A good apology is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for the apologizer. It’s not a task to check off in an attempt to make pesky conflict go away. An apology is ultimately for the person or people being apologized to.

Whether or not they are ready to hear and accept the apology, those being apologized to are the best judges of whether an apology is effective and real.

Yes, it is difficult, if not impossible, to truly discern another person’s motives. But I’m guessing you’ve been on the receiving end of an apology that just didn’t feel like an apology. Or that didn’t have accompanying follow-through. A sincere apology makes you feel seen. An insincere apology leaves you feeling empty. An effective apology is powered by words and actions.

What is the purpose of a genuine apology?

One way to think about this: an apology is for:

• clearly admitting a wrong (using active not passive voice)

• expressing regret for action(s) and effect(s), and

• pledging to do differently in the days and months ahead.

Although the goal of an apology may be some kind of “reconciliation,” the apologizer should not expect (let alone demand) reconciliation immediately after apologizing. In fact, expecting reconciliation at all can be harmful to the victim.

Above all, an apology is an act of self-giving love to the injured. It values and promotes their well-being, contributing to a greater sense of safety for the one who was wronged.

What do you do when people say they are “trauma-informed” but then traumatize multiple others, maybe even you?

A tale of two ministers

I know of one minister (okay, MORE than one) who told their people they would not tolerate spiritual abuse. They would protect the vulnerable. How refreshing to hear a pastor even aware of these dynamics!

Until… person after person was compelled to leave, each of them being deeply wounded by the leader who they thought never would have done this.

By contrast, a minister friend of mine told me she was still learning about trauma, new to some of the concepts and literature. Maybe in her humility she was downplaying what a great resource she would be (is) for traumatized church folk. I don’t imagine her adding a “trauma-informed” label to her bio. Yet she would be one of the safest, wisest, most compassionate, most trauma-sensitive people I know to send someone to.

It’s weird and hard when people “in the field” end up doing the things they’re training people not to do.

Of course trauma studies and pastoral care are not unique here. “Do as I say, not as I do” comes to mind.

But there seems to be something uniquely heart-wrenching about having a leader finally seem to get it (after all the other leaders who have hurt you), only for this one to be no different from the others.

Trauma-informed is the new organic?

“Trauma-informed” is a thing, yeah. Like, there are principles and experiences and dynamics that are important to understand in how we relate to people. I think, for example, about the wonderful book Trauma-Informed Children’s Ministry, which encourages people in the church to not just dismiss or discipline children who intensely act out, but to understand that sometimes big feelings and difficult behaviors come from deeper wounds, ones we want to attend to.

And yes, I think every seminary should assign Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery.1 Yes, I want every pastor to know that trauma includes event(s), the experience of the event(s), and the long-lasting effects of the event(s). Yes, I wish all churches would be trained and equipped to lovingly receive folks with PTSD and not actively retraumatize them.

But can’t we also understand all of that as good anthropology? Can we demystify “trauma-informed” and “trauma-responsive care” a little bit, so that people of faith realize that a God-honoring, neighbor-loving, Scripture-informed, open-to-best-practices, survivor-first, I-don’t-know-everything-just-because-I’m-a-church-leader approach will provide safety for the traumatized?

Maybe the “trauma-informed” moniker is cheap like the “organic” label on food. Anyone can put the stamp on it, but the quality is in how the thing is actually prepared, and in the health effects it has on you. Credentials? Sure! Standards and certifications? Heck yes. As long as we also remember: “You will know them by their fruit.”

Be Nice or Go Away

When I visited my parents after Christmas one year, I was able to successfully commandeer a coveted sign they’d found in an old country store:

Sometimes I wonder if at its heart “trauma-informed” isn’t just about being a decent and kind human to others.

Understood in that light, is “trauma-informed” too much to expect of our leaders? If it is, maybe they should go away.

Hypervigilance–a symptom of post-traumatic stress–is just as exhausting as it sounds.

Judith Herman, in her Trauma and Recovery, writes:

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go into permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment. Physiological arousal continues unabated. In this state of hyperarousal, which is the first cardinal symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, the traumatized person startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly. (51)

Right next to “as if the danger might return at any moment,” in the margin of my print copy I wrote without hesitation: “It might!”

The hypervigilant person is easily startled, Herman says. They feel jumpy, unsettled, maybe even all the time.

“Small provocations,” like someone taking more than half a second to go at a green light, can lead to outsized responses, like laying on the car horn.

And sleep? It can be a literal nightmare.

I can multiply examples of how my own hypervigilance became irritability became an unnecessarily sharp response directed toward my children. As a pastor I have seen the traumatized react strongly to what you might consider something “minor,” because it reminded them of a past horror. And there’s no shortage of literature naming hypervigilance (hyperarousal) as maladaptive.

Hypervigilance doesn’t keep office hours. It’s pervasive and annoying. It’s easy to wish it away.

But what if that’s not the whole story? What if hypervigilance has benefits? What if hypervigilance is even a superpower?

We’re talking about people who “have an elevated baseline of arousal: Their bodies are always on the alert for danger” (Herman 53).

How many people underreact to atrocities, mobilizing to do something only when it’s too late? How often have you watched a leader abuse their power, even subtly, and no one said anything because the threshold of damage wasn’t high enough to trigger their danger responses? Or because it was considered impolite or impolitic to speak up? Or because we were all just waiting for more evidence that this really was abuse? (The “more evidence” always comes, but at great expense to others.)

I think of the hypervigilant parent, watching their child swim in the ocean for the first time, ready to respond rapidly if need be. I think of the consultants that work with school administrators on safeguarding policies that feel tedious and (maybe to some) overwrought, knowing that predators are seeking to exploit vulnerabilities, so, yes, we need to have these policies and safe practices in place. I think of the shouts from the next door neighbor that the hypervigilant is conditioned to hear, to alert them that someone is in need of help now.

I have no desire to beatify trauma or its pernicious effects. Hypervigilance can lead to what Herman calls “an impoverished life” (62).

But I also see hypervigilance as a superpower. The over-alert person may be more alert to the pains and cries and sufferings of others, in ways that the normally-baselined among us might miss.

Maybe hypervigilance isn’t a gift, but it can be a real asset, used to respond to and strengthen others.

How to begin to describe Dr. Judith L. Herman’s lasting impact on the field of trauma studies? More important, how to appreciate the profound balm her work has been for the lives of survivors?

