A Narrative of Love

Tag: collective-healing

  • Dr Joy DeGruy — Radical Love and the Path to Collective Healing

    Dr Joy DeGruy — Radical Love and the Path to Collective Healing

    A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill

    ▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube

    Dr Joy DeGruy speaks from a place of profound personal and intellectual honesty about what it means to grow up Black in America — proud of one’s heritage and yet daily confronted with the dissonance between the ideals of equality and the lived reality of structural dehumanisation. Her academic work, she explains, did not come from her four degrees; it came from the recognition that she had never been taught about her own people, their contributions or their suffering.

    The conversation traces the concept of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome — the intergenerational transmission of trauma from centuries of American chattel slavery — and the way unhealed historical wounds become encoded in behaviour, self-perception and community life. Crucially, Dr DeGruy insists that healing is not about guilt: it is about recognition, agency and working together. When people know better, they tend to do better.

    She reflects on the African concept of “I see you” — a gesture of acknowledgement, belonging and love that speaks directly to the wound of invisibility — and on the radical ethics of love she places at the centre of the path to social transformation. Love, she argues, in combination with truth, destroys the lie on which systems of oppression depend.

    As Scherto observes in their exchange, love is a movement, an action, that shortens the distance between people — the relational starting point for healing. And healing, Dr DeGruy is clear, begins with each of us: your scope of power starts with you.

    This is one of eleven conversations in the A Narrative of Love series, hosted by Dr Scherto Gill in preparation for the 5th Spirit of Humanity Forum, June 2021. The series was sponsored by the Pureland Foundation and the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP).

  • Bob Boisture — Love, Justice and the Flourishing of All

    Bob Boisture — Love, Justice and the Flourishing of All

    A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill

    ▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube

    Bob Boisture brings the Fetzer Institute’s foundational commitment to love and forgiveness into direct conversation with the questions of governance, democracy and social transformation. He opens by sharing a three-fold definition of love that has shaped his work: love as a spiritual foundation, love as a habit of the heart through which another’s well-being becomes our own, and love as justice in action — a phrase he encounters in Scherto’s framing and immediately embraces.

    He reflects on his own journey as a lawyer who chose non-profit work in order to bring love into institutions — and on the uncomfortable conclusion that follows when you look at every social institution through a lens of love: every system we have is in need of transformation. The conversation addresses the racial reckoning in the United States directly, and Fetzer’s conviction that organisations cannot make a constructive contribution to healing in the outside world until they have done their own inner work first.

    Boisture draws on Martin Luther King’s insight that love without power is anaemic, exploring how the Fetzer approach seeks to mainstream inner work within civil society — building communities of genuine belonging, not merely inclusion within norms developed without those communities’ participation. The beloved community King envisioned, he suggests, is not an aspiration but a practice: an enactment of love through sustained dialogue, listening and the patient work of healing the heart of democracy.

    This is one of eleven conversations in the A Narrative of Love series, hosted by Dr Scherto Gill in preparation for the 5th Spirit of Humanity Forum, June 2021. The series was sponsored by the Pureland Foundation and the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP).

  • Lord John Alderdice — Love, Peace and the Politics of Healing

    Lord John Alderdice — Love, Peace and the Politics of Healing

    A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill

    ▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube

    Lord Alderdice draws on his experience as Leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and his central role in negotiating the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to explore what love actually looks like in political practice. He reflects on a fundamental insight that guided the peace process: that new political structures cannot create better communal relationships; rather, it is only by first addressing the disturbed historical relationships between people and communities that new structures can emerge which genuinely serve them.

    The conversation probes the moral complexity of peacemaking: the sense that reaching agreement may feel like a betrayal of those who suffered, while failing to reach it betrays future generations. Lord Alderdice reflects on how genuine political leadership requires humility, a willingness to engage with everyone as human beings beyond their political positions, and a sense of belonging to a larger community of generations — those who came before and those who will follow.

    He also speaks to the place of silence in public life, recounting how a proposal for two minutes of silence at the opening of the new Northern Ireland Assembly was agreed and continues to this day — a small but significant act of creating space for reflection within institutions built on conflict.

    The conversation closes on the limits of measurement in understanding well-being, and the importance of empathy, imagination and relationship as the deepest resources available to those who govern.

    This is one of eleven conversations in the A Narrative of Love series, hosted by Dr Scherto Gill in preparation for the 5th Spirit of Humanity Forum, June 2021. The series was sponsored by the Pureland Foundation and the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP).