Our Response to the Killings of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Paul Castaway, Melissa Ventura, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and others.

The Virginia Institute of Pastoral Care joins with the millions of individuals and organizations who are protesting the killing of George Floyd and many others by white police officers and civilians.

Our protest is grounded in our mission to restore healing and hope through spiritually-integrated counseling and education and the values on which the Institute is built.

First among these values is the principle that God invites all to healing and wholeness. Too often in our country wholeness has been defined in ways that privilege some people and discriminate against others. Wholeness for a few is a cramped, distorted view of humanity that allows a white police officer to see a handcuffed black man pleading for his life as a threatening creature he can kill with impunity. It allows for a system in which police do not have to respect the boundaries of personhood or space for a black woman asleep in her own bed in her own home. It allows a white dog owner in Central Park to weaponize her fragility by claiming a black bird watcher’s polite request to leash her dog is a menace to her safety.

Too often, access to healing has been skewed along racial lines, as the disproportionate death rates from COVID-19 among communities of color have shown. In our own field of spiritually-integrated psychotherapy, racially biased theories of health have led to counseling that provides little help to, or even harms, some groups in society.

More than 50 years ago The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to these distorted and damaging views of wholeness and healing in a speech at Western Michigan University. Dr. King said:

Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word ‘maladjusted’. . . . Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. . . . But I say to you, my friends. . . there are some things in our nation and in our world to which I’m proud to be maladjusted. . . . I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, and leave millions of people perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, and to the self-defeating effects of physical violence. . . . And I call upon you to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized.

‍VIPCare’s values state that a caring relationship is basic to healing and learning. Caring relationships require both an ethic of care and a genuine relationship. We are committed to extend the care we are trained and positioned to offer to people in need. We are equally committed to offer that care through relationships built person to person, hour by hour, week by week. For these relationships to be genuine, we must be continually engaged in a process of self-reflection and deepening self-awareness to surface any biased beliefs we hold, consciously or unconsciously, to challenge the assumptions we make, and to renew our commitment to racial justice. We must also be open to listening to the stories of those wounded in our society, to hearing their anger, and to learning from them.

VIPCare values a dynamic, collaborative community as the context for excellence in practice and a model for healthy living. As we affirm that commitment we must also confess that we have struggled to achieve and sustain a healthy racial diversity within our community. Our Board Diversity and Governance Committee has worked hard to diversify our Board of Directors and has enriched our common work greatly through its efforts. Our clinical staff, though, still does not represent the community we serve. Our professional, missional collaboration is the poorer because of it. We have much work to do to recruit a diverse clinical staff and collaborate with community partners.

At the 1996 General Conference of the United Methodist Church, Bishop Woodie White gave the following benediction:

And now, may the Lord torment you.
May the Lord keep before you the faces of the hungry, the lonely, the rejected,
            and the despised.
May the Lord afflict you with pain for the hurt, the wounded, the oppressed,
            the abused, the victims of violence.
May God grace you with agony, a burning thirst for justice and righteousness.
May the Lord give you courage and strength and compassion to make ours a
            better community, to make your church a better church.
And may you do your best to make it so, and after you have done your best,
            may the Lord grant you peace.

‍It is that peace, after the affliction and thirst and courage and strength and effort, for which we pray.

PHOTO: VIPCare's Board of Directors: l to r, front seated: VIPCare Vice President Jessica Young Brown, Janiel Youngblood, back row: Anne Peck, Carol Markow (retired March 1, 2020), VIPCare President Robert F. Brown, Executive Director Douglas M. Thorpe, Melinda South and Frances Broaddus Crutchfield

absent: Daniel Bagby, Sister Cora Marie Billings, Marlene Fuller, and Gwen Lingerfelt.