Ben Ralston

3 steps to profound healing (broken heart, bones, spirit)

I bleed. 
My heart bleeds out into the lonely night, and only the yearning for daylight; only the memory of a better day gives me hope…
Do you know what I mean? I know you do.
At least on some level, you do.

I’m a healer. I work as a therapist, I counsel people, and I heal their wounds (mostly emotional, but also physical). I didn’t ever desire to do this. I wanted to do many things, but never this…

When it came on me though, I knew it was my calling.
Healing is the simplest, most natural thing in the world. There are just 3 simple steps that you have to take to heal almost anything.
Of course, not everything can be healed. But even most things that are thought incurable can be.
And these are the 3 steps:
1.   Take responsibility for it.
Whatever the problem, it’s your problem. Own it. It’s yours. Not anyone else’s.
Even though you may have thought in the past that it was someone else’s fault.
Even if you wanted it to be someone else’s problem.
It isn’t. It wasn’t. It’s yours, and yours alone.
Own it.
Face it.
 Imagine that this problem is (literally) in your hands. Hold it up before your eyes and look into it deeply. This belongs to you alone. You alone can let it go.
But first, you must own it.
When you have taken responsibility you no longer blame others; and you no longer look for outside of yourself for the answers.

You know that you are responsible for your own change.
Quite often people call me and ask if I can help their partner / parent / friend. I have learnt to say ‘no’ in those situations. If that person had taken responsibility, they would be calling me themselves. If they haven’t taken responsibility, I can’t help them. Neither can you.
2.   Find the cause of the problem.
This is not so hard as it may seem, but it’s not as easy as step 3. It’s not as hard as step 1 though. Most people don’t make it past step 1. You should know that. If someone comes to me having taken step 1 (having taken responsibility for their problem) then I can almost always help them. And when they do come, I have the utmost respect – because I know what it takes to come to that point. It takes humility, and dignity, and courage. It takes being real. Most people don’t have that courage, and that’s why the world is in the state it is in…but more of that in a moment.
To find the cause of the problem, there is a very simple formula. Trace the problem (to use the analogy of a tree) to its roots. The topmost branches of the problem are in the head. The outermost symptoms are in the head (thoughts, beliefs, idea). The trunk of the problem is in the heart (emotions). The roots are in the gut(deeper feelings of trauma)… and the cause is in a reaction to those deep feelings of trauma. The reaction is a survival instinct.
Ask the question “how does this problem make me feel?” And then keep on asking that question until you come to the deepest feeling. Then ask yourself: “When I feel that deepest feeling, what do I want to do?”
The answer will be a survival instinct – almost all of our problems are rooted in our survival instincts.
There are exceptions to this rule – secondary gain is the most common one.
But if you clear the secondary gain (the process is almost identical to the one outlined above) then very often the problem falls away immediately.
Step 3: Heal the cause.
This is so easy as to be almost ridiculous.
Yes, that’s right. Healing is easy.
Taking responsibility is hard. Finding the cause is a little tricky, but when you know how, it’s pretty easy too. But healing the root cause of almost all our problems (gut-based survival instincts) is a doddle.
The cause of the problem is a subconscious blockage. To be specific, the blockage is a subconscious association between safety / survival and an instinct (fight, flight, and freeze – and their many variations: for example, fight may translate into feelings of wanting to run, hide, escape, etc.)
So if the nature of the problem is that it is subconscious, we heal it by simply making it conscious.
You see, our essence is pure consciousness. Light.
The blockage is like a shadow.
In the same way that you can remove a shadow by simply throwing light on it, you heal the subconscious blockage by bringing the light of your awareness to it.
This is mindfulness, and the power of it cannot be overstated.
When I heal a client’s blockage, I bring us both into a state of presence (here and now), and we acknowledge the blockage.
Our combined awareness (the light) bearing down on the blockage (shadow) makes it simply disappear.
The blockage is like an uninvited guest. When he is discovered, he leaves promptly. He is in fact waiting to be discovered, and wants to leave. He has a guilty conscience. He doesn’t belong there.
What belongs there is pure consciousness. When the blockage is removed, pure consciousness flows through the space again naturally, spontaneously and joyfully.
***


This is the most important thing in the world! There is no issue more urgent. Nothing is more worthy of your attention, time, and energy.
The world is in the state it’s in because so many of us are motivated unconsciously by survival instincts. In one word: fear.
We behave the way we do as a species (war, abuse, greed, hypocrisy, corruption) not because we are innately bad. On the contrary, we are innately good – our essence is goodness, or God-ness (“made in the image of God”).
However, our innate goodness has been tainted by the very thing that makes us so intelligent. Our higher thinking. Somewhere along the line human beings forgot how to quickly and easily release trauma (wild animals do it naturally). We instead learnt to hold on to our trauma. And those instincts that helped us to survivethe trauma stayed locked in place – permanently switched on.

