Rehabbing Abused Animals
A lifetime ago, I used to rehab abused pets. Cats who have been kicked, starved, or beaten, dogs neglected and abused, tanks of abandoned fish. I can’t help but feel like this prepared me for dealing with people as a priest: driving to someone’s house to take a cowering animal in a filthy cage or slowly moving fish between apartments in a pickle jar. Equally, taking custody of someone from a police officer who doesn’t want to haul them in; taking a toddler from a drunk, abusive mother; or hiding someone in an abusive relationship. The process for an abused animal or a hurt person is very alike.
It begins by getting bit, metaphorically or physically. You can’t avoid the teeth, which is an unfortunate truism when dealing with hurt people. Healing requires you to embrace the fact that there are going to be teeth. As a priest or spiritual worker, if you have any unhealed wounds, they’re almost always going to get hit. Because they are hurt people, many have learned to read people to survive, and they will find those unhealed wounds. You might not be able to avoid the teeth, but you can do your own healing so that when you do get bit, it doesn’t hit you somewhere vulnerable.
They need to bite. They need to know what happens if they do.
They will not bite just once, either. The biting—sniping, gossiping, threatening, physical violence, emotional violence—will continue until what motivates it is more healed. They need to keep testing, in part to comfort themselves. They may hate you more for a time if you don’t bite back because it is abnormal, and abnormal is terrifying. What characterizes a priest or spiritual worker’s connection with the divine, when they are within their jurisdiction (helping the people they are intended to help, in the way that is necessary), is the supernatural compassion necessary to tolerate the tendency of abused pets and people to chew without taking it too personally.
This is not to say it doesn’t hurt. This is to say that you don’t punish it so much as you shape a response that teaches whatever needs to be taught.
Slowly, as the priest or spiritual worker does the work that needs to be done, there’s less biting than questions, often questions the person finds truly painful. They begin to think differently, questioning their response and its target, questioning why things were the way they were in their history, questioning why things happen a certain way. They may indeed bite at this stage, but it has less blind ferocity as it is an expression of personal agony looking for an outlet.
A priest or spiritual worker is, when within their jurisdiction, a conduit for divinity: that is, in this case, a place where the painfully missing energies of a person’s life can be found. The love they did not get, the compassion they did not get, the understanding, empathy, every missing quality. And it is from that conduit that the hurt person drinks unwittingly. The priest or spiritual worker may not be conducting that current on purpose, either. The divine, the lwa, that entire cadre of energy, the discipline that a priest or spiritual worker engages in to clear that conduit, all allow the current to come as it needs to.
Slowly, the biting dies down to complaints, grumbling, and the occasional balking. A priest or spiritual worker is beloved for the scars their children leave, even the most minor serving to remind the child of something they could not get elsewhere, something they have not gotten before. And even as the child pushes back, it is in the knowledge that they have been given something they cannot rid the memory of.
The biting is a small price to pay.
