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  A Rocky Road

By Dr. Jaime Romo
Healing and Spirituality
July 13, 2010

http://www.jaimeromo.com/blog/

I'm back, after a leave of presence. I just returned from visit to Maui, where I had been almost 25 years ago. This time, I went with my family. While we enjoyed many beautiful experiences of floating with brilliant fish and tranquil turtles, and hiking through enchanting bamboo forest, it was also an important time to step back and rejuvenate from the work of promoting healing and ending abuse everywhere.

A couple of things strike me about the contrast of time. 25 years ago, I was beginning my teaching career, having just left the seminary. Today, I have left the university career to promote healing and end abuse everywhere for the rest of my life—at least the next 25 years. Back then, I was oblivious to my own abuse experience. Now, the world seems to be moving out of global denial of a problem, making it possible to end it.

One aspect of my trip reminded me of advocacy work; it was the drive from Hana back to the west coast via the south side of the island. If you've driven this before, you will appreciate immediately the challenges of ten miles of unpaved roller coaster roads with hair pin turns, cows in the middle of a narrow road around blind corners, a 1 ? lane road shrinking to one lane over narrow bridges, and did I mention hair pin turns. I was concerned that the car would break apart on this road. My family members were alternatively terrified and awed by the scenery that sometimes looked like another planet.

That's kind of like what this path to promote healing and end abuse is like, particularly in a culture of denial or protection of religious authority sexual abusers. The road is unpaved and there is nothing easy about it. And there's a cost to walk this road, not knowing if we can manage this terrain, if we can withstand the difficulty, the emotional and psychological strain involved, the secondary trauma that many survivor supporters experience.

On the other hand, there are some amazing aspects that come from traveling this terrain. I've been privileged to meet groundbreakers like Jeff Anderson, whistleblowers, and those who promote survivors' healing (like the speakers at the upcoming SNAP conference). I have met people with profoundly traumatizing experiences who have also opened themselves to profound levels of their own spiritual development and consciousness raising. I'm honored to be among them.

A few words from 'Letter to a Young Activist' by Thomas Merton speak to me:

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the truth of the work itself. And there, too, a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually as you struggle less and less for an idea, and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything….

The next step in the process is for you to see that your even thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come, not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it."

Eventually the road from Hana connected with a better, wider one, and the car stopped overheating. Eventually we got back to our more comfortable lodging. Even when I experience the frustration of waiting for the documents promised through legal 'settlements' to be released, I know that they will come forward. When I question the wisdom or feasibility of continuing in this path, I know that I and others make the road smoother and clearer for others to join in their own journey to promote healing and end abuse. Take care of you. The rough roads will be made smooth by your work.

 
 

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