Spirit and Trauma

A Theology of Remaining

Shelly Rambo

• Éditeur: Westminster John Knox Press
• Année: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781611640816
• Sujet: Teología y religión
• Sous-sujet: Teología cristiana

Rambo draws on contemporary studies in trauma to rethink a central claim of the Christian faith: that new life arises from death. Reexamining the narrative of the death and resurrection of Jesus from the middle day-liturgically named as Holy Saturday-she seeks a theology that addresses the experience of living in the aftermath of trauma. Through a reinterpretation of "remaining" in the Johannine Gospel, she proposes a new theology of the Spirit that challenges traditional conceptions of redemption. Offered, in its place, is a vision of the Spirit's witness from within the depths of human suffering to the persistence of divine love.

Chapter 1
Witnessing Trauma

Therefore, survival means what? Living over, living through .¹

Trauma is the suffering that does not go away. The study of trauma is the study of what remains. The phenomenon of trauma’s remainder presents challenges to our understanding of what constitutes an experience and, subsequently, what it means to witness an experience. In the aftermath of violence, persons and communities are challenged to orient themselves in the aftermath of events that shatter familiar frameworks of meaning and trust. In turn, people surrounding them struggle to witness the effects of suffering that often cannot be brought into speech and symptoms that persist long after an event is over. Witnessing the suffering that remains involves encountering the ways in which death pervades life; it entails attesting to the temporal distortions and epistemologica! ruptures of an experience that exceeds a radical ending yet has no pure beginning. Looking through the lens of trauma, the pressing questions for theology are: Can theology witness to this suffering that does not go away, to the storm that is “always here”? If so, how?

“Witness” is a term organic to Christian theology. My claim in this chapter is that the study of trauma moves us to rethink witness, particularly as it relates to witnessing the suffering that remains. Current studies in trauma complicate interpretations of witness, by turning us to a “crisis of witness” at the heart of our central narrative of death and life, cross and resurrection. Looking through the lens of trauma, the complex practice of witnessing suffering draws theology back to its most familiar theological claims about death and life. We are confronted with the enigma of suffering at the heart of the Christian narrative of passion and resurrection.² What does it mean that life is connected to an event of death? What does it mean to remain in the aftermath of that death? What form of life arises there, if any? Looking through this shattered lens, we approach these questions differently and are attentive to dimensions of these texts that often get covered over. We come to see that the relationship between death and life is a more mixed one. Death is not an event that is concluded. Neither is life a victorious event that stands on the other side of death. Instead, trauma uncovers a middle to this narrative; it reveals a theological territory of remaining.

By listening to the language of theology through the discourse of trauma, I unearth a dimension of theological witness that has the potential to speak to suffering that persists, that remains. To witness is a complex and often indirect task. To account for and recognize suffering in its remaining is to be subject to multiple elisions. In Martyrdom and Memory, Elizabeth Castelli suggests that the Christian tradition has this more textured concept of witness inscribed within it. However, it has been overwhelmed by dominant interpretations of witness as martyrdom and self-sacrifice, interpretations rooted in the event of death. She writes, “What if, instead, we retrieved and critically engaged the dimension of the term [martyr] that emphasizes a different range of ethical options: witnessing, truth-telling, testimony?…. Perhaps the figure of ‘the martyr’ that we need to mobilize here is not the one who sacrifices him-or herself but the one whose compulsion is to witness and to provide testimony.”³ Castelli gestures toward this eclipsed concept of witness, believing that, if recovered, it could turn us to see suffering differently. This concept, I claim, could turn us to attend to suffering in its remaining.

Revisiting texts at the intersection of death and life, cross and resurrection, I reveal the potential of these texts to speak to the complex process of witnessing to truths that often lie buried and are covered over. I reclaim the testimonial power of these texts, to speak to the realities of death’s persistence and also to speak to a different form of life arising in this middle territory, the territory of remaining. Insofar as theology ascribes to a certain governing logic of the passion and resurrection, theology is complicit in covering over suffering, in offering a redemptive gloss over its deep wound. Wedded to particular ways of reading the narrative of death and life, theology can elide a narrative of remaining that speaks to the complexities of ongoing suffering.

