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Healing the Person, Healing the Community, Healing the Environment, Healing the Earth!
Healing is a process of becoming healthy, that is, moving towards wholeness and fullness of life. There is an interconnectedness and interdependence among all living things inclusive of humans. In this mutuality of existence, what happens to one affects another and impacts the whole.
Healing the human person, be it by alternative or traditional means, can succeed only if the environment is healed and cared for at the same time. When we destroy our forests and pollute our waters and skies, we destroy ourselves. We lose our future. In other words, healing the human person must go hand in hand with caring for the Earth and all that live in it. Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si makes this clear when he says:
We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis, which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded and at the same time protecting nature (Laudato Si p. 94)
Where profits alone count, there can be no thinking about the rhythms of nature, its phases of decay and regeneration or the complexity of ecosystems which may be gravely upset by human intervention. (Pope Francis’ Laudato Si page 12)
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