So that our lives become ruled by subconscious tendencies towards fighting (conquer, destroy, kill, argue, conflict, win, etc); flight (hide, run away, escape, remain passive, etc); and freezing (numbness, paralysis, stiffness, lock-down, tightening up, etc).
This is why you may be a highly evolved, spiritual person, but have health, emotional, or psychological problems. Because there is something in your subconscious that trips you up and interferes with your essential nature from expressing itself naturally.
It all comes down to survival instincts.
When enough of us heal these blockages, I am sure there will be peace on earth, because peacefulness is the natural inclination of life. War is an aberration, like murder.
Death, killing, sickness – these are not aberrations – they are natural and necessary aspects of life. But war, murder, corruption and abuse are the consequence of un-released and un-healed traumas.
It’s so, so simple. We have the tools to forge a new society, a new earth, a new humanity.

Healing ourselves is the ultimate environmental activism.


It is a political act.


It is an expression of Ahimsa (non-violence) and Satya (truthfulness) and compassion.

Let us heal ourselves and each other.
Let us heal the global heart that is bleeding and crying out for us to stop abusing ourselves.
“He who saves one man saves mankind”
Save yourself. Save mankind.

Why I left Bangkok… Part 2 – Blue Sapphires and Red Bull.

Princess Di and a Blue Sapphire. She didn’t buy it in Thailand…

I’m sure Bangkok is a beautiful city. I’m sure there are lovely people there, and great things to do and see. I just didn’t do or see or meet any of them. (Click here for part one).
Instead I got on a train and headed North.
I stopped off in a town called Sukhothai. There’s a vast, ancient temple there.
I made friends with a young guy called Thum who worked in the place where I was staying. He was like a stallion. A lot of young Western girls passed through Sukhothai, and he felt obliged to sleep with all of them. He apparently had a strong sense of duty.
I hired a motorbike while I was there, and I’d drive around exploring temples and feeling free (I was 21 years old).
I noticed that all the trucks and lorries seemed to be in a hell of a hurry.
They would hurtle past me on my bike, missing my handlebars by – I swear – millimeters, the back of the truck shaking from side to side and huge clouds of dust kicking up in my face. I nearly died like this several times. Had I veered slightly to the right a moment before they passed I would have been finished…
When I mentioned this to Thum, he disappeared for a while and came back with a little brown medicinal-looking bottle. So I tasted ‘Red Bull’ for the first time (the taste was the same, but as for the ingredients, I don’t know…) back in 1994. Thum told me that it had amphetamines in it, and that the truck drivers all drank it to be able to drive longer and so make more money. I believed him. It gave an incredible energy kick.


(Year later, when I was a youth worker, I had a kid called Aaron in one of my programs. One night he had to be hospitalized after drinking 6 Red Bulls. He’d had a heart attack. He was 16 years old.)
There were two workmen hammering away on the roof of a small hut. I noticed that they’d hammer slowly and rhythmically for about 10 minutes, and then they’d climb down (slowly and rhythmically) and disappear inside for about 10 more minutes (before reappearing and staring their slow rhythm all over again). I mentioned my observation to Thum. He grinned his great big beautiful Thai smile, and led me into the hut they were working on. There was a man-size bong the in the middle of the room, and Thum sparked it up for me. He told me to take a hit. I took one hit, and then I went to my room and lay down.
I began to hear the most beautiful symphonic dance music. It was the coolest tune I’d ever heard, incredibly complex and uplifting. It was drum’n bass, several years before drum ‘n bass had even been invented. I wondered where the music was coming from, and got up a few times to try and find it. But every time I stood up, the music stopped. So I lay down and finally accepted that it was in my head. At first I was a little concerned. Then I relaxed and allowed the music to take me. Before falling asleep I wondered whether this new ability would last… it didn’t. I’ve not spontaneously composed symphonic drum ‘n bass since, and it’s probably a Good Thing.
There was a cool girl from Canada called Tina staying there (longer than she’d planned, until she met Thum), and she introduced me to PJ Harvey. Tina and I also went on a motorbike ride to a nature reserve. We hired a bike and I drove all the way there with her hanging on to my back. It was incredibly hot and dusty, and by the time we got there we didn’t have much time to swim in the waterfall. I swam and she watched (as I remember), and after I came out she took a photo of me and said it would be good for my portfolio (I was an aspiring actor).

