Love and Healing: The Spirituality of Counselling and Care.
“I have come to bring fire to the earth and how I wish it were blazing already!” (St. Luke 12:49)
All of us, in some mysterious way, long for completion.
“Only Love
Can bring individual beings
To their perfect completion as individuals
By uniting them one with another.” DeChardin.
This LOVE can be both ecstatically joyful and excruciatingly painful. It is hugely demanding. It has moral and cosmic implications. It comes as GIFT and calls us strongly to the SPIRITUAL:
“Life and Peace can only come with concern for the Spiritual” (Romans 8:7)
The Spiritual Journey itself uncovers the pain. It has been described as:
“A series of humiliations of the false self so that what prevents us from being available to God is gradually evacuated”
(Abbot Thomas Keating OCSO)
It is this “evacuation” that is the process of Psychotherapy/Counselling and Pastoral Care.
These three Plenary Sessions will be interactive meditative considerations on the tenderness, compassion and spiritual empathy required in our responses from the interior depth of self to those who invite us to accompany them in their search for healing, for communion with their own inner light.
The Counsellor or Pastor and those who seek help from them are haunted by a ‘Ghost’ that constantly calls for attention. This often-ignored ‘Ghost’ creates in us an infinite thirst for Presence, Real Presence in each moment of our lives. If we are open, we are drawn into a depth experience where fleeting glimpses of brilliant light that is both embodied and more than body tantalizes us.
Jim O’Donoghue
