Two stories about different kinds of healing

National Public Radio carried two interesting stories on healing today, but the stories covered very different forms and processes of healing.

One story covered how three sisters in Western North Carolina, part of Appalachia, are dealing with carrying a rare genetic mutation tied to Alzheimer's. My heart goes out to these women because they have hard stories and are doing what they can to learn about Alzheimer's and help others and because they come from my demographic. I understand what they're saying and how they're reasoning, though I cannot touch their situation. I get what one of the women is expressing when she says

The next morning I was wallowing in self-pity and what I'm going to miss. I'm going to miss birthdays, and my grandchildren won't know me, you know, as a healthy person. But then on the front porch in the mountains of western North Carolina, I'm rocking, and there's this single cloud in this Carolina blue sky, as we like to say. And I was praying for him to take my worries away. And I'm sitting there rocking, and the single cloud thins and thins and thins, and then, poof, it's gone, and with it, my worries.

And I get what is meant when another of the sisters says

I say it's like the Kennedy compound, except redneck. Some of the houses have wheels on them. But anyway, my dream is to have both of my sisters there in that little house...

and another responds with

The good thing is, we would be surrounded by family and people that have known us since we were children. And so if we walked away, somebody would find us, help us find our way back home.

The story is less about being healed of or surviving Alzheimer's and more about human connection and hope as the means of healing, or connection and hope being the healing that we can get when there are no other remedies.

Please listen to the story and interview here.

The second story falls differently. The filmmaker Edward Buckles, Jr. went through Hurricane Katrina when he was thirteen years old. Now here he is with a documentary film, Katrina Babies, that takes up the on-going and unfinished healing still going on after seventeen years after Katrina did so much damage to New Orleans and the region. I believe that the United States has never been the same since, and some of the people who Mr. Buckles interviews make a similar point and do so with more eloquence than I can.

Here is the official trailer from HBO:

The healing here is connected to social justice and all of us taking a hard look at what the United States has become and is becoming.

Listen to the story here, please.

Perhaps the healing here starts with Mr. Buckles saying "This film is not going to heal everybody. This film has not healed me. But it has opened up a door for me to figure out, "Okay, what does that journey to healing look like?" Because we are not just healing from Hurricane Katrina, we are healing from everything else that we have experienced before the storm and after the storm. And I just want us to know that we can start that journey." Or perhaps it starts with mourning when Mr. Buckles speaks a hard truth by saying "The New Orleans that was filled with families, the New Orleans, where all you really saw was Black people. We were in our neighborhoods, and we owned our neighborhoods, and we took pride in our neighborhoods. I just want people to know that when they're coming through to New Orleans and when they are experiencing all of this great culture and all of this great magic and beauty, that it comes from us. It comes from all of the people who were here before the storm, some of us who are still there after the storm. That's what I want people to know, is that everything that you love about New Orleans comes from us."

There is something universal in something that Mr. Buckles says in the interview. He says "I proposed this idea in the film of the double-edged sword of Black resilience. Yes, we are resilient. Yes, we take pride in our strength. But on the other side of that, is us being viewed as not needing the same help that other people need, because of the fact that we are so strong and we are so resilient. I think that people will like to look at them, 'Oh they're good, they're bouncing back. New Orleans is rebuilt. New Orleans is coming back. They don't need anything. Look at that.'"

What is universal here, or what should be universal, is something that connects New Orleans to Appalachia and that reaches from place to place and across peoples. This talk of "resiliency" and not needing help comes up more often these days. We hear it in Eastern Kentucky now as people try to recover from the floods that took thirty-six lives just a few weeks ago. We hear it from and about Black people as racist wave after racist wave becomes another kind of flooding. And Mr. Buckles is exactly right: this is a double-edged sword because, while there is a truth there, it also sends a message that help isn't needed or deserved. It becomes a way of rejecting government and struggles for social change and of introducing libertarian ideas that will quickly become a Grade B version of survival of the fittest. The "country folks can survive" slogan comes back with the extra meaning that "city people" are a problem, sometimes implying people of color. You will hear similar ideas in hip-hop and rap, but blaming someone else. And here we are in another civil war.

The peoples of New Orleans and Appalachia have more in common than they don't. I'm sure that most working-class people in New Orleans, or those who were forced to leave their city, can fully identify with the desire to have family together in a house and to be "surrounded by family and people that have known us since we were children." Large numbers of people in Appalachia know that they live in "America's internal colony" and should be able to understand something of the experience of the Black Belt South and of being forgotten by those in power. Justice will be to make sure that housing, family, and control over one's circumstances happens, and not to leave housing and family and order up to luck and fate and to who has a gun or a gun and a badge.

I don't believe that we can put preconditions on healing. I know that some folks resist healing or have forgotten how or why it's needed. I have come to believe that we can say in love and solidarity with one another "We don't care if you want it or not or deserve it or not, but we're going to do some healing on you!"

From Central Appalachia a few weeks ago

    

And a closing quote:

"You have the healing touch, even if you may not realize it. It is not a supernatural gift, but a common gift, one given to us all. We are born to be healers, along with other vocations, to help us navigate this world as vulnerable beings. We have the power to hear one another, to communicate, to empathize. We have the ability to care, to understand and to forgive. We have humor in abundance and comfort to share. We can change a heart with only a smile. We can offer peace and shelter to any in need. You are one of us, the healers of the Spirit."

The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston