Healing the wounds of the nations : towards a common mission of the Churches !

In what ways can the Churches be or become healing agents for their people? The article argues that churches are communities of remembering. And as remembering centers around the Crucified, the "wounded" (H Nouwen), it becomes a re-membering energy, i.e. an energy that unites what has been dismembered. It is argued that one of the most destructive aspects of contemporary societies is the "winner-syndrome". By regarding human beings as "winners" and "losers" it sets in motion merciless struggles for the "top-position" which turn out to be processes of denial and exclusion and create a downward spiral of violence. The churches' ecumenical healing ministries should begin by dismantling the matrix of denial and violence in order to create a "matrix of connectedness" that is grounded in the basic woundedness of all human beings. The author participated in the Harare Assembly of the World Council of Churches (1998) and sees his reflections as a contribution to the "Decade to Overcome Violence" which is to begin 2001.


INTRODUCTION
"Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either The following is a slightly changed version of the James-Hair-Memorial-Lecture that I gave on March 2, 1999, in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2 Geiko Milller-Fahrenholz is a Lutheran theologian from Germany with a varied career in ecumenical work.In the seventies he worked for the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches; in the eighties he was Director of one of Germany's Protestant Academies before he went to Costa Rica, Central America to teach Ecumenical Theology and Ethics.He now lives in Bremen, Germany and works as an ecumenical consultant and freelance journalist with frequent teaching requests in many countries.
Among his recent publications is The Art of Forgiveness, Geneva 1997.His forthcoming book with the title The Kingdom and the Power is on the theology of Jiirgen Moltmann (SCMlFortress Press, 2000).

METAPHORS HAVE THEIR LIMITATIONS
We are here to reflect on the healing of our nations' wounds, and we are challenged to do so as members of different, and divided churches.Let's face it: This theme is quite a mouthful.What could we possibly say that will not sound exotically unrealistic or piously irrelevant?
The first thing to get some clarity about is the metaphoric character of the theme.
"Healing" the "wounds" of the "nations" -we are dealing here with three metaphors.
"Healing" and "wounds" are images from the world of medicine; they center around the body or the corporate self of persons.A person can suffer from a variety of wounds, some visible and outward and others invisible and hidden.And according to these various forms of impairment and damage a great variety of therapies has been developed.
The more the experts understand of the intricacies of our bodies and psychic dispositions the more reluctant they become to talk about "healing".Who would dare call himlherself a "healer"?For to be healed means to be whole, to be restored to our full integrity, to be in perfect harmony with all our gifts and energies.Looking at it this way, who would ever consider himlherself healed?At best we hope that the doctors will help us to maintain some functional integrity and to make the best of our age.
Further, to use the word "healing" in relation to the "wounds of nations" means to carry an image from the field of medicine over to the realm of politics and to equate a HTS 56(2&3) 2000 609 Digitised by the University of Pretoria, Library Services Healing the wounds of the nations large social institution with a "body", that is to suggest a corporateness and "bodiliness" that does not exist.What we call "nations" are social and historical constructs, composed of a great variety of ethnic entities, clans and other groupings, each with their particular traditions, customs, and cultures.We are well advised to underline the open-endedness and fluidity in our understanding of "nations", firstly because nobody really knows what a "nation" is except in the constitutional sense of statehood, and secondly because we are getting very quickly very close to fascist ideas once we regard the "nation" as a "body" within which each citizen has to understand him/herself as a tiny cell. 3 So much about the risks and limitations of the images of our theme.But having said that we must also add that it is possible, and indeed necessary, of talking about "wounds" in our nations' lives.It is a metaphoric way to refer to manifest conflicts that tear nations apart, such as civil wars, gross economic disparities, territorial divisions etcetera.It is also a way of speaking about more obscure crises such as racism, xenophobia, or corruption.But then it is also necessary to see the hidden wounds that refer to severe irritation and confusion with regard to our very identity as nations.And it is with these hidden "wounds" that I want to concern myself.

WHAT ABOUT CHURCHES AS HEALING AGENTS?
The subtheme suggests that our churches should be moving towards a common healing mission.Is this not an assumption to be regarded with profound scepticism?Are we not all victims and witnesses of churches that have been great dividers or at least that have organized themselves along ethnic divides, social or cultural borderlines?It would be foolish to deny this grim reality.
At the same time it is true to say that, throughout history, the churches have exercised healing ministries of various sorts.They were the first in Europe to look after the sick and outcast.Some of them have been forceful agents in the fight against slavery and other forms of discrimination, but many were reluctant.A few of them have risked their very existence in the pursuit of a peaceful and non-violent life, but the majority has condoned wars for too long.
3 Hundred years ago, the French Ernest Renan said: "Une nation est donc une grande solidarite, constituee par le sentiment des sacrifices qU'on a faits et de ceux qu'on est dispose a faire encore" (1882).