A review of her 1992 Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of ­ Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror said, “You’ll wonder if Judith Herman has the ability to see inside your thoughts after reading Chapter 5.”

I started wondering that on page 10. There she writes:

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: It never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

Yeah, that’s all one paragraph.

Just before that:

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.

In teaching and training settings, and in conversations with others, I share a key point from Herman at least 2-3 times a week: that the first stage in recovering from trauma is “establishing safety.”

Dr. Herman is a huge inspiration for me in my co-writing a book on spiritual safety and in my co-founding the Spiritual Safety Center, both with Lianna Chong. (More on both of those projects soon.)

Here’s the publisher’s page for Trauma and Recovery. I’m only about 30 pages in, and it’s already one of the top 5 books I’ve ever read.

American exceptionalism? The United States is the only country in the world not to ratify the United Nations’s 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child.

But the UNCRC helps us with advancing the well-being of children. John Wall, in his excellent Ethics in Light of Childhood, writes:

Through documents like the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, rights today are one of the most important ways to think about and improve children’s lives. But the very concept of human rights is burdened by a profound antichild ethical bias. It has traditionally viewed human beings through the lenses of independence, autonomy, and individualism, which, it turns out, are not even true to adulthood.

As the kids say, Wall’s whole chapter “Human Rights in Light of Childhood” is straight 🔥.

Tracing the history of the “major international children’s rights agreements of the twentieth century,” Wall sorts the 1989 UNCRC into three broad categories of children’s rights:

1. The right to provision: “children’s rights to normal development, nutrition and health, priority of aid in distress, the means to an eventual livelihood, and being brought up in the consciousness of owing service to others.”

2. The right to protection: “rights to live with social dignity and order against people’s tendencies for violence, manipulation, and abuse.”

3. The right to participation: “rights to act and be heard in society for oneself.”

I think about these three with accompanying prepositions:

1. Provision for children’s material and social-emotional needs.

2. Protection from harm and abuse.

3. Participation in their families, communities, and societies.

Similarly, in the volume Child Theology: Diverse Methods and Global Perspectives, Rohan P. Gideon writes about salvation and the “vulnerabilities and agency” of children. In the section “Expanding Humanization and Liberation,” Gideon uses the same three Ps:

In regard to children, salvation as humanization means an understanding of children as full human beings with complete dignity and agency and thus as beings entitled to participation, protection, and provision. (my emphasis)

Without minimizing the agency of children, he goes on:

Children’s vulnerable position demands preferential protection in church and society.

PREFERENTIAL. How’s that for a 4th P?

“Preferential” is a modus operandi or core value that permeates how we work for children’s provision, protection, and participation. We do the 3P’ed-work in a way that privileges children and their perspectives.

Thinking about my own profession, thus privileging children flies in the face of church leaders that bend over backwards to accommodate the attendance of child sex offenders in worship services where children are present. Sure, we all agree a registered offender shouldn’t teach Sunday school, but can’t they be in the sanctuary, if chaperoned?

No. The call to a preferential protection of children is one reason why. A way to safeguard children (why do I even have to say this?) is to protect their right to worship in a space where child sex offenders are not present.

Can that (please, dear God) become an uncontroversial practice? We protect children’s right to worship in a space where child sex offenders are not present.

We start there. Then—and only then, with children’s safety established—do we ask how to best come alongside the offender for their repentance, spiritual formation, and care.1

In my continued passion for advancing child protection, I want to be sure to practice also means of provision. How, in other words, can we not only work to prevent abuse, but how can we provide positive experiences for children and their families and communities? And how can we heed the rally cry: “nothing about us without us,” and ensure we are making space for children and youth to participate in bringing about the good of the world?

These are the questions that lead me down hours-long trails of reading and research and even re-thinking what it means to be a pastor.

What about you? How might the protection-provision-participation framework apply in your profession? In your family?

I enjoyed presenting and discussing the HOPE framework with a group at the Medford Public Library last night!

HOPE stands for Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences. While Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) correlate with poor mental health in adulthood, Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) correlate with good mental health in adulthood.1

And PCEs may serve a protective function: even in the presence of ACEs, they correlate with better mental health outcomes.

These are the four building blocks of the HOPE framework, all PCEs we want to promote:

As much as I love presenting this good news, I was even more encouraged to hear how folks in the group were already bringing these building blocks to life in their day-to-day.

You can read more about HOPE here.

They could be BuzzFeed headlines:

• “5 Ways to Boost Your Resilience at Work”

• “Emerge from Any Crisis More Resilient Than Before”

• “The Secret to Building Resilience”

• “Building Resiliency: How to Thrive in Times of Change”

I keep reading (and writing!) about resilience.

I have requintupled my efforts to be more resilient these last few years, and to help foster resilience in others.

Now a nagging discomfort with the term “resilience” has grown into a full-blown cringing.

During the pandemic I drove past a yard sign: “This is tough, but you are too.” It warmed my heart, and I surely appreciate the message and encouraging intention behind it.

Then I thought: What if I’m not actually tough? Or not feeling tough? Or what if I could be tough if I wanted to, but it’s all-consuming!

It’s exhausting to feel like you have to be strong. That’s because the conditions that make resilience an option are exhausting and unsustainable.

Maybe you don’t want to be resilient. Maybe you just want it all to chill.

I worry that telling a sufferer to cultivate resilience can unwittingly overlook (worse, enable) the persons and systems that make resilience a possibility in the first place.

Be more resilient at work? Maybe, but how about managers and execs take better care of their employees?

Be more resilient as a resident of the U.S.? Maybe, but how about the country not elect a known liar and sexual abuser? Or at least hold him accountable?

Be more resilient at church? Sure, but how about pastors and all congregants increase the spiritual safety in their churches?

In Healing Leadership Trauma: Finding Emotional Health and Helping Others Flourish, Nicholas Rowe, PhD, and Sheila Wise Rowe, MEd, point out how it’s problematic to speak of resilience when it comes to racial and ethnic trauma, too.

Professor Shawn Ginwright noted in his book that while honoring the need for healing, we need to address the limitations of building resilience. He referenced a colleague who said, “Imagine that someone has their foot on your neck and it is very difficult to stand up! Resilience is like saying to young people that I’m going to make your neck stronger, rather than focusing on how to get it off my neck in the first place!” If we are to heal from rejection and shame, we need to address the internal pain and external causes of racism.1

So… resilience. A helpful idea and practice, as far as it goes.

