We just launched Healing Spiritual Wounds with Carol Howard Merritt For Individuals and For Groups.

St. Paul is famous for having  written, “We see through a glass, darkly” — or, as the NRSV translation puts it, “in a mirror, dimly.” We cannot understand God’s nature without human language and human concepts limiting us because God is larger and greater than our understanding of reality can accommodate. The nature of our interactions with God requires us to use metaphors to describe God. The Bible uses the images of a father, a king, a war leader, a bridegroom, the master of an estate, a potter, a farmer, and many other metaphors that highlight elements of our relationship with God.

This necessity is part of our journey toward God; of what it means to be a human who worships God. Conceiving of God in erroneous ways, however, can cause great spiritual damage. When we grow up with images of God that are violent, full of hatred, cold,  wrathful, arbitrary, etc. we learn to fear God, but not to love God; to pray to God, but not necessarily to ask God for guidance. This kind of damage is a spiritual injury. It damages how we conceive of and interact on a spiritual level with God and with our neighbors.

In this class, Carol Howard Merritt talks about spiritual injuries: what they are, how to avoid inflicting them, particularly on an institutional level, and how to heal them — again, as churches, not just as individuals.

This class is ideal for people who want to learn how to deal with the spiritual injuries that people and institutions inflict — and how to keep our institutions from inflicting spiritual harm in the first place. For a preview of the course, please click here.