It was interesting to read Schreck apply Rambo's work on trauma to the place where women religious find themselves today.
This shifting within religious life and in world events has taken us to what I call a middle space. We find ourselves in this place of both creativity and disorientation. Much of what was is gone, and what is coming is not yet clear. ...
I am greatly helped in this next section by the work of Shelly Rambo and her book Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Rambo speaks about a theology of remaining in difficult places because "when you enter certain worlds, they do not let you go."
Though her work is with trauma survivors and in no way do I want to diminish the aspect of trauma, I do think some parallels with or experience can be drawn. ...
The task of "remaining" in this uncertain place is to pay attention to the reality that does not go away. In this experience all of our theological categories are re-defined: concepts like love, divine presence, incarnation, and world view are reshaped. Knowledge, truth, and experience of our world are transformed, placed on much more fragile terrain because of the radical disruption ...
What we try to do in the middle space is to describe events that shatter all that one knows about the world and the familiar ways of operating within it. What if from this place we simply witness to and provide testimony about this experience, with special attention to truths that often lie buried and are covered over. ...
In this middle space that is what we do: we call attention to things, things others might bury, or are afraid to face. That is why I say, however long the night we will be faithful and we will speak about what we are learning in the middle space. We trust Holy Mystery revealed in our midst. (Excerpt, Schreck, pages 7-10)
I need to think and pray into that some more, especially as it relates to my experience as a woman religious.
I've certainly been thinking and praying with a heavy heart today about the immense (human induced) suffering in our world today. And I mean, quite literally, today. A friend recently posted a very poignant list she's been carrying around with her these days: "Ferguson (police state, Black Man Walking), Gaza, Ukraine, Malaysian Air Flt 17, Refugee kids fleeing violence in Central America, Yazidi's fleeing the Islamic State, The Islamic State, Syria, Afghanistan, Ebola ..." No doubt you have your own (similar) list. It seems to be growing by the day. So much violence, oppression, death, and trauma being caused to human beings by other human beings. One can feel paralyzed, helpless, or even complicit. Our globalized media savvy reality means that we are present to this suffering on one (superficial/virtual) level, even though the vast majority of us are removed in our privileged spaces of comfort and safety. In my case, I think that's at the root of much of my own sense of being uncomfortable in my own skin as human induced suffering rages on and seemingly spreads. Removed as I/we are from the reality of suffering, I worry that it becomes easier to ignore or fail to act against it, thereby fueling more suffering.
Which is where I find Shelly Rambo's work so helpful:
In our current world, we are witnessing ongoing atrocities and different manifestations of suffering. The invisible forces of global capital and the undetectable effects of new wars and their justifications demand that theological accounts of suffering attend to the elisions constituting traumatic suffering. Although some may say that all 'suffering is suffering,' there are different expressions of that suffering and its effects that press for renewed theological articulation. I understand this as the increased invisibility of suffering and the power of its erasure. The discourse of trauma engages these invisible realities, continually calling attention to what falls outside the lines of what is, or can be, represented. The challenge of theological discourse is to articulate a different orientation to suffering that can speak to the invisibility, gaps, and repetitions constituting trauma....
A theology of the middle Spirit can help us rethink the theological discourse about suffering, given its new unique dimensions in trauma. Bessel van der Kolk acknowledges that one of the primary effects of trauma is a crisis of the human spirit. This crisis refers to a complete loss of meaning and trust in the world. ... How does a theology of the Spirit meet this crisis of spirit? ...
I have started to envision practices patterned after this testimony, practices of tracking and sensing that propel us to recognize suffering amid its multiple elisions. ....
The tracking and sensing, then, not only unearth and give theological significance to the unknown and unutterable within human experience, but these practices also testify to something of who we understand God to be. The work of the witnesses is to track the undertow and to sense life. But this witness is, as well, a testimony that runs deeper than we might imagine, to the nature of divine love. In the middle, divine love is witnessed in its remaining. ...The work of tracking and sensing is sanctifying work, the work of making love visible at the point where it is most invisible.
If we read this sacred story as a story of survival, we are pressed to think about what it means to remain in the aftermath of a death that escapes our comprehension. To witness this sacred story is also to receive it for the truth that it tells: love remains, and we are love's witnesses. ...
From this space, a different vision of life can be glimpsed. It is life as remaining. This transformation, this redemption in the abyss of hell, is not about deliverance from the depths but, instead, about a way of being in the depths, a practice of witnessing that sense life arising amid what remains. The middle story is not a story of rising out of depths, but a transformation of the depths themselves.
(Excerpt, Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, 169-172)A lot of words, many of them big theology words. But really, if I am even beginning to understand their power, I think it is summed up best by these two contrasting photos that have come out of Fergusson:
Top: Violence, suffering, and trauma.
Bottom: Witness, remaining, and healing.
2 comments:
First of all, I’m sending all best wishes as you complete your thesis. I have not forgotten both the anxiety and the joy of that experience.
I feel some frustration underwriting this post. Although your vocational path is moving you toward administrative work, I sense you want to get your hands dirty with the pastoral--the “being there.” And the the theology you discuss (Schreck/Rambo), like all theology, tries to describe the “being there” without ever going there.
Eleven years ago, I witnessed a murder/suicide in my workplace. Mine was (and still is) the secondary trauma of the witness, watching someone suffer and bleed out without the power to stop it. One of the things I realized at that time is that, although Jesus suffers his own unimaginable passion, he did not have the particular pain of the impotent witness. He was able to heal those around him who were in suffering (except those in his hometown). So I turned to Mary whose 7 sorrows are those of the mother and witness. I picked up the rosary, the story of her witness: the joyful, the sorrowful, the glorious. I can’t tell you how much my spiritual life has been enriched by this practice.
As you discuss, we are secondary witnesses to so much suffering: in Gaza, in Iraq, on the border, in Furguson. Theologians can go a long way to get a short distance (that’s their job). They can’t walk with those who suffer or those who suffer because others suffer.
Thanks for sharing Annie ... I'm thoroughly enjoying and grateful for the opportunity to study theological ethics, but yes, there is also a desire to be less theoretically "there" and more actually "there" in the midst of it all.
Thanks too for sharing your own powerful and transformative experience!
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