But talk of building resilience can’t just be clickbait, or a way to make money off people’s pain, or a way to overlook the harmful actions that people and institutions perpetrate with their power.

I don’t remember what specifically led me to sign up for emails from Crisis & Trauma Resource Institute. But—my email subscription overkill notwithstanding—I’m glad I did.

Here is an insight from a recent newsletter:

When a client is stuck in anxiety...
Try this: Shift them from what if to what is.
Anxiety feeds on imagined worst-case scenarios. Bringing clients back to the present moment, through grounding, sensory awareness, or a calm question, can break the loop.

It reminds me of a Seth Godin quote: “Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.”

Anxiety is hard to tame. Interrupting the spiral of worry takes real effort.

But I can remember to change one letter, in moving from what if to what is.

Next time I find myself in a worst-case scenario planning session, I will try instead to look around, to engage my senses, to just be here now.

Content warning: sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, clergy misconduct, and a pretty non-conclusive ending to this post

From the pulpit I wrestled with Julian of Norwich’s famous lines:

All shall be well
And all shall be well
And all manner of thing shall be well.

The words are not hers—they come to her from Jesus, as he has appeared to her in a vision.

Lesser known is Julian’s response:

Ah, good Lord, how could all things be well, because of the great harm which has come through sin to your creatures?

In my sermon I quoted both Julian’s Jesus and Julian, connecting them to anxious and proof-seeking disciples, in the first century and now. I tried to invite us into the tension between Jesus’s promises and their apparent lack of fulfillment in the world we inhabit. Like: How can you say it will all be okay, Lord? Have you SEEN this place?

In the end I pointed us to how Jesus met Julian in her wondering:

And so our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts which I could raise, saying most comfortingly in this fashion: I will make all things well, I shall make all things well, I may make all things well and I can make all things well; and you will see that yourself, that all things will be well.

If this sounds familiar, here is Isaiah 65: 17-18, where God is speaking:

Behold, I will create

new heavens and a new earth.

The former things will not be remembered,

nor will they come to mind.

But be glad and rejoice forever

in what I will create

for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight

and its people a joy.

“All shall be well” not because of some vague optimism that things just have to get better. They might not.

"All shall be well,” because the living and powerful and creative God makes it so.

And I noted the security we have when we follow Jesus. He says: “No one can snatch them out of my hand.” No matter what anyone does, no matter how not-well it gets, it is and will be all-well because God’s got us. No one can take us away from Jesus.

As I quoted Jesus from John, I thought to add these additional words of Jesus from Matthew: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28).

But before I could, I caught myself.

This is not the first time that I or the Holy Spirit (or both? neither?) have threatened to upstage my prepared manuscript. There was the time I realized a word in the hymn “It Is Well” may have been functioning in real time as a swear word. And the time when I had (silly me) described Jesus’s bursting into tears at Lazarus’s death as a sidebar to the story.1

So I was getting ready to preach, with Jesus, “They may kill the body, but they cannot kill the soul.”

But I suddenly remembered something I had just read in a wonderful chapter by Dr. Marcus Mescher. The chapter is called “Clergy Sexual Abuse as Moral Injury: Confronting a Wounded and Wounding Church” (available here).

Dr. Mescher notes that victim-survivors of clergy sexual abuse (CSA) “describe their abuse as like the rape or murder of their soul” (124).

I had heard this before: CSA as soul murder. Here sexual abuse and spiritual abuse and abuse of power and violence and manipulation and deception are all intertwined. And this coming from one who is seen as standing in for God. And being inflicted on another who is vulnerable and trusting.

So to victim-survivors of clergy sexual abuse, it feels like “they” (clergy) actually can “kill the soul.”

This whole inner dialogue took place in maybe less than a second—before I could start quoting Matthew 10:28. I was stopped in my tracks by the thought of “soul murder,” even as I was preaching in real time.

I believe what Jesus said in Matthew 10:28. And I think it applies far beyond its original context.

But I refrained from quoting the verse, because—in a powerful and disconcerting moment—I remembered those who say they have experienced the killing of their souls.

Who betrayed Jesus? People, institutions, and... God? Who has betrayed you? And how can the cross speak to your betrayal?

I was honored to be invited to preach at The 7 Last Words of Jesus Christ worship service at St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Roxbury, MA, hosted by the Black Ministerial Alliance Ten Point Coalition.

I preached on: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Recording above (with an awesome congregation of saints), transcript below.

Jesus was betrayed

Who betrayed Jesus?

Judas comes to mind.

Judas would move from a loving disciple and a safe person, to a treacherous informant. Judas would not protect Jesus but would turn him over. Judas betrayed Jesus.

Who betrayed Jesus?

Peter betrayed him, too.

Peter was even part of an inner circle of Peter, James, and John. Peter had VIP access to miracles and teachings. If anyone should defend Jesus, if anyone should show up for him, it’s Peter.

Yet when Jesus predicts his own death and resurrection, Peter rebukes him! Even before Holy Week Peter starts to deny Jesus: “Far be it from you, Lord!,” he says. “This shall never happen to you” (Matt. 16:22). That’s a betrayal of Jesus and his mission.

Peter’s betrayal of Jesus would go even deeper, when he denied Jesus—publicly and loudly—three more times during Holy Week.

More: when Jesus gets to the Garden of Gethsamene, he pleads with his disciples, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch” (Mark 14:34). He just wanted his disciples to stay awake with him, to show some solidarity.

He was “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death”—that’s the language of the traumatized, even before Jesus was arrested.

Jesus finds his crew sleeping. “Could you not keep watch for one hour?” (Matt. 26:40) he says. Betrayed by loved ones, yet again!

Surely Jesus’s family would stick with him.

Very early in Jesus’s adult ministry. Jesus appoints the 12, pulls them together, and then (Mark 3:21): “When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’”

His family—whom he relied on for safety and support and nurture for 30+ years—tried to seize him. And they called him crazy!

I get we might say, “Well, family is crazy.” But his family’s “intervention” was also a betrayal. They want to sideline Jesus, clip his wings, undermine his God-given mission.

Jesus Christ was betrayed at just about every turn—by one of his 12, by one of his 3, even by family.

That’s just at the personal level.

There’s still more to Who betrayed Jesus?

Jesus also experienced “institutional betrayal.”

