Life-enhancing principles such as engaging in the rhythms of nature through hospitality and community are ‘lived out’ in many cultures, including the Celtic approach to Christianity. Relational hospitality has a welcoming radiance that can strengthen the weary. It is a type of spirituality that is less about belief, and more about the wisdom of timing needed for growth. Timing is intuited, of course. And here timing becomes a clue, that there is a secret to be revealed…
Of course, every human being gets some things wrong, including timing, and letting their life be led astray by situations. That is why healing communities are needed for people to rest for a while, to realign or reshape their lives. New patterns of communicating take a while to learn, to test out and to open out. A renewed personal identity grows. In time, leaving such a healing community is the crowning moment leading to an individuated and socialised ‘I-thou’ life, where ‘I’ am a continuous state of process, reflection, and development. It happens when people feel secure within themselves enough to live as an exploratory ‘Me-You-Us’ (MYU) participator in and shaper of the local world.
Our secret healing community
Healing communities are not special. Many people do this in their own homes, offering hospitality to someone whose life is in a phase of turmoil. Sofa surfing is a hidden feature of life for many people. To equip hosts of these surfers with the sorts of communication skills and knowledge that promotes the growth of inner strength in others would enrich society. These life skills would help to re-humanise a world corrupted into isolated personal states that long nevertheless for growth into some sort of wholeness of life.
My wife and I took on this hospitality role for twenty years. We ran our home along these Celtic Christian lines offering a place where, during those years, over a hundred people made their attempts to rebuild life. We never advertised what we did. People heard by word of mouth. We might get a phone call, that’s all, and then the conversations would begin. Everyone is different. And… everyone becomes different in their inner renewal as they allow the light in.
It was through these encounters, and through sharing life together with those who stayed or considered staying, that we learnt more about light and darkness. We learnt, as I have said before in other posts, that evil intent cannot remain in the presence of the love of God. It flees when people who do not fear evil intent instead know or seek in their hearts a profound still love in the wholeness of the source of life, sufficiently for their thoughts to conform to that love (not the other way around, their love conforming to their thoughts).
The warlock by the moor
To seed that loving kindness, and the openness to life-enhancing renewal, is a fulfilment of what it means to be human. I can tell some stories of anonymised occasions when we learnt not to fear evil in order to seed growth. There was the six year old boy who appeared in a primary school without any socialised or eating skills, who lived with his father and younger sister in an isolated house across two fields on the edge of the moor. I bought a four-wheel drive car to get to know the father, who I then discovered was a warlock. I learnt much from him about how the magic circles think and behave. He had ascended to a prominent place of knowledge, but had discovered having reached ‘the top of the mountain’ that he did not know how to live, or to bring up his children. He wanted me to help him find the way down from the mountain, and in exchange he showed me how people went up. He explained to me, for example, their view of the copper dragon and healing, and the role of wood alongside earth, air, fire, and water. The mystery of Christ’s lifeblood staining the wooden cross and falling into the earth became clearer as the power that releases entrapped people into renewal, even resurrection, along with the water and the cry of his breath to forgive, because people do not understand what they are doing. At his invitation, I became that boy’s God-father. I started taking him to our community church fellowship to help him learn how to socialise, only partially successfully. The story goes on from there, but it is too long to tell.
Two other very relevant stories
We received a phone call one night from people in London who we didn’t personally know, but who had heard of us. They were providing a safe place for a young woman who had just left the Moonie cult. She was afraid she would be found, so we agreed that she could be brought out of London to our home the next day. Sacha stayed with us for nearly a year, during which time we learnt about the depths of brain washing that she had willingly participated in. It came hand in hand with the intensely close and reassuring experience of community living offered by the cult, reinforced by a given sense of purpose to life. However, moving on from the cult brought a restrictive reaction. Individuation was frowned upon, and worse, utterly crushed with a profoundly inculcated guilt. It was this disproportionate exaggeration of a healthy but unpleasant loss emotion that is the evil trickery. It distorts love’s potentially creative mode of grieving, which includes self-questioning prior to growth. This is the largely unknown inbuilt purpose of grieving – to explore how to grow stronger again through times of difficulty. The growth cycle taught in the Emotional Logic method activates this healthy exploration and adaptability by which people come through challenging times stronger. Without that growth cycle, the path to the restoration of love’s joy mode in life remains blocked. The evil intent of this cult is to exaggerate guilt as one phase of healthy grieving, and thus to assert power over another’s life to prevent genuine personal growth. It’s a trap.
