What is Harm Reduction?

What is Harm Reduction?

On their web page dedicated to this topic, the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) tells us...

Harm Reduction is an evidence-based, client-centred approach that seeks to reduce the health and social harms associated with addiction and substance use, without necessarily requiring people who use substances from abstaining or stopping. Included in the harm reduction approach to substance use is a series of programs, services and practices. Essential to a harm reduction approach is that it provides people who use substances a choice of how they will minimize harms through non-judgemental and non-coercive strategies in order to enhance skills and knowledge to live safer and healthier lives.

CMHA goes on to tell us...

Harm reduction acknowledges that many individuals coping with addiction and problematic substance use may not be in a position to remain abstinent from their substance of choice. The harm reduction approach provides an option for users to engage with peers, medical and social services in a non-judgemental way that will ‘meet them where they are.’  This allows for a health oriented response to substance use, and it has been proven that those who engage in harm reduction services are more likely to engage in ongoing treatment as a result of accessing these services. Some harm reduction initiatives have also reduced blood borne illnesses such as HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C, and have decreased the rates of deaths due to drug overdoses.

Read more here to find out some examples of harm reduction and the goals of harm reduction.

Pray before "the fixed tabernacle and mobile tabernacles"

"We will be helped by staying before the tabernacle and before the many living tabernacles who are the poor. The Eucharist and the poor, the fixed tabernacle and the mobile tabernacles: It is there that we remain in love and absorb the mentality of bread broken," that is of Jesus, who gives himself in the Eucharist.

Pope Francis spoke these words on May 23 when he opened the general assembly of Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican-based federation of national Catholic charities with some 450 delegates from around the world.

"... Jesus asks us to remain in him, not in our ideas; to leave behind a desire to control and run things. He asks us to trust one another and give ourselves to the other."

"... Seek in others the presence of God, who does not dwell in the greatness of the things we do, but in the smallness of the poor we encounter. If we do not look directly at them, we end up always looking at ourselves and making them instruments of our self-affirmation."

Read the full report on this event: True charity means focusing on Jesus and the poor, pope says, by Cindy Wooden in the National Catholic Reporter.

May 13 - "Do you love me?"

On the 3rd Sunday of Easter we heard the Gospel reading from St. John where Jesus, risen from the tomb, appears to the apostles on the shore of the lake where they had been fishing all night without a catch. In that gospel reading there is the well-known interchange between Jesus and Peter where Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him. Preachers and scripture scholars tell us that this is the point where Peter is not only forgiven for his triple denial of his Lord - also beside a charcoal fire - but that it is also the very point where Peter is given his apostolic mission as chief shepherd of the flock of Christ.

This is all described very poignantly in a reflection by Sr. Mary McGlone SSJ where she points out how we cannot really be used by Jesus in the mission he has for us until we are confronted by our sinfulness and weakness, and brought to a place where we experience forgiveness by the Lord's gratuitous love. She actually titled her post, "Only sinners need apply"