In this chapter, I examine the enigma of suffering as it has come to be known in the twentieth-century term “trauma.” These discussions have moved from an analysis of individual suffering to interpreting trauma as a symptom of history. The phenomenon of trauma brings theology to a new ignorance, unsettling familiar categories and placing the discourse of theology in a more tenuous place.⁴ But this shifting ground underfoot also unearths a discourse of remaining. If theology can “listen through the radical disruption and gaps of traumatic experience,” something new arises from within the discourse itself. Trauma is not the problem presented to theology from outside, but the key to an aspect of witness that has been lost in the interpretive tradition. Theology does not need to turn outside to respond to the challenges of trauma but, rather, turn within to discover a language of remaining. The language of trauma thus resonates with something deep within the discourse of theology.

I develop this internal witness by reading biblical and theological texts, exploring a language of remaining that is often elided. I track this language and the elisions in relationship to literary readings associated with trauma theory, specifically the work of Cathy Caruth. The language of remaining within theology speaks back to trauma theory, offering a distinctive vocabulary to think about the challenges of traumatic survival. In the end, the language of remaining also provides a way, within theology, to reframe and reengage questions about divine presence in suffering. The classic question, “Where is God in the midst of suffering?” comes to new expression if read through a traumatic lens. To interpret theology from the middle, I create theological space for dimensions of experiences that are often unregistered and invisible.

Multiple ways to enter the discussion of trauma are available. Note that I am not engaging trauma in psychiatric terms but in relationship to the concept of trauma as it appears in survivor texts and clinical texts. I am not aiming to do a psychological assessment of trauma or even, more theologically close to home, aiming to provide a theology of pastoral care. My primary aim is to probe the interpretive frameworks of theology and to reexamine the narratives that frame Christian claims about suffering. In the aftermath of trauma, these frameworks often fail to speak to the depth of suffering that persons experience; they shatter. In my readings, I meet these texts in their shattering; I listen for the ways in which language falters and is transformed into the language of testimony and survival. My engagement with trauma is at the site of the literary, a site where psychoanalysis and theology enact a textual witness to suffering. I reexamine the theological “lexicon” for its potential to speak in and beyond its limits, in and beyond the shattering of its own interpretive frameworks.⁵

THE LENS OF TRAUMA

Trauma begins with an event or series of events that are too much to bear. The experience is beyond the ‘“edge” of what is possible to perceive and respond to, beyond what we are able to include in our identities, as individuals or communities .⁶

Speaking about his time in Vietnam as a military intelligence officer, Paul says that he remains haunted by his work there—its successes and its failures. Vietnam, Desert Storm, and Iraq presented him with a series of crises—moral, historical, and spiritual—that were never fully resolved; these crises continue to live inside him. The difficulty for Paul, as with many who have experienced situations of overwhelming violence, lies in locating, naming, and identifying the suffering. The roaming character of the suffering haunts him. Aspects of those war experiences remain with him, but they do so in ways that continually escape him. He is always encountering the enigma of his own suffering. As someone who seeks to hear something of his experience, I, too, am drawn into this enigma.

Trauma is distinguished from other experiences of suffering in that a person’s capacity to respond to and integrate the experience is severely impaired. Due to the force and the unexpected nature of the precipitating event, the normal pathways by which a person takes in, processes, and interprets an experience shut down, resulting in a range of symptoms. One of the most defining symptoms of trauma is the persistent intrusive and distressing images or recollections of the traumatic event.⁷ Fragments of the past return in the present. Given the frequent and unpredictable intrusions of the past into the present, life, for many survivors, is reorganized around the trauma. In all cases of trauma, a person’s relationship to herself and to others is fundamentally altered in response to an event.⁸ In the aftermath of trauma, the relationship to one’s own physical body and to other bodies, as well as one’s access to language and the ability to communicate with others, is profoundly affected.

Something of a violent experience remains, and its remaining is a continual encounter with the enigma of suffering. Although a range of symptoms attach to trauma and traumatic experiences, the enigma of suffering speaks to three broad alterations that occur: alterations in time, body, and word. These three are not exhaustive, but they represent distinctive aspects of trauma that constitute what I refer to as the “lens of trauma.” When we consider the ways in which we normally function in the world, we understand ourselves to be temporally oriented. We have a past that we relate to through processes of memory; we also experience the present and, in turn, have the capacity to imagine and live into the future. We often think of these as progressive. The past is behind, the future ahead, and the present is the viewpoint from which we relate to both. The central problem of trauma is a temporal one. The past does not stay, so to speak, in the past. Instead, it invades the present, returning in such a way that the present becomes not only an enactment of the past but an enactment about what was not fully known or grasped.