Following another phone call, we discovered also that a High Court case was being raised against the Moonie cult to have its religious charitable status removed. Solicitors began to visit in secret from London regularly, because Sacha was one of only two cult members who were willing to testify against the cult. The case unfortunately collapsed when the other one committed suicide in a very public way, driven by guilt we presume. Sacha herself managed to build another life, but always missed the closeness of intense community, and struggled with guilty self-doubting when planning to do something of her own volition, sometimes bringing on asthma. She found a job, moved out, found a boyfriend, became engaged. The night before her wedding she had the most severe asthma attack and died.
We grieve, and learn, and move on wiser than before. Not all ways lead to God’s creative life.
The other story about learning to be wise about light and darkness followed a call from someone we knew, backed up by a second call a few days later from a psychologist friend confirming the truth and seriousness of the problem. A woman with a small baby had left a Satanic cult, who wanted to take the child for the sex industry. We hesitated, but the second call convinced us we should take them in secretly. A couple of weeks later, the same people separately called again to affirm that the police from another city needed to interview her. She was an important witness in a cult murder trial. She stayed for eight months, during which time the Home Office installed an alarm in case of intruders. The interview process was arduous for her, recalling events that made her vomit. In our home we had a ‘need to know only’ policy for our household conversations, so that we concentrated on where life was going to, not where she had come from. She was strong and intelligent, planning how to get away from the cult’s emotionally manipulative ways of making people return. She made it clear that she would do or say anything that would keep her child away from them. She was adept at raising support for herself to head for freedom when she felt she needed it. Along the way over those months we learnt a lot about how this particular cult thinks and works. Rather than magnifying guilty feelings out of proportion to situations, as the Moonies had done, they explicitly magnify fear out of proportion to reality, another loss emotion. They trigger people’s imaginations, looking to discover what horrifies them, and so gain power over them by feeding those fears that weaken or distract. But the loving kindness of Godly grace known deep in the inner heart overcomes that fear. And wisdom grows in those who listen to that call from the still depths in their hearts. Thus, heart before head, loving trust before belief, is the foundation on which resistance can stand. In time, anyone who seeks this wisdom can learn to recognise those manipulative methods that people of evil intent use to undermine others. And, when standing firmly on that loving grace, evil flees.
Hospitality invites freedom
Hospitality avoids becoming a cult because it allows people the freedom to come and go as they explore their paths to wholeness of life. People move on from hospitable settings to get a life. Hopefully, they will have been better equipped with the life skills needed to make wise creative choices and equitable relationships. Sometimes we had to encourage people to move on who had become too comfortable in the communal routines, who weren’t learning anything new, who were manipulating for their own comfort.
A positive outgrowth from those two decades of emotive experience is the formulation of Emotional Logic as a preventive and strengthening method of approaching life’s challenges. It empowers people to open a short mental ‘gap in time’ when emotive challenges arise, providing a reasonable alternative to just giving in to manipulative undermining or simply knee-jerk reacting. In this gap, a learned mental framework connects unpleasant loss emotions with pre-verbal intuitions that unveil the personal values being challenged in this situation. Personal honesty thus gathers around itself the energy that is unfolding as those unpleasant emotions. E-motion is energy in motion.
The Emotional Logic method is more dynamic than simply ‘staying with’ the experience of those emotions. Mindful engagement with emotional information turns into values-based action plans as an honest response to change or threat or risk. This creative gap in time fills with reason, emotion and intuition blending into a resilient partnership. Wisdom thus recognises evil intent, and more firmly individuated ‘I’ resists manipulations. Love is thus made known in both its joy and its grief modes to resist evil and endure, even while time may be needed for further growth as the situation evolves. Anyone can incorporate this approach into their way of living with others.
To discover and learn more about the mental framework and how to activate personal values, fifteen true stories of change have been brought together in this Emotional Logic book. The Emotional Logic Centre website ‘Events’ page explains how joining a Foundation Award course enables you to practice the method with others. For Personal Learning Appointments, email hello@emotionallogiccentre.org.
So this is the secret mentioned in the title of this post. The more people learn to activate this framework for resilience, the more an attitude of simple hospitality and welcome will be seeded into a lost and troubled society. This sort of secret growth of attitude everywhere would rehumanise society.
