Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Restorative Justice and Wounded Healers

The story about the Amy Biehl Foundation's work on healing and forgiveness is evidence that without dialogue there can be no healing and restoration. The courage to dialogue with "the enemy" when tears and pain from loss and woundedness scream at you to stop, gives birth to new life and new beginnings. The opposite is also true: when pain and memory prevent us from entering into safe and uncomfortable spaces, the intentions of the offender come out victorious and you remain a victim. So, for me the question is how we can walk alongside and support the offenders and victims so that they can risk becoming vulnerable again, but this time for the sake of planting new seeds of hope for a better world. In that sense we all become wounded healers, as Henry Nouwen says. Thank you, Marianne Thamm for this article in The Daily Maverick.


Seventeen years ago on 28 July 1998, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission granted amnesty to four young men who had been sentenced to jail terms for...
dailymaverick.co.za

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