Can We Heal Each Other?

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Edward Eismann founded an organization called “Unitas Therapeutic Community,” described in a recent article in America Magazine as “a program in the South Bronx that understands social connectedness as key to mental health.”

Eismann, a psychologist, wasn’t satisfied by the lack of success in treating the youth that came to his clinic in the late 1960s, so he began walking the streets of the neighborhood to see how his patients were actually living day-to-day. The neighborhood was mainly Black and Puerto Rican, so the white Eismann stood out.

Then, day after day, he began sitting on the clinic’s front stoop, and the word spread that Eismann was a guy who could “help young people with their worries.”

Muggings and Gang Battles

And they had plenty of worries. “Muggings and gang battles made the streets treacherous,” says the article, and a resident recalls that when he was 14, Eismann’s approach was “a unique idea for young people like me, when around us (people were) saying, ‘If you’re Black and Latino, we can only expect the worst of you.’”

Eismann’s message: “If society had reneged on its social contract with the South Bronx … children could commit to each other. They possessed the ability to heal – themselves and others.

“My belief is everybody has in themselves the capacity to be healers of other people,” he said. “If you bring people together and help them relate in constructive and positive ways, you elicit from them the kind of healthy responses that bring about change in others. We are all in life to be helpers to each other.”

Interesting that he describes this as a “belief,” because it wasn’t something he learned in the process of getting his doctor's degree. Eismann, according to the article, was motivated by his Catholic faith.

Edward Eismann and
Street Kids
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“He saved my life,” a man named Orlando told the article’s author, Eileen Markey, at a funeral parlor in Queens, NY, where people recently gathered to remember Eismann, who had died at age 91.

I often find myself skeptical about Bible passages that promise or celebrate God’s saving work in the world. My favorite psalm, 91, for instance, proclaims that God “will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler.”

Apart from the psalm’s antiquated language, I wonder whether God is really doing much in this world that is plagued by war, hatred and duplicity.

In the book of Judith, which is in a part of the Bible Catholics call Deuterocanonical and Protestants the Apocrypha, the unknown author writes, “…for you are a God of the lowly, helper of the oppressed, upholder of the weak, protector of the forlorn, savior of those without hope.”

Really? I wonder how the people of Gaza, or the Israeli families destroyed by Hamas attacks, or the thousands of victims on both sides of the Ukraine-Russian border feel about those words. Or the millions of people around the world living in poverty, generation after generation.

God's Work is Formidable

I wonder all this until I read about somebody like Eismann; then I remember that God does his work in the world through us. And such work is formidable, because there are thousands of people like Eismann, and millions like him over the centuries.

And many, if not most, have been motivated by faith – even those who don’t acknowledge that, because Judeo-Christianity has had such an ethical impact on society that even “nones,” agnostics and atheists are - perhaps without acknowledging it - doing God’s healing work. We do it among our families and friends, at work, in volunteering, sometimes just in listening to someone who needs listening to.

So, people searching for God should take heart. God is at work through us, and no work is more important.