FāVS News News and Commentary about Religion and Ethics in Eastern Washington and North Idaho
This question comes on a day when the U.S. faces its deadliest school shooting since the Newtown massacre:
What does healing look like to you?
Thomas Schmidt: Three areas of healing
Briefly, healing to me involves the use of substances, behaviors and thoughts by an individual and others, to achieve results in at least three areas. Those areas are: achieving a resumption of the body and mind in homeostasis, the learning by an individual or group how to better maintain the homeostasis, and the reconciling of these two healings with the world’s, the group’s, society’s, etc. need for a just homeostasis.
Deb Conklin: Healing is the restoration
Healing in its most inclusive sense would be the restoration of Shalom: Returning all of creation to right relationship with itself and among all its parts. Healing will look different for different beings and different situations.
Nick Damascus: Taking charge
Healing can be said to be self-induced suffering and a denial of the passions of this world. Through abstinence comes strength of will and through the strength of will comes the ability to take charge and transform one’s life from the dictates and expectations of others and the influences of this world.
Thomas Schmidt is a retired psychotherapist and chemical dependency counselor who belongs to the Sufi Ruhiniat International order of Sufi’s and is a drummer in the Spokane Sufi group and an elder at the Country Homes Christian (Disciples of Christ) Church. He is a member of the Westar Institute (The Jesus Seminar people). He studied for the ministry in the late 1950’s at Texas Christian Church and twice married Janet Fowler, a member of a long tern TCU family and a Disciple minister. He was active in the Civil Rights Movement, studying philosophy at Columbia University and psychology in the University of North Carolina university system. He has taught philosophy and psychology, and was professionally active in Florida, North Carolina, and, for 25 years in Spokane. He has studied and practiced Siddha Yoga, Zen Buddhism and, since the mid 1970’s, Sufism and the Dances of Universal Peace. He has three sons and three grandchildren. With the death of his wife, Janet, he is continuing their concentration on human rights, ecology, and ecumenical and interfaith reconciliation.