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Geiko Miiller-Fahrenholtz
The ecumenical movement of this century owes a considerable part of its momentum to this commitment to healing.We might well refer to efforts of healing in mission work; we can refer to pacifist and peace-making initiatives that would be inconceivable without committed ecumenical intervention.We have a significant record of solidarity work for churches and societies in economic and social distress, for refugees and displaced persons; we are beginning to wake up to our responsibility for the endangered earth herself.
But even so, there is this gaping wound that keeps our churches divided.We do not celebrate the eucharist, the Lord's Supper, together.The recent General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Harare provided yet another example of this bitter fact.
At a Sunday during the Assembly we were all shipped to four or five different churches in town to celebrate our different eucharists there.What does this say about our authority to present ourselves as healing agents to our peoples and nations?Are we not far too wounded to be able to heal?
And yet, at the very end of the Assembly, and on the stubborn insistence of a Mennonite delegate, it was decided to make the first ten years of the next millennium a "Decade to Overcome Violence".Hence both are there, the awareness of our brokenness and the commitment to some kind of healing ministry.

AT THE CENTER OF FAITH: THE CRUCIFIED CHRIST
He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised and we esteemed him not.Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows, yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
(Is 53:3-5, KJV) HTS 56(2&3) 2000 611 Digitised by the University of Pretoria, Library Services Healing the wounds of the naJions From the early days of Christianity these words about the unknown Suffering Servant have been understood to point to Jesus of Nazareth.Whenever and wherever we meet in order to open the Bible we remember the life and death, the cross and the resurrection of the One whom we believe to have carried our sorrows The mystery is that in Jesus the Christ we are confronted with a God who takes our iniquities upon Godself.Why is this?
The suffering God or, to use the title of JUrgen Moltmann's influential book, the Crucified God, is at the center of our faith.Difficult to put into words, only to be described in dialectical formulations, our faith centers on the revelation of a love so great that it takes into itself all our enmity and guilt, our violence and frustration, our sorrows and grief.It is the revelation of a love so almighty that it encompasses even death, even the death of the One who felt utterly forsaken.It is the love revealed in the prayer of the crucified: "Father, forgive, they do not know what they are doing." The river of life flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb is the power of redeeming love, the power of forgiveness.You see, the massive reality of guilt and grief is acknowledged; for the Son is crucified.But this guilt and grief is taken up within God; for the crucified is the resurrected one and sits at the right hand of God, to plead our cause.

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Geiko Miiller-Fahrenholtz
There is no denial of injustices and grievances; they are present in the stark reality of the Cross.And yet they are not used in order to fuel new injustices and grievances: the mechanism of retaliation is broken.Jesus does not step down from the cross in order to take revenge.With outstretched arms he endures the pain and anger, he takes upon himself the bitterness and alienation.In his cross the repetitive cycle of violence is suspended, is hanging in the air, as it were.His love consumes our violence.This is, in St John's incredible phrase, the "glory of the cross".This is why Bonhoeffer, in the agony of his death cell, confesses: "Only the suffering God can help us."

