Trauma and Grace

For those interested in PTSD or PTSS (post traumatic slave syndrome), I now recommend three books:  Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Joy Leary, a black social worker; Trauma and Grace by Serene Jones, a white theologian; and,  a chapter 3 "Soul Anatomy: The Healing Acts of Calvin's Psalms" recommendation by Jones (the best chapter in her book built around Calvin's Commentary on the Psalms).

The following is my review of Trauma and Grace.

PTSD/trauma is caused by violence.  The violence can be either personal (such as rape) or personal/social (such as war or slavery).  Violence is the cause; trauma is the result.  This book is primarily about trauma, secondarily about violence.  A biblical synonym for social violence would be oppression which is found 555 times in the OT.  The best brief but vivid description of the trauma (RSV "broken in spirit") caused by oppression is found in Exodus 6:9.  For context, read also Exodus 1 and  6:1-8.

In Luke 4:18-19, Jesus inserted a phrase from Isaiah 58:6---"to release the oppressed"; in other words, not only the exploited, but the broken in spirit, the crushed, the traumatized, those in a spirit of despair.

Jones describes trauma in the following fashion: an injury, a wound, by a hostile, external force, not an internal flaw or weakness.  An assault on both body and spirit.  Trauma victims feel a threat of annihilation grounded in a real event, a shattering; even witnesses to violence can experience trauma.  Of course, repeated events of trauma such as would occur in lifelong slavery would be much worse than just one incident; such would be overwhelming, truly shattering.

A victim of trauma is described as excessively vigilant, numbness, anxiety, sleeplessness, a compulsion to repeat events, loss of memory, loss of control, choice, meaning, a sense of isolation, fatigue.

"When trauma happens, it becomes difficult for victims to experience the healing power of God's grace because their internal capacities (where one knows and feels) have been broken.  It is hard to know when your knowing faculties have been disabled.  It is hard to feel divine love when your capacity to feel anything at all has been shut down."

Grace needs to be both gentle and powerful.

There are three stages to healing: establishing a safe zone for the telling of the trauma story; the church needs to provide a nonjudgmental place for the hearing of the story;  the church needs to assist in the reintegration  into both everyday life and church life, both short term and long term.  Trauma is often enduring trauma, recycled trauma, relived trauma.

More on Calvin:

"He describes how, as a young and restless scholar in Paris in the mid 1500s, he suddenly found himself on the wrong side of a brewing civil war inside the royal family, and how, in the middle of the night, he secretly fled his French homeland, just barely escaping imprisonment and execution.

"He then describes finding himself in a German town and, rather by accident, being asked to minister to a community of similarly outcast French folks. . . . had been brutalized, as were their family members who remained behind them inside France.  The list of atrocities they suffered was long: they were 'maimed, executed, tortured, burned, and assailed on all sides by the wicked.'  In the midst of such tumultuous harm, he tells us that they turned to him for guiding wisdom and spiritual support to survive.  He reminds his reader that this story is not that different from King David's own, . . . and because of this, the king's poetry had much to teach the Frenchman's outcast flock about remaining faithful in the midst of terrible isolation and constant attack.  As he states it, "In considering the whole course of the life of David, it seemed to me that by his own footsteps he showed me the way, and from this I have received no small consolation."

Next, from Serene Jones:

"Stage One: Psalms of Deliverance: Establishing Safety, Providence, and Divine Witnessing: Psalm 10:12-18."

"Stage Two: Psalms of Lament and Mourning: Remembering and Offering Testimony: Psalm 22."

"Stage Three: Psalms of Thanksgiving: Reintegration of the Mundane and the Scope of Divine Grace: Psalm 119."

Trauma and Grace focuses primarily on trauma, not the violence that caused it.  Now we need a theologian that will give the same thoughtful attention to oppression that Jones has given to trauma.  The much needed book could be titled Oppression and Justice.