Becoming Fully Human, Together

My school has this great ethos, in that they strive to "Educate to Counter Oppressions and Create Just and Sustainable Community." Feels like the heart of ministry to me!

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I think of the following quote from one of my professors as my rallying epiphany... a message that was already forming more solidly in my mind that he then gave words and clarity to when I first read this quote by the side of the Deschutes River in Oregon this Summer before heading to the Bay Area for seminary. It is quite a chewy paragraph, but if you are anything like me, then wrestling with it with pay off in resonances and revelations. I use it as a jumping-off point, because countering the phenomena that he describes is the passion which currently fuels my ministry.

"… Many of us are living as though our lives were someone else's occupied territories. We might not believe or accept certain things that are going on in the world around us, but we rarely challenge them for fear of the consequences for us and for those for whom we care. Much of the tensions, personal and communal, with which we live are, I believe, rooted in this colonization. Colonization, the forced imposing of a certain way of thinking, of being, of moving in the world, and the subtle and systematic removal of all that it perceives as a threat to its project, makes us doubt the value of our own work when it goes against the grain of the dominating paradigm. … colonization can even kill our spiritualities and poison our relationships. Its roots go so deeply that it is sometimes difficult for us to imagine that we can re-shape the discourse. Why? Fundamentally, because hegemony is the power of the dominating discourse to convince everyone that the interests of the few in power REALLY are the interests of all. Brute force need not be used to attain this goal, nor even blatant efforts to sway public opinion. It goes on through the economy, through billboards and TV programmes, through curricula in schools; it unfolds itself in ways that lead us to believe that the desires of the discursive regime are INDEED OURS. Thus, they come to be taken for granted. Hegemony is important because the capacity to influence the thought of the colonized is by far the most sustained and potent operation of the dominating discourse. This leads to the fragmentation and compartmentalization of our lives. And it goes on every day in countless ways."
-Prof. Dr. Ibrahim Farajaje', acknowledging also the works of Frantz Fanon and Teresa Cordova

The cures of this disease are at the heart of my ministerial call. As I have professed for years on my freelance ministry web site www.soulemergence.info:

My purpose through Soul Emergence is:

1. To enliven people by nurturing the rediscovery and celebration of their own powerful Wholeness.

2. To create space for people to spiritually unfold, discover and celebrate the Power of Love and essential Oneness in beloved community.

I believe in some sense that these notions, though not always the presenting issue, may be part of all that is at the heart of pastoral care.

Sometimes we have an awful lot of layers of emotion and behavior related to our social locations to slog through before we can uncover any sort of "pure" relationship to the essential experience of some powerful event like the loss of a loved one. Most of us are not wading in the waters of pure experience, but rather in the mud up to our ankles, if not deeper. How do we both get cleaner and also benefit from the mess? How do we get clear enough to know who we are, and empowered enough to bring those selves forward?