ALTHOUGH THE NEW YEAR BEGINS ON AN ARBITRARILY CHOSEN DAY IN TIME, the possibility for renewal a new year offers is both real and important. A new beginning is always a good time to begin to heal.
Healing, however, is not the same as curing. Where curing an illness is a bio-medical procedure, healing is a soul-process that brings spiritual and material powers to bear in the hope of relieving dis-ease. Sometimes curing and healing occur together, but not every time or in every case.
The goal of healing is to restore a distressed soul to a healthy state of dynamic balance and peace (to a state of ease). Dis-ease alienates you, not only in relation to the social world, but also in relation to the inner world. Outer isolation and inner dissociation go together, one typically causing the other. Healing is what opens you up again to a renewed sense of meaning in life, to reconciliation with others, to greater inner integration of the personality, and to greater wholeness.
Now, more than at almost any other time in our national history, we need the healing and rebirth a new year promises. The soul of our nation (the U.S.) is suffering a level of dis-ease it hasn’t experienced in more than 150 years. At the same time, too many people are experiencing soul distress in their individual lives.
The nation is divided to the point of dissociation. The split is not only political and cultural, but also psychological and existential, by which I mean different people now perceive reality in such radically different ways that it’s getting harder and harder to find any common ground. Some groups fiercely resist change, while others aggressively push for social transformation. Almost everyone fears they’d suffer a great loss were the “other side” to get its way. Meanwhile, there’s a pandemic that won’t go away and won’t let us live our “normal” lives.
The pandemic pushes each of us into even greater distress than the national dis-ease does on its own. Exposure to the virus, and fear of exposure, adds physical isolation to feelings of social isolation. Our individual levels of anxiety and distrust of “the other” increase as we try to cope with an inescapable increase in social diversity that inevitably brings instability and unstoppable social change that is either moving much too fast or not nearly fast enough.
At this point, we should all be hearing echoes of Jackie DeShannon singing the Bacharach-David classic “What the World Needs Now Is Love” — because love is the key to healing. We need both to love more and to feel more love. As love expands, our circles of trust also grow. Increasing love and trust nurtures a greater and greater sense of unity in a meaningful world in which you feel you truly belong.
If you look just a little beyond the surface in each of the world’s great spiritual traditions, you’ll find each, in one way or another, is teaching the path of love. Not a sentimental or an erotic love, but the committed, “godly” love of others that Christians have always named agape. This love is the power that heals. This love is what we need now, individually, as a nation, and for the world.
Thank you for reading my blog. If you enjoyed this post or found it insightful, please share it with your friends. And feel free to invite them to follow the blog, too. Oh, and while you’re at it, why not check out my book, Moonlight Shines in the Darkness, a Jungian study of Jesus and the feminine in the Gospel of John.
Soul Spirit Wisdom 