On the way back it was getting dark, and the air was full of insects. Every few seconds I’d get shot in the face by a flying beetle, and it seriously hurt. Tina hid behind my shoulders and was more or less ok. It felt like an epic journey. I was the hero; no one but Tina could ever understand…
The next day I decided to head off to Chiang Mai.
Tina and Thum took me to the bus station and we said our goodbyes. I was feeling ill. By the time I got to Chiang Mai I had a fever. I felt very, very, sick. I found a place to stay in the suburbs that was a vast walled garden with bungalows. I stayed in one of the bungalows. It had a shower / toilet room, and I spent two days squatting in there with my two friends Projectile Vomit and Violent Diarrhea. When they’d had their fun with me, they threw me on the bed, and I lay there for another couple of days hallucinating feverishly. I was so weak I could barely move, and I remember thinking that if I died, no one would find me for a week.
When I got some strength back I hired a bike and drove into town.
I visited a temple. It was a cloudy day, and there was only one other person there – an old Thai man. When it started to rain I went into a doorway for shelter, and he joined me. It all seemed so natural.
We chatted, and he told me that he was a teacher. He had two hobbies: exploring the beautiful temples of South East Asia, and collecting stones. I didn’t know what kind of stones he meant exactly, but I wasn’t that interested either.
When the rain stopped, we started off on our separate ways. He turned to me and said:
“Would you like to join me for lunch? I will eat traditional Thai food and see some beautiful traditional Thai dancing…”
I clearly hadn’t learnt my lesson from the first similar-sounding invitation, so I said ‘yes’.
I followed his car, and after a while he pulled over and told me that he had a ‘chore’ to do on the way – he was buying some ‘stones’, and he had to go to the ‘warehouse’. Would I mind waiting for him a few minutes?
We pulled up outside what looked like a very expensive jewelry store on the outskirts of town.. The window was full of beautiful golden necklaces set with glittering precious stones, and the door was guarded by what looked like a Thai policeman. Still no alarm bells in my naïve young mind…
My new Thai friend disappeared inside the ‘store’ and reappeared a moment later with a tall, beautiful Thai woman in a short-skirted suit. I was stood there straddling my motor-bike feeling young and free and lucky.
He asked me if I would like a tour of the shop and warehouse (where apparently they ‘cut the stones’) while I waited for him. The tour would be with the ‘manageress’ – the beautiful Thai woman.
She looked a lot like this (but with a suit on):


How could I say no?
So I had a tour, and the two of us ended up in the ‘office’. She sat on the edge of the desk, one leg crossed over the other at the knee. She had long legs, and her shirt was unbuttoned enough to show some cleavage, and I was 21 years old. My usual shyness around women (especially women I was very attracted to) somehow disappeared and I found myself flirting with her. She told me a long story about how Thailand is famous for it’s Sapphires. She also casually mentioned that the same Sapphires are worth 5 times as much in the West.
I started doing the math. But I wasn’t very good at it so I asked for a calculator…
Up until this point, there had been no indication that this whole situation was nothing other than a very fortunate co-incidence. I just happened to be looking around the same temple as a stone collector, who just happened to stand under the same doorway as me when it just happened to start raining. One thing led to another and now I just happened to be in the office of a famous Thai jewelry store falling in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, figuring out how I was going to become the wealthiest 21 year old in history.
It was my lucky day!
Then came the first ‘alarm bells’. The ‘Manageress’ asked me (ever so slightly impatiently) if I was going to buy some stones. Up until then, nothing had worried me about this situation.
I told her I’d think about it if she would let me take her out that evening.
Then came the second alarm bell. Her mouth said “yes” but her eyes looked very “no”.
However, despite these two clear warnings, the voice of my intuition was being drowned out by the much stronger voice of my simple, willful greed. If I were a cartoon character I would have had dollar signs flashing in my eyes.
So I asked my future wife her name and she told me
“Wâyt-sà-ya”, and we arranged a time later that evening when I would meet her at the store for our ‘date’, and I jumped on my bike and sped off to call my Mum and tell her the good news!
My Ma was not quick to share in my excitement. She suggested that I wait until I speak with my Father before doing anything foolish.
I decided to do some research. I visited another Jewelry store in the middle of town. It was in an old wooden building, and when I stepped inside a little bell rang. An old man came out of the back office. The moment I mentioned the name of the other Jewelry place (to this day I remember the name: ‘Doi Inthanon’) the old man froze. Then he looked out of the window, locked the door, and pulled me into the back office. His wife was there, and he quickly spoke to her in Thai. She gave me a harsh look:
“You no go Doi Inthanon. Doi Inthanon bad people”.
That was the message. I don’t remember the details of what she said, but I do remember very clearly that when I suggested that I go to the police, she said:
“Doi Inthanon police same same”.
That evening I turned up for my ‘date’. The ‘policeman’ was no longer there, but there was a young Thai guy, about the same age I was, looking fairly ‘bling’. When I arrived he hurried inside. Before I could follow him, he came back out.
“Wâyt-sà-ya is getting ready, I take you for drink”.
A moment later we were in a bar, and I bought us two beers. Mr Bling sat opposite me, and resolutely refused to look me in the eye. His eyes darted and shifted over my shoulder and towards the doorway every few seconds, and he was shaking. He was sweating.
I told him I was going to the toilet, and I left the bar. I got on my bike and got the hell out of there. I was shaking a little myself. I drove back to my walled garden bungalow, and was looking over my shoulder the whole way back.
Later, I found out that Wâyt-sà-ya means ‘whore’ in Thai…


