So, back to this question I asked, what is the faithful response to people who enter our sanctuary having already experienced harm? It’s both simple, and complicated. It’s to love them unconditionally, and to reassure them that even though you may not be walking in that dark valley with them – God is. Unconditional love looks like letting survivors feel their grief, anger, sadness and pain, not making your love conditional to a good mood, or a presentable public face. Unconditional love looks like giving survivors the agency to find their own meaning about what happened to them, not making your love conditional on listening to your good advice.

It’s like a creation reboot in miniature, starting behind those locked doors, moving out into the world.  Except the wounds of history don’t just go away.  They’re all still there.  The hands and the side and the fear and grief.  More like a reimagination of the human story mid-stride.  A daring proposal that homo sapien, clever human, could become homo pacificus, peaceful human.

“…Both of these practices remind us that transformation is rarely about starting from scratch. It is about what happens when what already exists is taken up, worked through, and reshaped over time. I’ve named them as “cycles of transformation,” but in reality there is a kind of spiraling movement to it. Things return, but not in exactly the same way. They come back changed, deepened, made into something that can sustain life in new ways…”

On the journey to Emmaus there are no earthquakes.  There are no dazzling clothes like lightning.  And there are no descending angels giving a public service announcement about a startling divine rupture in the fabric of the universe.  But there is an earth-shattering change in consciousness, mediated through the most ordinary of encounters.