Lateral Healing Part II: After the Heal the World Summit

To the ones who come after, 

We are within reach of each other. That is the whole problem and the whole hope.  

I am writing to you from the other side of a week I am still learning how to hold. One hundred and thirty-five people came from all over this country, carrying twelve different first languages. Among us were young children and elders, the connecting generations in between, and we gathered on the ancestral lands of the Washoe people at Zephyr Point for Auburn’s annual Heal the World Summit.  

Calling on our ancestors, few of whom would have ever crossed paths as we did this last week, we imagined how we might heal together. I want you to know that we tried, that we made an attempt to heal wounds we may not even know how to name.  

I keep returning to lateral healing. So much of what wounds us travels sideways, neighbor to neighbor. We pass the hurt on to the people closest to us because they are within reach. I came to this summit asking: how do we care for those who are not our own? Not our kin, not our tribe, not our language, not our theology—whose ancestors are different, who perhaps might have harmed or healed others, those who created or dismantled systems that damage all of us. How do we turn toward strangers and refuse to look away?  

The answer I am betting my life on is love, through lateral healing. The same sideways closeness that lets us harm one another is the closeness that lets us mend.  

I will not write you a tidy letter. On one day, we had three labs running, each of them offered by Indigenous relatives, gifts laid down with such care. We hosted healing circles. We passed the mic to everyone, writing letters to the future like this one. And that love was both given and received imperfectly. For some, healing took place. For others, the distance between the pain of our ancestors and our longing for our descendants was too far for a week.  

I am not telling you this as a failure. I am telling you because listening is harder than we admit, and being present is a discipline and practice that is much harder today than ever before. Generational violence and technology drive us apart. Division is the devil’s business plan. To stay in the room, to let a stranger’s grief land in your own chest, to receive a gift offered in a language that is not yours, requires care, patience, and a love so few of us have ever received in our lifetime.  

We need more opportunities to practice. And practice means people will fall short, including me. We hope that you are the beneficiaries of the practice of love we seeded here this year. Healing cannot happen in a week. I knew that walking in and I know it more surely walking out. A week is not enough to undo what generations built, but I do not think a week is nothing either.  

I hope the soil was turned over a little. I hope the ground in each heart was loosened just enough that something could take root later, after the return home, in the ordinary days when the work happens. I hope we prepared the soil for something still possible, something with room in it for our many ancestors and for a shared future none of us can build alone. 

Nobody gets there alone— not to a healed future. Not one where we care for each other’s children and elders. If you are reading this, then some seed we could barely see took hold. Tend it. Turn toward the ones who are not your own and say they belong to you, and that you love them.  

Finally, if you are a descendant of or took part in our Heal the World Summit, thank you. I am filled with gratitude for the shared hope and love. As our grounding leader, Dr. Lisa Asedillo, led with her parents, Doug and Rebecca, she reminded us of James Baldwin’s words: “Love has never been a popular movement and no one has ever really wanted to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and passion of very few people.” You are holding the world together with your love, whether you know it or not.  

A Prayer for Love 

Creator, keeper of every language and every land, 

Teach us to care for those who are not our own. When a stranger's grief turns toward us, do not let us look away. When a gift is offered in a tongue we do not speak, open our ears anyway. When the circle is held out, give us courage not to step back. 

We confess how hard it is to listen, how often we cannot speak, how easily we stay outside the room. Be patient with us. 

We know healing does not come quickly. So soften the soil. Loosen the ground in every heart just enough that something might take root later, in the ordinary days where the real work waits. 

Make of us a people who heal sideways, the same closeness that once carried our wounds now carrying our mending. 

Hold our ancestors and our shared future in the same wide hand, and remind us that no one becomes a constellation alone. 

Amen. 

With the good seeds of love planted in hard ground, 

Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Dean