Part 3



Please leave a comment if you feel so inspired. I’m interested to know if you prefer my writing about my work – healing, therapy, personal development – to this personal anecdote stuff.
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Why I had to leave Bangkok after just one night. Part 1 – The Girl with Black Eyes.

I cried a little writing this. Sometimes, I am ashamed to be a man…
I was 21 years old and I went to Thailand. A guy I knew who was very cool had been there, so I thought that perhaps if I went to Thailand, I’d be cool too. As far as I can remember that was my motivation… and I guess I wanted to grow up a little.
Well, I grew up a little.
It’s funny. Before I left, my Mum begged me to promise to call her every day. I thought she was insane and I assured her in no uncertain terms that I would not be giving her daily progress reports. As it turned out though, she had good reason to worry!
I’d planned to stay 3 nights in Bangkok, and then get on a train and go North. It didn’t work out that way…
When I arrived, I headed for the area where all the tourists usually stay. I forget the name (Khao San road?), but it’s very well know. And actually, the place I ended up staying is the place where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character stays in the movie The Beach. I was there first, but only for one night.
I was 21 years old and alone in a very strange land. I went down the steps into the sitting area below and ordered a beer. I remember feeling like a fish out of water. I don’t know what I was thinking, going to Thailand. I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin, let alone South East Asia. But there I was…
And there were a couple of old Thai Dudes playing chess, and I sat near them and plucked up the courage to watch. In the end, I had a game with one of them (my Dad taught me to play chess when I was about 5 years old, and by the time I was 15 I was beating him consistently. He was a very, very sore loser, and wouldn’t speak to me after we played. He’d just go to bed sulking. I never let him win though, even though my Mum asked me to when he was sick. I couldn’t do that to him. I loved him too much).
Anyway, here’s what happened in Bangkok:
I played a little chess with this old Thai Dude and he was a bit of a charmer. After our game, he invited me out for some “traditional Thai food and music”. I was really happy – I wanted to get to know the real Thailand, not just the Khao San road (or whatever it’s called). So off we went… and ended up in this fairly tacky looking restaurant. The manager was floating around us, wringing his hands and doing his best “I’m servile and I’ll do anything for a tip” act. The band played synthesized Western rock songs. It was awful. And the only other thing I remember from the evening was the girl with black eyes…
The Thai dude called over the manager and whispered in his ear, and the manager scuttled off somewhere and came back a few minutes later with a young Thai girl. I’d say she was 11 years old. I’m usually very good at guessing people’s ages. I usually get it spot on.
I’d say she was 11. But she had black eyes. I don’t mean the color – although, I think that the color of her eyes was black too. What I mean is that there was no light – no light, whatsoever – in her eyes. There was only darkness.
Can you imagine? Have you ever seen a child with no light in their eyes? It’s unimaginable. Her eyes weren’t eyes. They were black holes.
She stood in front of me, and looked through me. I could feel her discomfort, her total unease… no, her hate.
The Thai Dude told me that for a few dollars I could do whatever I wanted with her, and for a few dollars more I could have her for the night.
The charm, and the chit-chat, and the chess game, and the pretense, all fell away. I felt sick to my stomach.
I leaned forward to try to talk to this girl; to reassure her that I didn’t want anything from her. But she recoiled. She didn’t speak a word of English, and she trusted me as much as all the other men she’d ever known.
I wanted to rescue her. I wanted to pull out my Uzi and kill every motherfucker in there – the band, The Dude, the manager, and any other cunt who had any part in all of this. I wanted to throw this girl over my shoulder and get her the fuck out of there.
I didn’t have an Uzi, but I swear to God I would have killed those people with my bare hands there and then if there had been a chance of helping her. If she had seen me for who I was, and let me help her, I would have. But there was nothing I could do.
The feeling I had was like when you are in a restaurant, and you see a lobster being taken out of the tank and dropped into boiling water. This girl with black eyes was like an 11-year-old girl in boiling water, and I was powerless to help her.
In the end all I could do was stand up and walk out of there. I walked out into the night, no clue where I was, and somehow found my way back to the hotel. The next day I left Bangkok. I couldn’t stand to stay there any longer.
I’ll never forget that girl, and how she looked right through me.

