Mental Health Task Force
Greetings All Souls Brothers and Sisters,
I am fortunate to serve on a Diocesan Task force, along with Millie Elmore, put together about 18 months ago by our diocesan brother Larry Thompson. This task force emerged based on the fragile and ever-reforming Department of Health and Human Services system of care developing throughout the state of North Carolina. Since our inception we have surveyed every parish priest in the diocese and have been in vigilant prayer for what might emerge as needs, desires, and the creative ways our individual parishes might be able to respond to those in our midst affected by mental illness, substance abuse, and developmental disabilities.
In an effort to get acquainted with what our own parish needs might be and to begin a process of conversation and dialogue, we would like to offer a Parish Tea Time to do just that. We are scheduled to meet on January 12 at 5:30 p.m. in the Owen Library. Our goal is to simply extend this dialogue into the parish and see what may emerge as concerns and needs, and what we might be able to do to respond. I’ve learned that there is hope in every story and it is there our collective stories will emerge and offer life-giving responses.
I have a quote that lives on my desk that I would like to share with you, along with the invitation to join us on January 12.
Hope: Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope—not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of common sense; nor the strident gates of self-righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (our people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is gonna be all right,” but a very different, sometimes very lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it might be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only the struggle, but joy in the struggle—and we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.
—Victoria Safford
So, come… join us. Tell us what you see, what you might imagine, and how we might be prepared for what we are yet to see. I also believe that great things come from a shared pot of tea!
—Jacque Combs