Toronto Refugee Healing Work – June 2020  John Calvi

 

It was in Toronto sometime in the 1990’s.  A refugee committee of several Catholics had brought together both the staff and the refugees who had been tortured for me to lay hands on.  We were in the meeting room of the Toronto Quaker meetinghouse.  It was a large group and we sat in silence a long time as one after another came and sat in the chair in the middle of the circle.

 

I’ve loved working in Toronto, such wonderful people doing good works.  And though I’ve always worked with lots of people each trip, I only remember only a few clearly.

 

There was a man who had survived the dungeons of Idi Amin.  He was tall and very strong, but there was a fragile part of him I could see, a trembling beneath the surface.  It was a blessing and a gift to be able to see this and I knew it would be intense.

 

In that dungeon, the cells faced a central space where the hurt happened.  Amin and others would come down the steps, below ground, and look over all the prisoners.  They looked to see who to drag out of the cell next so all could see and hear.

 

The only way to survive was to make yourself as paint on a wall, totally unnoticeable, as gray paint on concrete.  This man had made stillness and non-being into a practice responding to the terror.  And while his stillness was gone, the terror arose in him each day several years later.

 

I took a long time to slowly enter that terror, where it was laid in the body, slowly embrace it, and then begin to withdraw this burden.  It’s beyond words, but if you could imagine charming a wolf out of one’s belly with a tender song, it was something like that.  I moved so slowly, I changed rhythm very carefully to enter and bring out- almost like moving smoke.  He said thank you and I could feel we’d gone deep in moments that felt like time had stopped.

 

And now all these years later he has been coming to mind.  Has something happened?  Is there change in his life?  Another shift of trust or love or healing?  Why do I remember him now these last few weeks?  It’s all mystery, come and gone, with the intensity making no mark but in memory.  I can feel him in my hands this night and I have the same tenderness as my hands warm.  I am still hoping he is well and clear.