Category: Communion
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Saving My Neighbor – Just How Connected Are We?
If you are in the “helping professions,” confronting problems in people’s lives, it doesn’t take long to realize that no one is purely and simply an individual. The problems we suffer may occasionally appear to be “of our own making,” but that is the exception rather than the rule. Whether we are thinking of economic…
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The Community We All Need
I once read that the Russian instinct, when under pressure, was to gather with other people, while the American instinct was to flee. Thus, the Russian landscape was marked by villages, while America was marked with isolated homesteads. My Russian knowledge is just hearsay, but I know that Americans like to homestead and to be…
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The Loneliness of Shame
…shame thoughts are quintessentially alone thoughts. They are produced by the felt impossibility of communion, and they produce realities that have no primary communion in them. Patricia DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame +++ What does it mean to be lonely? We could pool our collective experience and quickly generate our own Wikipedia entry…
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The Sins of Our Fathers – the Epigenetics of Shame
There is a new word and a new idea in science: epigenetics. It is the study of how the environment and experience alters our body – and alters it in a way such that it becomes part of our genetic legacy. It is, to the mind of some, a genetic form of inherited sin. That’s…
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The Healthy Shame at the Heart’s Core
Imagine: A large crowd has assembled and you know that something special has been planned. Unknown to you, however, is the fact that the something special is for and about you. At a given moment, you are called forward. A short speech detailing some extraordinary thing you have done is given. You had not thought anyone…
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Comfort for a Child – Speaking Peace to Shame
In my previous article, I described the origins of the “self-talk” (logismoi) that haunt our minds with negative chatter. They lie very deep within us, even having something of a signature within the deeper parts of the brain itself. It is very “old” and yet very “young.” It is old in that its foundations were…
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The Fiction of Relationships and the Fullness of Life
It is very interesting that we use the word “relationship” to describe everything from God to our lifestyle. More interesting still, is that, used in this manner, the word dates back to only around the mid-20th century. There are older examples, but the psycho-social meaning that it carries today does not appear until around 1940.…
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A Deadly Communion
Habits are hard things to break. I quit smoking almost 30 years ago (cold turkey). It was more than difficult and came only after many failed attempts. But, in many ways, such a habit is among the easier to deal with. Far more difficult, and far more deadly, are the habitual patterns of human…
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Keeping Christmas
It is not unusual to give thought to how we keep a fast. Will it be in a strict manner? How will my fasting be possible when I’m at work or at school? How will I teach my children to fast? When we ignore the Fast, we feel guilty and the need to confess. It…
Matthew, in western art the painter is always present, the person in the picture is a creature of the painter.…