Part 2

Part 3

My wife told me to edit this (too graphic). I didn’t – read at your own discretion.



I had a miserable childhood.
Don’t get me wrong: I was blessed with great parents who gave me very strong foundations. But beyond that, I got a fairly tough deal.
Each and every school I went to sucked. Sucked with a capital S.
Strange really because they were all private schools; or as we say in England (in a typically counter-intuitive, oxymoronic kind of a way), public schools. The schools that parents have to pay a lot of money to send their kids to.
So I supposedly had one of the best educations that money can buy! Sure didn’t feel like it though… and I suspect that education is not something that can, or should be, bought…
***
When I was six, we lived in Israel for a year. I didn’t speak a word of Hebrew when we first got there, and I didn’t know a soul, but the ‘teacher’ made me stand facing into the corner at the front of the classroom, all the Israeli kids behind me sniggering at the pale, dumb kid who even the teacher didn’t like.
My mother had to pick me up from hospital one day – I’d had my head cracked open by a rock-wielding Israelite. I must admit, I may have thrown the first stone. But his was a lot bigger…



At the end of that year we moved back to England, and my ‘education’ began in earnest…

***
My first school back home: the ‘headmistress’ force-fed me (fairly violently) a particularly disgusting school dinner. I was about 8 years old I guess. To this day I would rather chew my own legs off than eat rice pudding.
Her husband, the ‘headmaster’, on a separate occasion punished me by taking me into his office – he closed the door, made me take my pants down, and bent me over his desk. He then beat me with a stick across my buttocks, gently. I suspect that he was playing with himself at the same time.
At that school, I had not a single nice teacher. Not one. There were only grey, lifeless, totally uninspired, empty-shell ghost-shadow excuses for human beings pretending to teach us. They didn’t teach. They stood at the front of the room and pointed their fingers, looking bored. The only thing to learn from them was that life is mindless, repetitive, and without joy.
When we, the children, mirrored their boredom, we were punished, usually by being given pages of ‘lines’ to write out as extra homework. Usually from the bible.
I would do my lines in bed with a flashlight so that I didn’t have to tell my parents that I’d been ‘bad’. One time my Father came in and caught me with a bible in bed (I’d managed to hide the paper and pen when I heard him coming). The memory of his face now makes me laugh. He obviously thought that his 9-year-old son was doing late night bible studies, and probably had visions of me becoming a priest!
He said something like:
“Ah, you’re reading the bible, eh? Yes, it’s an, er… interesting book isn’t it?”
Let me tell you – to a 9-year-old boy, the bible is anything but interesting. But I nodded and waited for him to leave so that I could finish my lines.

***
One day, when I was about 11, my mother told me she was taking me out of the school a year early. She’d enrolled me in a new school. I remember her saying to me somewhat apologetically:
“You haven’t been happy here have you?”
So I went to a new school for a year. It was much better. We had to travel a bit further each day to get there, but there were some nice teachers. Also, again, some very lifeless ones, but it was better. One of the nice teachers turned out to be a bit too nice though. He was the drama teacher, and he gave me the lead role in the school play: Hiawatha. He also invited me to his on-campus apartment where he played hardcore porn on his VHS and encouraged me to masturbate. He then sat in a chair slightly behind me, and masturbated himself…
I was afraid of him; fascinated by the beautiful naked women and the sex that he introduced me to; and deeply uncomfortable with the various situations that I kept finding myself in with him. But I didn’t tell anyone. Abused children rarely do…
He ingratiated himself with my parents by nursing my budding acting abilities (for which my Ma was grateful), and before I knew it he’d become a ‘family friend’. He’d come for barbecues and evening meals and I’d sit there inwardly squirming.

