A Sacred Presence in the Community

Fall 2022 Newsletter Opening from Leland Seese, Board Chair

When an organization that provides mental health services understands itself as a sacred presence in its community, this presupposes an understanding of its work as systemic, and not discrete and individualistic. In other words, such an organization recognizes the connection between the work of a mental health provider, its particular clients, and the wider community.
To be a sacred presence in the community is to honor thetruth that the Hebrew word shalom means balance, peace, and wholeness for each and for all. The shalom of each member of the community is not fully realized unless it is integrated into the shalom of the whole community. When Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10),
he spoke in the plural. Abundant life, in the mind of Jesus, was necessarily both communal and individual.

An individual clinician in a mental health organization with this awareness is continually mindful of the connection between her work and wider issues of healing, justice, and love. Whether he is working with an individual client, a couple, a child, or a family, the clinician’s starting place is the reality that these people are members of larger networks of relationships. Thus, the client’s experience of their own personhood in community — as spouse or parent or sibling or child, according to their gender identity, racial identity, cultural identity, and so on — is inextricably tied to their shalom, their opportunity to live an abundant life.

At the Samaritan Center of Puget Sound this is the mode of seeking to be a sacred presence in the community. The Center’s use of the phrase “spiritually integrated counseling and education” rests on the notion that its work at all levels serves individuals and the community, with an awareness that the two are bound together. Thus, the Center’s openness to people from various faith traditions, diverse political and social communities, and all economic levels, is grounded in a shared calling to serve shalom, to seek abundant life for its community and community members. In the United States, and in the wider world, we are living through a time of upheaval, in which anxiety and depression, loneliness and despair rub shoulders with momentous changes. Some fear that their world is vanishing. Others fear that the world they have always hoped for will never be. At the Samaritan Center of Puget Sound, this means seeking to be sacred presence that is responsive to opportunities to build diversity, equity, and inclusion among individual clients, staff, board, and supporters. And this is what it means to be a sacred presence in the community.