Healer. The idea is well researched, documented and understood within the traditional fields of medical and pastoral care. But I believe that the Wounded Healer holds a much wider significance for us all within the healing needs of the whole world.

So why the spring flowers photo? Simply to give some cheer on this gloomy foggy frosty winter morning, when the last remnant of our unseasonably early snow is still lying around on the grass and the roads. Oh for spring!




Copyright Eleanor Stoneham 2010

Community - Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century

I came in from the garden the other morning in time to hear the last few intriguing minutes of a discussion on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. Host Jenni Murray and her guests were talking about gated roads and the importance of belonging to community and the current fear culture that seems so prevalent in our neighbourhoods.

On following up the programme on the Radio 4 website I found one of the guests to be Anna Minton, and discovered that she has written a book around this theme, Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city (Paperback Penguin Books - 25 Jun 2009)

This attracted my attention as a subject dear to my own heart.

If we sense that our boundaries are being threatened, it is a natural human reaction to feel insecure or suspicious. We are afraid that our identities may be lost. Fear can breed violence and aggression, which then becomes a real obstacle to any attempts at community building. And this applies as much to the inclusive faith group or the national culture as it does on the faceless and impersonal track housing or housing estate we have created, or in the inner cities.

When barriers are in any way dissolved, it is important to ensure that individual and group identities continue to be preserved and respected in their overall unity. The one great melting pot that we dreamed of in the “swinging sixties” where all differences would be watered down and identities lost will never work. And why should we want to bring all colors and cultures and faiths and backgrounds into one homogeneous mush anyway? We have to learn to celebrate all our differences of faith and creed and culture in a spirit of respect and understanding and indeed joy. Judaism has a set of principles known as Darkhei Shalom, meaning “how to live graciously with people whose beliefs and way of life are incompatible (with the Jewish faith). Despite profound differences, we must engage in common citizenship, contributing to the welfare of other communities as well as our own,” writes Jonathan Sacks in To Heal a Fractured World.

This needs real community. It needs community at all levels, local, national and international, if we are all to learn to live together in perfect harmony. “Beware above all of everything that isolates, that refuses to accept and that divides,” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin warns. “Each along your own line, let your thought and action be ‘universal’ which is to say ‘total’. And tomorrow may be you will find to your surprise that all opposition has disappeared and you can love one another.” (Activation of Energy 1970 p.95)

We should perhaps remember that most of the war and conflict in the world today is defensive rather than aggressive. Much of the violence and pain we see around us has been interpreted in the context of Teilhard’s theories, as being the result of our failures to adapt and evolve alongside the move we have so rapidly made towards global convergence. This suffering has been likened to the pathological birth pangs of a new world order, a world in need of healing. Man has to learn, he says, not to give up security, which is psychologically impossible, but to trade in the old security of fences, boundaries, guns and bombs, for the new security of openness and trust in bonds of relationship, mutual support, brotherhood and love. And that means real community.

Of course the worth or otherwise of a visionary’s words can only be tested by the passage of time, but Teilhard’s visions seem to be attracting ever more followers as we struggle to understand our seemingly precarious future in this twenty first century.

Bonds of mutual support, brotherhood and love seem far removed from the gated private roads, the houses surrounded by overtly secure and impenetrable security gates, the intercom devices to gain entry. Such exclusiveness continues to isolate and divide. I believe strongly that it is misguided and harmful to achieving any real community. It removes us from being a part of the spirit and soul of a place.

We have the first responsibility to make change in our societies and communities. Governments with their laws and regulations can only provide the supportive framework within which we make these changes. Governments can fight the injustices of low minimum wages, non-existent healthcare for so many, lack of security in sickness and retirement, and the huge divide between the richest and the poorest of our society. They can make the tax codes which support the status of marriage and family, that either help parents stay at home with children or force them back into the workplace.

But most of all I believe we need spiritual politicians who are compassionate, indeed empathic to the needs of the populace. In fact we need spirituality, compassion, empathy, and good old-fashioned moral responsibility all round. And we need changes of heart and mind in us all.

And the picture? It is of the Chestnut Festival in the Nun's Valley in Madeira - during a tremendous rain storm which threatened to totally close down the event. But community spirit and neighbourliness prevailed against all the odds!