I only learned that phrase recently: institutional betrayal. But as soon as I heard it I thought—oh, I know what that is!

There were institutions that were supposed to provide for and protect Jesus but didn’t, in the end.

Like: the temple. Like: the religious leadership, the chief priests and the elders and the Bible scholars of his day that he amazed at age 12 when he taught them.

Jesus was as observant and as close to God as you could get, and yet time and time again, he found himself betrayed by the religious institutions that were supposed to treat him with dignity. Many religious leaders handed him over, and parts of his religious community shouted “Crucify!”

And then, Jesus found himself betrayed by the political institutions of his day. The Roman Empire had the power to actually do something. Jesus deserved a fair trial. He deserved an advocate in Pontius Pilate, and instead he got, I wash my hands of him.

Jesus betrayed again, by a person, Pilate, and with the full weight of the institution of the Roman empire behind him.

The researcher Jennifer Freyd says institutional betrayal is a “fail[ure of institutions] to intervene,” on behalf of people who depend on those institutions.

Institutional betrayal is when ones appointed to protect and to serve instead neglect and betray.

And it’s so much worse when all these people—Judas, Peter, Jesus’s family—and these institutions—the Temple, Rome… they all have provided Jesus with support… until they withdraw it. They all loved him and nurtured him and respected his rights… until they betrayed those rights. They were all so trusted and trustworthy… until they weren’t.

So when Jesus cries out from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” behind those words is the weight and pain and trauma of a lifetime of betrayals.

And now, even you, O LORD, are forsaking me? Et tu, Yahweh?

The personal betrayal was bad enough.

The institutional betrayal put Jesus up on this cross.

And now, Jesus asks, with the whole world listening: is there divine betrayal, too?

What happened to “I and the Father are one?” What happened to, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased”???

Whatever we make of the theology of it, Jesus’s prayer is a powerful portrayal of how a deeply traumatized person feels:

Abandoned.

Disoriented.

Fragmented.

Fractured.

Alienated.

A stranger to the world. A stranger to yourself.

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

You have been betrayed

Maybe, on some level, you can relate to this Jesus who knew so much betrayal. Maybe you have held in your body the overwhelming pain that betrayal trauma causes.

Like Jesus, do you know what it feels like to be betrayed by a friend or a family member? Have you been working with colleagues for a common cause, and you thought you were together, only to have them undermine what you had all agreed to?

Like Jesus, do you know what it feels like to be betrayed and exploited by the institutions that were supposed to be there for you? Have you brought your deep pain to the institution we call Church, only to get hurt even more? Have you been betrayed by a religious leader or political leader, when you turned to them for safety, and instead they tried to devour you?

And like Jesus, after all this betrayal you’ve felt, have you prayed—or wanted to pray—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Have you wondered if God—whom you trusted—had betrayed you?

However we wrestle with the theology of Jesus’s prayer, we know this: Jesus said it. Jesus prayed that prayer for all to hear: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

So Jesus knows that prayer when he hears it from you.

Jesus knows what you feel like, when you’ve been betrayed: by people, by institutions, when you wonder if you’ve been betrayed by God.

When you ask Jesus to get you out of this “Godforsaken mess,” Jesus remembers the cross.

Resurrection, already on Good Friday

After Jesus prays, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” he cries out again, he dies, and then…

“Behold! The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.” (Matt. 27:51-52).

“Raised to life”!

Jesus just died. We are just seconds away from betrayal trauma and torture overwhelming his faculties to the point of death, and we hear:

“The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.”

Something with resurrection happened, not just Sunday at the tomb, but Friday at the cross. Something must have happened with that prayer—“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Because already Jesus’s death was bringing wholeness, power, and resurrection.

The temple curtain ripped. The temple—that institution that had betrayed Jesus. A dividing curtain is ripped in half.

The ground shook and rocks split in two—this is a new, powerful world that only Jesus can bring. “Even the rocks will cry out” with life.

Those tombs—that included saints of old who were betrayed unto death—those tombs opened up. The dead were raised to life.

Being betrayed and feeling Godforsaken… violates even your ability to make meaning of life. Yet Jesus’s betrayal, Jesus’s trauma at the cross, Jesus’s cry of Godforsakenness… gives new meaning to all pain and suffering.

The cross means you have new life, right now, even when you are betrayed and feel like you’re dying. Even on your Good Friday, the cross means resurrection.

Bodies are already raised to life, even while Jesus is still on the cross.

The cross means that even when people and institutions betray you, God will, in fact, not betray you, because the dead—even the dead are raised! God will not forsake you. God will not leave you for dead.

God has brought you back to life, and God will bring you back to life as many times as you need,

so you can breathe again,

so you can walk again,

so you can live again,

so you can trust again.

There is resurrection even on Good Friday. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

And the answer comes—even before Easter! The answer to Jesus’s fourth word on the cross comes on Friday:

Here I am, tearing the curtain in two!

Here I am, shaking the earth. Here I am, splitting the rocks!

Here I am breaking open the tombs. Here I am, raising the dead to life!

Here I am, raising your bodies, your bodies that have known so much hurt and have held so much injury and have borne so much pain.

Here I am, raising your bodies that have been betrayed again and again and again.

Here I am raising your body to new life, right now, even on Good Friday.

Around this time every year, I join my voice to the chorus of dressed-up church children everywhere, asking: “Wait, why do we call it GOOD Friday?”

My stock answer goes something like this: Even though Jesus died on Friday, he came back to life on Sunday, defeating sin and death, and giving the promise of new, resurrection life to all people! His death on Friday became good, even though it didn’t look so good at first.

And there are implications for us: what looks not-so-good at first, even suffering and death, can turn into good, especially when God is at work. In Genesis 50:20 Joseph says to his brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” God brought wholeness out of harm, good out of evil. Joseph, without meaning to, foreshadows what would happen with Jesus on Easter weekend.

I still stand by this understanding of “Good” Friday. But I also worry about a human tendency to underestimate suffering, or to fetishize it. Theologian Christopher B. Hays says, “Indeed, there are times when suffering is simply evil, and must be resisted rather than embraced. The suggestion that other people’s suffering is redemptive is particularly dangerous; it risks making the observer complicit in the evil.”

Job’s friends wanted to find “other people’s suffering” (Job’s) redemptive, somehow. They wanted to see a cause-and-effect answer to why Job lost everything. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar went to great lengths and used many, many words to try to find greater meaning in Job’s suffering.

