If there is a recipe for healing, what would the ingredients be? Certainly, time would feature as a dominant ingredient, for I have never witnessed a body or soul mend without it. Time is not merely a waiting room where healing eventually arrives. It is an active collaborator, mending what cannot be forced, teaching what cannot be learned in haste, and revealing that many wounds close from the inside out.
Since my impatient heart finds the process of healing unwieldy and uncomfortable, longing to return to plans and purposes, a dose of reflection on attachment is required. Some suffering comes from grasping at what was, what should have been, or who I imagined myself to be. Alongside this, a practice of contemplating impermanence steadies the soul. Everything changes. Every season passes. What feels unbearable today will not remain unchanged forever, and neither will I.
The gentle humor of good company belongs in the recipe as well. Kind listeners unafraid of truth-telling, beloveds who remain present when there is nothing to fix, and friends who can coax laughter from sorrow all have medicinal properties. Healing rarely flourishes in isolation. We are mended, at least in part, by being known.
Then come the humble ingredients: warm drinks, sunshine, long walks, fuzzy blankets, nourishing meals, and the companionship of creatures. Grace often arrives as ordinary comforts. The body teaches the soul; it is safe through these small gifts.
One more ingredient belongs on the list: hope. Not optimism, which predicts a favorable outcome, but hope, which trusts that meaning can emerge even when outcomes disappoint. Hope is the stubborn yeast that keeps the whole mixture rising.
Theologically, I wonder if healing requires another ingredient still: surrender. Not resignation, but the willingness to entrust what cannot be repaired by effort alone. Many spiritual traditions suggest healing begins where control ends. We recover not by mastering our cracks but by allowing ourselves to be held through them. As Leonard Cohen reminds us, “That’s how the light gets in.”
If the world itself requires healing, would the recipe simply demand bigger doses? Maybe not. The wounds of a world are not merely enlarged versions of personal wounds. Still, the same ingredients remain essential: enough time for truth to surface, enough courage to relinquish destructive attachments, enough honest voices to tell difficult truths, enough companions to bear one another’s burdens, enough delight to remind us why repair matters, and enough hope to continue when healing feels impossibly slow.
Perhaps the world’s healing recipe differs in this way: what the individual receives as comfort, the world requires as justice; what the individual receives as companionship, the world requires as community; what the individual receives as grace, the world requires as mercy.
No one heals overnight, and neither does our world. Yet hope holds us steady, trusting that healing remains possible despite its slowness.
Blessed with your good company,
Kimberlee
Minister of Faith Formation