There is a familiar saying: time heals all wounds. Trauma represents an antithesis to this statement. In fact, in trauma, distortions in time constitute the wound. The problem of temporality is at the root of the phenomenon of trauma. Trauma is not a one-time event. Instead, trauma speaks to an event in its excess. The fact that the event was not fully integrated at the time means that something of that event returns at a later time. Its unintegrated nature makes it difficult to locate the suffering in any one place or time.⁹ Sigmund Freud first indicated that timing was a—if not the—defining factor distinguishing traumatic experiences from other experiences of pain and suffering. When Freud began to work with soldiers returning home from World War I, he made a simple but profound observation: the past does not stay in the past. Veterans were experiencing vivid war scenes in the form of haunting nightmares or flashbacks. The past was flashing back to them, carrying them psychically and physically back to the scene of the action. Their bodies were braced as if the threat were imminent. The veterans were not simply remembering the past; they were reenacting it in the present. Freud was perplexed by the ways in which time—past and present—was distorted for these veterans. The nightmares were causing a great deal of psychic suffering precisely because they could not be distinguished from present reality.

Up to this point in his thought, Freud had interpreted dreams, whether frightening or pleasurable, as unconscious attempts to fulfill wishes. The dreams reflected the mind’s attempt to bring certain desires into being. Traumatic flashbacks defied this theory. What was returning for these veterans was not what was desired but, instead, what was profoundly undesirable and haunting. The flashbacks also seemed to put one into a state of uncontrollable fright, as if the psyche was not just replaying a terrible experience of the past but was encountering something frighteningly new—something it did not know from the past.

Freud’s observations of these “returns” became the basis for theorizing a double structure of trauma.¹⁰ In his observations, the veterans were manifesting symptoms of an earlier experience, but these returns were also sites of intense suffering. There is the actual experience on the battlefield, and then there is the flashback, a reliving of that event. Freud began to speculate that the root of traumatic suffering was the confusion in the relationship between the two—in the experience of time. The suffering experienced by veterans, he noted, is a suffering that arises from a missed event, from an event that escaped comprehension. The trauma is not located in the past but instead is located in the gap between the occurrence of the traumatic event and a subsequent awakening to it. The suffering does not solely lie in the violence of trauma’s impact (in its happening) but in the ways in which that happening, that occurrence, was not known or grasped at that time. The veterans were suffering, according to Freud, from this belatedness.

The return of the event in the form of fragmentary visions, flashbacks, and symptoms displaced from their context is an intrusion into life. Death returns in an unrecognizable and ungrasped form; life then becomes a perplexing encounter and continual engagement with death. What happens is that the past event—both what is known about it and what is inaccessible to cognition—enters into the present in a way that confuses a trajectory of past, present, and future. In the present, these veterans were in the past. The experiences were haunting them, and present life became organized under the threat of the return. We can thus imagine that trauma not only impairs one’s ability to reckon with the past but also to imagine the future. Any planning capacity becomes centered on protecting oneself from being triggered by the past.

Freud’s exploration of these unwanted returns led him to revamp some of his most fundamental theories.¹¹ At the heart of combat neuroses is the return of an undesirable and unknown experience. The past event ceases to be contained in the past. Our relationship to the past is often expressed in terms of memories and our ability to access them. But the veterans, according to Freud, were not accessing their memories of what happened. Instead, these fragmented clips of the past were overtaking and possessing the individual. What Freud is probing is the enigma of experience—the fact that an event can be so strong and forceful yet somehow remain unregistered in conscious experience. As a result, the experience returns as something profoundly unexperienced and unknown.

The suffering that remains also alters a relationship with body and word. We are embodied, moving in the world through a complex web of physical processes. We are grounded in the world through our bodies. When someone experiences trauma, the body draws all of its resources together to respond to the threat. Basic functioning processes in the body are unable to sustain the level of impact, and a person’s ability to regulate his body in response to the physical world is severely impaired. With the rise of neurobiological studies of trauma at the turn of the twenty-first century, we can more accurately track the ways in which overwhelming experiences of violence alter a person’s fundamental biology. Most significant, however, is the resea...