May is Mental Health Awareness month.
On this Day 2, I choose the word “field.”
In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis stressed the interconnection of all things:
we are all children of the same Mother and Father and we all share a common home.
“Field” is the awareness that, in this common home,
that we have shared for countless generations,
change happens constantly as blessings and curses continue to co-exist and affect dynamics that bind us all.
What we receive with awareness and gratitude, we grow through and pass on as blessing to another.
What we are unable to bear;
all peoples we exclude from our lives;
terrible violence committed with no atonement or penance;
continues to seek resolution across generations.
History seems to repeat itself —
as suffering seeks meaning in the here-and-now, from across time.
Indeed, as Pope Francis stressed,
“time is greater than space” and the effects of countless instances of harm in time accumulate as stubborn structures of sin.
It is the greater Love we have witnessed,
the trust we live by,
that makes us hope that the deeper the sin,
the more powerful the expression of Love that can transmute it.
We often lament about the state of the “other” or even the “world.”
In reality the world begins with the state of “my field” that I take with me in all my daily encounters.
I am my field—my field is me, or my lot of responsibility in this common home.
And nothing that lies buried in my field can be hidden forever.
My personal field is the “soul” space where I not only breathe, but I am called to grow to contribute to collective healing and to peace in the world.
It is not about expecting the other to change.
It is about how I change—even if in the deepest recesses of my soul.
For what is buried within is always and inevitably reflected without.
What in my own life continues to leave me restless?
Which relationships in my life shattered and can be repaired?
How can my soul break chains and grow in freedom?
The therapeutic process is about co-creating a shared field — for a short time — that is a “hospital after battle.”
There, multiple vicissitudes of life are let go of, are buried with dignity, are healed to prepare for new life.
In our co-created “field” all transformation is witnessed, so we can be renewed and bear much fruit in the power of Love.