***
When I was 13 I went to high school, and for some strange reason I asked my parents if I could board there. I remember having fantasies of pillow fights and midnight snacks. I had two brothers 10 years younger than me, and perhaps I just craved the company of my peers. I don’t know. But the fun I had hoped to find wasn’t there. Instead there was an accepted culture of bullying and abuse that dated back to the dark ages – literally. Public schools in England are renowned for it.
The teachers weren’t so bad though, although I can’t say that any of them were great teachers. They still seemed pretty bored.
Except one. Mr Green, an English teacher. I will never, ever forget that man. He was only there for a year, but he changed my life. In many ways, he probably saved it.


At that school every teacher had a nickname. All the nicknames were things like ‘Witch’ (the very creepy chemistry teacher) and ‘Buttocks’ (the geography teacher whose arse was so large that she had to go sideways through doors. No kidding. I went through a phase of having a crush on her so bad that I would sit with an erection through entire geography classes. If ever she asked me to stand up and come to the front of the class I had to will my penis to behave: not easy when you’re 13-years-old).
Mr Green had long sideburns, and his nickname was… ‘Sideburns’. I wondered at the time how he got away with such an innocuous nickname. Now I realize that it was a sign of our affection for him.

How else do teenagers say “I love you”?
To me he was like a pool of glistening water, an oasis in a burning sandy-hot desert. Going to his classes I was excited, inspired, engaged. He gave us books to read that I could understand and believe in, and he read them out loud with us, sharing his passion with us. Every word of his was measured, had meaning, and was offered elegantly, with a smile.
His eyes shone, and he would encourage us when we did well, and berate us when we were fools, but everything was done with love.
One day I found out that he was leaving to go to a better school. I remember vividly how I felt. Betrayed, distraught, abandoned. He was too good for me.
He left, and I was alone with the shadows for the rest of my time there.
One sentence of his haunts me (in a ‘friendly ghost’ way) to this day. I must have not done something that I should have done (apologized to someone for something?), and he asked me why not – why hadn’t I done it? I couldn’t answer him. And he said:
“Ahh. You’re a moral coward”
I think that I’ve been trying to prove him wrong ever since.
Isn’t that what a great teacher does? Every word and action transmits wisdom, and the world around them becomes a wiser, better place.
Every word of his was a stone dropped carefully into the pond of my young mind, and his concentric circles of compassion and understanding continue to ripple on through my life, even to this day.
If only there were more teachers like that, eh?




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Abuse causes trauma. The trauma of abuse, until healed, causes countless problems later in life. Abuse does not need to be obvious (i.e. sexual abuse). It can also be subtle, (i.e. lack of attention from parents). Most people who suffer abuse tend to find themselves in a cycle of abuse – as was clearly my case. The good news is that it is very, very easy now to heal trauma. And it is no longer necessary to talk about what happened (to relive the experience). If you, or anyone you know, lives with the consequences of abuse or trauma, please contact me, because I can help.

2 things wrong here: One: ‘priests’ who abuse children. Two: a ‘church’ that has $166m in spare change.

Photo credit: Peter Watts

The thing that struck me most about this story of an order of Catholic Jesuits who have agreed to pay out $166m to the (Native American) victims of child abuse (at the hands of their priests) was not the sexual abuse.
We all know that priests have been abusing children sexually. We know how widespread it’s been (and hope it no longer is). Somehow, it’s not that shocking anymore. Amazing how easily we become desensitized to something isn’t it?
The thing that hit me most was the money.
What business does the Church, or any so-called religious institution, have hoarding hundreds of millions of dollars?!
I somehow can’t imagine Jesus ‘saving for a rainy day’.
I mean, it’s not like there are people starving in the world is it? Or villages without water? Or vast numbers of homeless refugees?
I’m not saying that the ‘victims’ of those priests don’t deserve a little compensation.
I’m saying that they shouldn’t need to be compensated, because they should never have been abused in the first place.
And a church that is one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, and whose representatives damage the people they are meant to protect, needs to be seriously questioned.