They must have really wanted to turn his Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad (Fri)Day into Easter Sunday.

Maybe their pontifications weren’t for Job’s sake, but to ease their own theological cognitive dissonance.

After hearing one too many times that “Everything happens for a reason,” Job said: “I have heard many things like these before. What miserable comforters are you all!” (Job 16:2)

Thou shalt neither minimize nor romanticize my suffering, in other words.

We can be like Job’s friends: downplaying suffering because we can’t handle how awful it is, or over-glorifying it because of the power of post-traumatic growth. Both are strong human impulses—in which I’m sure I’ve participated.

But even with Good Friday soon to give way to Resurrection Sunday, the horrors of crucifixion invite—even demand—that we take seriously pain and suffering and loss and trauma and torture and abuse.

The church traditions of The Stripping of the Altar and not-celebrating Eucharist on Good Friday are embodied ways of locating ourselves at the foot of the cross, as if in real time.

If you’ve ever sat in a quiet and dark sanctuary with an eerily bare altar in Holy Week, you might have felt trapped in time. Or dislodged from your day-to-day travels through the space-time continuum. You might have even been able to inhabit a space where—even if only for a moment—you couldn’t conceive how it was going to all turn out.

I think we need such quiet moments. They help us avoid a triumphalism that skips past Good Friday and goes right to Easter, that skips death and goes right to life. So we linger at the cross a little longer, before we run to the tomb. We actually observe Good Friday.

But this Holy Week I’m wondering about going a step further. Even within Good Friday, what if I slowed down some aspects of the day itself?

I am asking:

How might my participation in Good Friday change if I tarried a little longer with Jesus’s suffering, and with the suffering of the world borne on his shoulders?

What would a Good Friday be like that didn’t hurry to ascribe greater cosmic significance to Jesus’s suffering, but just took it in, looking the crucified, tortured, abused Lord in the eyes?

What if I tried to neither minimize Christ’s suffering (because I can’t handle the atrocity of it) nor romanticize Christ’s suffering (because I need suffering be redeemed)?

What if, this Good Friday, I put the meaning-making on hold and tried to just sit quietly with Jesus in his agony?

During the pandemic I ate a lot of popcorn, drank a bunch of ginger beer, and watched as many To Catch a Predator episodes as I could find.1

I wasn’t watching TCAP for entertainment. And I always skipped past the graphic descriptions of the online chats that preceded the meet-up and arrest.2 I watched because I wanted to learn more about predators, where they are, how they operate, and how I can protect others (and myself) from would-be abusers of all kinds.

There is also some vicarious satisfaction in watching justice play out, in seeing a predator taken off the streets, as it were. Survivors watching may think: They didn’t get MY abuser, but they caught this one!

Today I’m more likely to read a book or journal articles and attend trainings on abuse prevention than to watch TCAP, but I have a goal that persists: I want to always be improving my abuse detector.

Abusers manipulate. They groom not only their targets, but also their targets’ communities… and even anyone who would call them to account. The abuser spends an inordinate amount of time constructing a scaffolding of deceit before they abuse. Even when they’re caught, it could be DARVO.

I don’t want to fall for it. You don’t want to fall for it. We don’t want to be deceived.

But we are deceived. And as painful as it is to admit: we are deceivable. I wish we weren’t. I want a foolproof abuse detector.

More, because we are self-protective, we can resist even a suggestion that we might have missed a dynamic, might have gotten someone wrong, or might have seen into someone but still been manipulated. Who wants to hear that? If I admit that my abuse detector missed an object (a person, an institution), I’m admitting that my abuse detector STILL IS flawed.

Which means I’m admitting I am vulnerable to being abused again. I’m admitting I am vulnerable to being groomed, brought over to the side of the power that is harming others.

Even with all the lessons I’ve learned.

Even with all the progress I’ve made.

Even with all the deceivers I’ve spoken truth to.

Even with all the abusers I’ve sought to confront.

Even with all the manipulation I’ve tried to disrupt.

Even with all the healing.

I am still vulnerable to being harmed and am still vulnerable to being misled into missing (or overlooking) harmful dynamics.

Crappy feeling, right?

But I think I need to sit with that reality: my abuse detector is not flawless. I believe it is better than it was months ago and years ago. But I still miss stuff. We all do, especially if we’re close to a person, situation, or organization.

If you want to follow a case study in the Christian world of how flawed (broken?) abuse detector dynamics have played out, read this article by Rick Pidcock and follow as many of the hyperlinks as you can stomach.

And then see how Rick (and others like him) was proved right in his assessment here.

Many members of an entire community built on resisting oppressive power dynamics seem to have missed the abuse of power when it was perpetrated by their own leader. Or they minimized it. Or justified it. Or just didn’t see it? Or said, He wasn’t toxic toward me, so I can’t imagine he was toxic toward others.3

Same story, different org. Even if WE were the ones who were going to get this right.

Three and a half years ago, when I still watched TCAP every once in a while, I wrote a post called: Yeah, But He’s Our Hananiah: When the One Who Misleads Is One of Us.

I stand by everything I wrote then. And now I can add to my understanding that even those of us who proactively work on fine-tuning our abuse radars are susceptible to faulty sensors.

The antidote?

There is none.

Just kidding! Mostly.

I mean, no human who is not also fully divine is going to be perfectly discerning. In that sense, we need to own a hard reality: even “gold-standard” organizations and “independent third-party investigations” can miss the mark. An online comment (which helped inspire this post) put it well: “our monster radar isn't always accurate.”4

I grieve the inaccuracy and corruptibility of our radars, because survivors—and victims of abuse who are unsure they are going to survive—need reliable advocates. And not just hopefully reliable or probably reliable or even mostly reliable advocates.

So here’s what I think we can do :

1. Keep learning—humbly.

We can ask, “What might I still be missing?” as we continue listening to the voices of survivors and learn more and more about the dynamics of abuse: physical, emotional, psychological, sexual, spiritual.

2. Learn with and lean on others.

A community of fellow learners and discerners—while still not infallible—can help ME see what I alone might have missed. Sometimes just listening to yourself share a story out loud with someone else can give you a bit of objective distance from it, such that you’re more self-aware and more others-aware.

3. Listen to Jesus.

This is the nuclear option, but also the beginning and the end of how I believe we become more discerning and better able to detect (and prevent, and confront) abuse. Especially in Christian settings.

When Jesus talks about himself as the good shepherd in John 10, he notes how the thief and the robber can get into the sheep pen. And there is a doorkeeper who must discern the voice of the real shepherd. All the sheep must discern the shepherd’s voice, too—their lives and the lives of others depend on it.5

How do the sheep know to follow the shepherd and not the deceiver? They follow the shepherd because “they know his voice.”

Because they know the shepherd’s voice, they not only don’t follow the deceiver, they run away from him.

I believe that the best inoculation to an abuser’s deceit is to know what the voice of Jesus sounds like. And to keep listening to it.

That’s not to try to put a nice bow on the serious conundrum of fallible abuse detectors. But it is to say: inability to attain to perfection is no reason to shrink back.

Our peace depends on our ability to respond well to deceit and abuse.

I would love to be wrong about my thesis that everyone’s abuse detector is flawed. So please let me know in the comments if you disagree, what you see me missing, or what you’ve learned as you’ve sought to fine-tune your own abuse detector.

Content warnings: child abuse, sexual abuse, evil, deception

Our church learned that an occasional attendee had repeatedly sexually abused a minor some decades ago.1 The one who shared was courageous to do so. The abuser had not confessed or taken accountability for his heinous behaviors.

Believing the report of the abuse, church leadership prayed and worked through a plan for talking to the offending man about what we had learned. Then we tried to find him—without success.

One Sunday, after a long absence from our church, he showed up at the public park where we were worshiping… mid-service. It was the first time I’d seen Ned Notrealname since learning of the abuse he perpetrated. I had to finish the sermon before I could talk to him.

I preached with one eye on the congregation and another eye on Ned. His presence that day was a surprise, but we were prepared for this moment.

After the service I approached him. With two church elders standing next to me, I told him we knew that he had sexually abused a minor, and that what he did is not okay. I called him to repentance.

Ned not only admitted it, he doubled down and said he was proud of what he did.

He was exulting in how he sexually abused a dearly loved child of God.

I’ve seen some things in 20+ years of ministry, but this was the most evil I’ve ever been face to face with.

Given Ned’s response, I told him he could not be present at our church. We were clear with him that what he did was awful. Here he was not only unrepentant, not only defending himself, but he was calling evil good. It was the actual worst.

Already agitated and combative, Ned looked poised to aggress. A member of the church offered to call the police. The police came and (kind of?) helped de-escalate the situation. Ned eventually left.

I planned to share with the congregation what happened. As a special announcement at the beginning of the next week’s service, I would be clear and open about what we’d learned about Ned and about how he responded to us. I wanted our people to know what was actually going on. And to know what kind of a church we would be when confronted with abuse in our midst.

That following Sunday, outside in the park again, I was in the middle of my planned, “You may have seen us talking last week after the service with Ned....” Before even my third sentence, a couple folks in the congregation motioned toward me to look behind them. There was Ned.

He was keeping a distance from us, and I hoped it would stay that way, but I was amplified through a speaker and he could have heard me. I cut the announcement short. I would have to put all this in a letter to the congregation.

So I did. Later that day I wrote:

Let me repeat what I said in another post, where I expressed skepticism at any time a church leader is the hero (or just protagonist) in their own story:

Not that the above makes me heroic—trauma sensitivity is a bare minimum expectation we should have of the Church!

The above collective actions—and the supportive response of the congregation—encouraged me in my hope for the church. The interaction with Ned lit a fire under an already existing vision I had for the church. I wanted to be clear in communicating that vision again.

Even so, I believe that such a response is the bare minimum expectation any of us should have for how the Church responds to disclosures of sexual abuse.

And it grieves me that it seems to take so much to get churches to stop enabling abuse. Let alone respond to it in a way that centers the ones harmed and prioritizes everyone’s safety.

We ALL have work to do here.

May any of us with influence in the Church be found faithful before God in how we respond to abusers and care for the abused in our midst.

RESOURCES:

National Child Abuse Hotline 1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453)

GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment)

John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the Bible, and the easiest verse to memorize. Most translations render it as, “Jesus wept.” And now you’ve just memorized a Bible verse!

Jesus’s weeping at the death of his friend Lazarus is not the only time in the New Testament that someone cries, but the word John uses for weeping is unique in the New Testament. A richer translation, drawing on the Greek-English lexicon BDAG, might be: “Jesus burst into tears.”

It’s amazing to try to visualize Jesus bursting into tears. The grief is deep and painful, and Jesus just loses it.

Have you burst into tears recently? This kind of sobbing is not voluntary. It hurts. You might feel overtaken by the crying, and for a moment (or lots of moments) you feel out of control.

I find it disarming to imagine Jesus involuntarily bursting into tears.

Recently I preached the whole story of John 11, which has the 7^th of the “7 Signs of Jesus” in John. The 7th sign, the resurrection of Lazarus, points to at least two truths even greater than the miracle itself: (1) Jesus himself will rise from the dead and (2) Jesus IS the resurrection and the life. Jesus invites those living in the land of death to say, “Yes, we believe you are the resurrection and the life!”

That’s where my sermon was going, and where I did, in fact, end it. After all, Jesus had said, “This sickness will not end in death,” so I didn’t want to end the sermon in death.

So after sharing how Jesus burst into tears, I said: That’s a nice sidebar in this story. Jesus’s response reminds us that where there is suffering, where there is death, where the unfair and unthinkable happen… in those places, Jesus “bursts into tears” with us, because he is a loving, compassionate, and empathetic God.

As soon as I said “sidebar” in the sermon and started moving on to resurrection, I started to feel like Jesus’s weeping—in that preaching moment—wanted to take up more space than I had given it. Almost like Jesus’s weeping wanted to upstage Jesus’s raising-from-the-dead in the story. Theologically, I believe Easter > Good Friday and resurrection > death. And I want to read John 11 responsibly, as a whole.

But in that moment—as I felt my own feelings and looked at this particular group of gathered people and as the text was coming alive to us—Jesus burst into tears seemed like a bigger “big idea” for us that day. We NEED to know Jesus is weeping at all the pain we hear, see, and experience on a daily basis.

I might have stayed with Jesus’s sobbing and talked about the resurrection end of the story next time. I might have trusted the Holy Spirit to help me go off-manuscript and into whatever the Holy Spirit might have been inviting us to in that moment. I might have led us into concerted prayers that lament our own griefs and losses.

I did not expect those two little words—Jesus wept—to take up such a prominent place in me and, from what I could tell, in others. Mid-sermon the power of Jesus’s weeping felt like it was going forth as involuntarily as the weeping itself.

What if Jesus’s bursting into tears is also a Sign of Jesus in John? It would be a sign of his humanity, a sign of his emotions, a sign of his witness to grief and “with-ness” with us. It would be a sign of his ability to be moved, even involuntarily so.

Jesus’s weeping is also a sign of his love. The other Jewish mourners—the ones who were comforting Mary and Martha and grieving with them—were taken aback and said, “See how he loved him!”

Jesus’s bursting into tears was motivated by love.

Christ’s love culminates in proclamation (“I am the resurrection and the life”), invitation (“Do you believe this?”) and action (raising Lazarus). So, yes, the climax of the story is resurrection. It ends there.

But on the way, John gives us a heck of a Selah^⁠1 with Jesus wept.

In the same way, our sickness and the sickness of this world will not end in death, for all who say yes to Jesus, the resurrection and the life.

But we encounter a powerful moment on the way to resurrection, when we hear Jesus bursting into tears again today. You and I are never weeping alone. A loving Jesus is already weeping with us and for us.

I am going to linger in John 11:35 a little longer and see what depths of Jesus’s love I keep finding in Jesus wept.

¹ Nobody knows what Selah means. Call it an interlude or a guitar solo, which in this case might be: While My Guitar Gently Weeps? #dadjoke

I’ve used running mantras for long runs or races:

• I’ve got this

• Run the mile I’m in

• Just keep moving

• This is enjoyable. I enjoy this!

Scripture is even better. For longer runs, having a verse or full Bible passage to recite focuses me.

Repeating empowering phrases also helps when we are recovering: from loss, from pain, from injury (physical, moral, and otherwise), from traumatic events and experiences. In the midst of ongoing anxiety, depression, and panic, a good mantra can comfort and strengthen.

A good mantra needs to be true and we need to believe it. Platitudes we already question (“Everything happens for a reason”) won’t do. So-called toxic positivity (“God won’t give you more than you can handle”) doesn’t help.

Here’s a mantra for you or for those you love:

That was then. This is now.

When the space-time continuum feels like it’s collapsed in on itself, stressful events of the past have lingering effects. It’s as if the events are still happening write now, even when they’re not.

That was then. This is now.

Here’s how Dr. Janina Fisher puts it in one of the cards in her Living Legacy of Trauma Card Deck: “The antidote to ‘then’ is ‘now.’”

She says:

Pause and focus just on this moment right now…

If you’re feeling anxious, depressed, or angry, let go of whatever you were thinking about that led you to feel this way. Look around and notice where you are in this moment. Is anything bad happening? Anything triggering?

This only works if you (or someone you are sharing this with) are actually safe in the present moment. There might be something “bad happening” right now, in which case another mantra (or no mantra) is needed. Judith Lewis Herman says the first step in trauma recovery is establishing safety now.

But if you actually are safe in the present moment, you can say: That was then. This is now.

Here’s the rest of Dr. Fisher’s card, which gets physical, so that you’re grounding yourself both inside and out:

Then focus on one small thing that is calm, solid, or safe around you. Notice that nothing bad is happening in this present moment. Don’t think about what happened earlier today or what will happen tomorrow-just notice this moment.

I recently tried this and the thing I focused on that was “calm, solid, or safe around [me]” was… the car I was driving when I thought to try this practice!1

Again, we (and/or others we share this phrase with) might use it carefully. It might best promote our safety in a given moment to do the opposite of what the card suggests, to make sure we “think about what happened earlier today or what will happen tomorrow.”

But as long as we are safe in a moment, there is freedom in digging in—to this moment—and becoming more present where we are right now.

That was then. This is now.

I use a task management app to track and organize commitments. The work itself is enough without also having the extra work of remembering what work I have to do.

To say to myself, “I’ll have to remember to do X later” is to turn task X into two tasks: the task itself (X) and now remembering it (Y). The app (or paper planner) can do the second task.^⁠1 Why should I?

That’s one of the keys to actual efficiency: not unnecessarily adding to my cognitive workload. I want to use my brain for focused doing, not doing while also wondering what else it is I am supposed to be remembering.

When we don’t have external and trustworthy systems, though, we’ll essentially ruminate on our task list or calendar or whatever loose ends we’re trying to keep inside.

They have nowhere to park, so they keep driving around in our heads.

Herein is a connection to remembering trauma, drawing on author Susannah Griffith. In her Forgiveness after Trauma: A Path to Find Healing and Empowerment, she writes about The Body Keeps the Score and how—like tasks we don’t write down but try to remember—our brains hold on to memories because we are afraid they will be overlooked and forgotten. Here’s how she puts it:

In Bessel van der Kolk’s powerful book about trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, he writes that certain war veterans he worked with unconsciously held on to their symptoms of trauma so that they would be a “living memorial” to their fallen friends. They believed that if they, in their bodies, weren’t holding on to the memories of those they’d lost, their loved ones would be forgotten. And I think we sometimes treat anger like this too. We become living memorials to the injustices we have faced, holding on to anger out of fear that if we don’t, the wrongs we’ve faced will matter to no one. We keep fighting our battles long after our combatants have disappeared.

If I don’t keep a calendar or list of tasks somewhere, I fear they’ll be forgotten. Similarly, if there’s not some processed, grounded, housed, and trusted location for memories of injustice or loss, I may forever hold on to them… in hopes that some day those memories might find a home.

Ideally these memories could find safe harbor when the remember-er shares the trauma (the injustice, the anger) with someone else. That someone else can partake in the holy work of seeing-with, remembering-with, and maybe even acting-with the remember-er to bring about a more just future. Any of us who have experienced this kind of being-seen know how powerful it is.

This idea of a “living memorial” sends me in at least three directions:

1. Of course the traumatized can’t just get over their trauma, because the symptoms are potentially tied in to the blessed act of being a “living memorial” to the person or thing or status or existence that was lost. To forget is then conceived as a kind of betrayal, to others or to self.

2. But the traumatized may not wish to bear such an immense weight alone. Who can remember with them?

3. Pastors, churchgoers, and concerned humans of all persuasions could consider that traumatized persons carry with them pain and loss and injury that they may not have fully metabolized. And now the comparison to a task list looks crass, but a corollary is having a head full of tasks and appointments and not having yet thought oneself clear by sitting down in front of a notebook or task app. Unprocessed pain can be immobilizing, and this is a call for mercy toward all people.

If Dr. Griffith is right about holding on to a “living memorial,” what else does this mean for our interactions with others?

¹ As long as I have a consistent review method, which is only one thing to have to remember. Even here I can set timed task reminders or say that I will begin every day with a task review.

And he is crafting “Disabled Psalms,” the first of which is here:

The Psalm ministered deeply to me.

“In the prime of my life / you disabled me” was jarring to me.

Those lines are so resonant with the theology of Lamentations, Jeremiah, and some of the biblical Psalms… and I disagree! I see a distinction between God causing something to happen and God allowing something to happen. I believe God is omnipotent, but not omnicausal (to borrow a great word from Zach Lambert).

Do I think God actually disables people who have disabling accidents? No. Does God cause trauma? No! At least, I don’t think so.

And yet, if I had Christopher’s experience might I see it differently, more like “you disabled me”? Possibly!

I also wonder: does a theological distinction between “God caused” and “God allowed” hold water for someone God allows traumatic injury to happen to? Maybe not! If God allowed it and could have prevented it, maybe the sufferer sees it as: God might as well have caused it in the first place. At the least, I want to consider the perspective.

Either way Disabled Psalm 1 is stunning.

I’m not so sure the biblical lament Psalms care about all the intricacies of theology anyway… I mean, they care about theology (and are in fact doing theology), but there’s also an urgency that goes beyond trying to figure out the ins and outs of what happened and why… such Psalms seem to be more about expressing the visceral anguish, and staying connected—if at all possible, using any language necessary—to God.

I am reflecting on all this as I take in Christopher’s Psalm.

As you listen to Disabled Psalm 1, what do you think? How does it strike you?

1 The one where they’re running but they can never scream

In college I wrote lyrics:

You know that dream that
people always have?
The one where they’re running
but they… they can never scream?

2 “This linguistic stalemate”

To be voiceless, wordless, powerless in the face of danger is a subconscious fear but not just for dreams. Sometimes it’s an all-too-conscious reality.

Speaking in the Aftermath may help people who experience trauma. Or even every word ever may not be not enough.

In that case the failure of language compounds the wound:

Communication is imperative for survivors of any kind of trauma to recover, but if the words that survivors have do not assist in the process of being heard, then they face additional barriers in their own healing. This linguistic stalemate, in turn, ensures the perpetuation of harm, as well as the inability to personally identify and hold others accountable for the enactment of it. …

[T]he words we have do not line up with the actuality of harm, which means there’s voiceless suffering that comes from the limits of the words that are supposed to describe it.

—Danielle Tumminio Hansen, Speaking of Rape: The Limits of Language in Sexual Violations (Fortress, 2024)

3 She said: Voiceless suffering.

How much healing comes if a harm can only be kind of named, viewed through a murky lens, processed by way of a reductionistic euphemism?

4 Unsayable: “The limit does not exist”

More than not finding words, maybe the words don’t exist to be found in the first place.

Why had it become so hard to speak?

One of the reasons it was so challenging to find words is because the words themselves didn’t seem to exist.

—Danielle Tumminio Hansen, Speaking of Rape (the book is amazing; her Substack is here)

Judith Herman agrees:

Witnesses as well as victims are subject to the dialectic of trauma. It is difficult for an observer to remain clearheaded and calm, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces, and to fit them together. It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys fully and persuasively what one has seen.1

5 Short form > long form?

Poetry is still words, but see here how Becky Castle Miller leans on “short form” writing to process trauma, where long form writing feels less accessible:

I do not know how to write about the trauma I experienced this summer in long form.

So far, I have written about it in short form, and write I have. I’ve written an entire poetry collection about it. Snippets of moments, lines of dialogue, metaphors, vignettes - this is really what trauma memories are, these fragments.2

6 Snippets and lines? Maybe I can do that much

This post and my first one (and three more, coming… soon?) sat in my Things inbox and my Scrivener drafts until I finally gave myself permission to publish them more as “snippets” and “lines” and “vignettes,” and less as tightly constructed long-form writing, which is taking forever.

Taking forever not just because of the writing mechanics a good, long post requires, but because the content itself plays a part and makes completion elusive. Evasive. It’s weird. It’s almost like trauma is its own cagey but still necessary co-author in trauma writing.3

7 Or maybe I can’t

Or maybe we try but then give up on words when they seem to be giving up on us. Why speak or write anyway?

Maybe what we want and need is self-expression beyond words.

Danielle Tumminio Hansen again:

Finally, given the limitations of words, it may be that non-linguistic forms of communication, such as art or music, can be a more effective means of communication. In the years after my own experience of harm, I found the greatest source of healing wasn't in speaking or telling the details of my story but rather in the choral singing I had done since childhood, often in professional contexts.

8 Now we’re talking (get it… TALKING?)

That’s more like it. I mean, how do you put “the Unsayable” into words anyway?

As the audience told me when I talked too much between songs in performances:

Less talk, more rock. 🤘

What I need from this universe is for there to be a new genre of music. New for me, maybe new for all people.

9 (Post) Trauma Rock

Yes, that’s what I need to listen to and to create: (post) trauma rock.4

In fact, I already do listen to and create music in this genre that needs to be a thing. (Is it already?)

At this point in the post, there should be music. Later. Think of this as the (long) caption accompanying an art piece, art piece to follow.

For now, I ask: when words don’t work to process trauma, how to metabolize the trauma experience so it doesn’t just metastasize?

All the trauma literature I’m reading talks about the need to do this bodily. Which is great!

AND there’s a lot of TALK about processing trauma. As there should be.

But what if we need to ROCK the trauma out (or rock with it still inside) as a way of fully processing it?

Music accesses deeper parts of me. Playing music reaches parts of me and takes me to places that even all the reading, writing, processing, training, and counseling (awesome as those all are) can’t quite achieve.

Music—whether you listen to it, play it, write it, or all of the above—connects with us on a deeper level, so that we at least feel seen, validated, and more at home with ourselves when the song comes on.

I’ll write more about all this later, and share some music, but this is enough words for now. It’s time to go rock.

I could rattle off a dozen things that led to what would be my highest runner’s high in months: the sunny 57° weather, vacation days, being with family, