Planting the seeds of healing.
What would healing look like?
When we had arrived in Accra, we were surprised to learn that Brother Tetteh would not agree to conduct the marriage ceremony until both of us had answered two questions. We had to return the very next day with our responses, and without discussing it with each other. In the wake of our experience at Elmina, the power of questions was a theme that returned to us again.
The Power of a Question
Brother Ishmael Tetteh’s Questions:
1) What must your marriage be known for?
2) What will it mean for your family, your community and the planet?
We had returned and answered Brother Tetteh’s questions in the ways most true to our heart. Our answers became part of our vows, part of what we promised to each other and the world. As the tears flowed in Elmina, remembering the questions again helped focus the grief AND the love. And a third question emerged through Dedan.
“Belvie: It was a profound question. But I must say, being in the midst of tears, anger and the wound, my first attitude was annoyance—'Healing? I’m not even in that universe!’ To be honest, initially the question was jarring and interrupted the space I was in. But! What’s important about that interruption is that the seed was planted. ‘What would healing look like?’ His question planted a seed.
Yes, we have to be in the wound, be there, feel and go through the range of our emotions, but we don’t need to stay there; that’s not where we need to live. Embracing the heartache and the tears and the sadness, despair and rage, Dedan’s question was from the depth of his soul to the depth of mine, as he gently held my hand and asked me to look at him. In order to see him, I had to wipe the tears. I also felt all the love that he had and that we shared was embodied in that question, What would healing look like?
The next morning, I got out of bed because I remembered something that the African elders had said to us, ‘When you come out of the slave dungeons, you need to perform a cleansing ritual. You must go to the nearest running water (if possible) and ceremonially wash your feet because you don’t want to walk with all that sorrow.’ When I remembered that, I went down to the beach for a ritual washing of my feet.”
And then a vision began to emerge, first with the refrain of a poem…
What Would Healing Look Like?
(Excerpt from The Power of Love by Fran Grace, Inner Pathway 2019)
“Dedan: I’ll say again that the formative context is vitally important. Also, we were on our honeymoon! My wife was crying all day and all night. I wanted to know—partially out of frustration and partially out of something deep within me wanting to know if we could ever heal these horrible wounds left upon our souls—it was in the depth of that despair and grief that the question arose:
What would healing look like?”
“In contemplative practice of any kind, questions provoke inquiry, reflections and conscious awareness of what we are learning or what is being revealed to us about our current inner and outer work.”
– Angeles Arrien (from Living in Gratitude)
“Torture” by Alice Walker
“When they torture your mother
plant a tree
When they torture your father
plant a tree”
(excerpt)