HEALING IN THE LIGHT OF WOUNDEDNESS
I said that Christian communities are communities of remembering.In our muddled and murky ways we are groping for the mystery, as I have just tried to do, of a God who knows our woundedness by heart.And because God is acquainted with our grief, familiar with our iniquities, embracing our god-forsakenness and godlessness, there is no reason anymore to hide this reality from ourselves.Let's face it!This is the way we are, haunted by anxiety and anger, driven by foolishness and fury, dead-locked in retaliation and revenge.This is the way we human beings are.In the mirror of God's forgiving love, let us face the truth about ourselves as human beings.(If it wasn't for this love we would be unable to face it; for we would have to hate ourselves too much!)As we draw close to the crucified God we remember our woundedness.
So, at the deepest level, we are communities of remembering our woundedness.call this "deep remembering", and that is for me the beginning of healing.
For if we were to admit the truth about our human condition there would be no need to hide behind the walls of self-righteousness.This would put an end to our tendencies to punish others for our own failures, to idolize our heroes and to satanize our enemies.To admit our common woundedness would help us to affirm our common humanity, and this deep awareness would enable us to see through, and to reach across, the borderlines and divisions with which we seek to maintain and stabilize our identities.
Yes, of course, we read (in Mt 9: 12) the words of Jesus: "It is not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick".We hear him call to himself all who are downtrodden and heavily laden, but we do not wish to realize that he is talking about us.We want to be HTS 56(2&3) 2000 613 Digitised by the University of Pretoria, Library Services Healing the wounds of the nations strong and healthy, we want to appear fully capable of handling our load ourselves.Our pretense is to be perfectly capable of managing our lives on our own.What do we need the crucified for?
If, however, as Christian communities, in our deep remembering, we would permit the Crucified to reveal the very nature of our lives, which is the fact that we do not know how to handle things, we would be led to offer to the world an alternative.In the light of the Christ we would discover the truth of the Beatitude that the "meek, or the humble and gentle, are the blessed ones who will inherit the earth".It is not the tough guys, the self-centered, the arrogant and brutal ones, who are able to run things.Their way of running the affairs of the world is a curse; for they wreak havoc on the earth.
There is nothing wrong with strong, energetic and committed people, but things go wrong when such strength is grounded on the pretense of invincibility and invulnerability.I think it is much better to affirm a kind of strength that is rooted in the awareness of our woundedness.
What would happen to our church communities if we were to approach our divisions with this awareness, that our presumed strength separates us whereas our shared woundedness would unite us?Would this not enable us to recognize ourselves, and our own troubles, in the other, across the divide?
This deep remembering challenges our accustomed ways of remembering.We have been brought up to remember our particular past, represented by our mothers and fathers and by all those who have nurtured us with their faith.Behind them are those whom we consider to be the venerated teachers and interpreters of our particular traditions.In many subtle ways they have shaped the ways in which we approach the formative centuries of the Christian faith and, lastly, the ways in which we read the Holy Scriptures.
These ways of selective remembering are shaped by our different traditions, and these are in turn reshaped and reinforced by our remembering.It is as if we in our traditions had drilled different wells to tap the life-giving waters in the depths of history.
And we seem to be quite convinced that the quality of water we are getting from our respective wells is much better than that others are drawing from theirs.

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Geiko Miiller-Fahrenholtz
This helps us to see the dark side of our selective remembering.For we do not only remember the great gifts of our fathers and mothers of the faith.We also keep in mind the traumatic events that occurred in our history.And we are mindful of who did that to us!As we are led to admire those who represent our particular tradition, we are also, often without realizing it, led to be doubtful, suspicious and at times even contemptible of the others.
Hence, we remember the light and the darkness of our past, the blessings and the hurts, the grace and the grievance that has brought us to be the kinds of communities we are.We prefer to remember when and where we have been hurt by the others and we tend to overlook the instances when and where we have offended and hurt the other.It is this unacknowledged dark side of our remembe~ng that keeps us apart from each other.
I have often felt that even after all the years in the ecumenical movement we have not yet begun to tell each other of these sinister and unredeemed memories.We have not yet begun to reveal to each other the lasting traumatic events, the hurting points in our past that keep nourishing our distrust.It is an admirable task to work through our various doctrinal differences and to come up with connecting formulae.But what have we achieved thus far?A convergence in the head, but no convergence of the heart.
Crystalclear is the water of the river of life that is flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, says the Book of Revelations.But murky are the waters that are flowing through the channels and pipes of our separated and divided traditions.They are murky not because we want it that way, but because our selective remembering obscures our vision.

OVERCOMING DENIAL: ALTERNATIVES TO THE "WIN-NER-SYNDROME"
The world is run by people, mostly men, who are out of touch with their innermost woundedness.The woundedness is there, of course, but it dare not and cannot be recognized as such.Therefore it must be denied.The images of greatness and power, of toughness and determination, are intricately connected with denial.This is a personal problem, it is a male problem, and it is a problem of entire nations.
. Christian communities are communities of remembering.Whom do they remember?The One who is acquainted with grief.What does this entail?It has often been said that we would come closer to each other if we got closer to Jesus.I am convinced that this is true, if not in the sense that Jesus is a historical figure in whom our different approaches converge.As we have seen from history, this historical figure can be interpreted in a thousand different ways.I believe that the connecting moment is reached when we enter into the mystery of why Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, the earthly image of the invisible ground of our being.
"All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way;and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter ... "(Is 53,   6f)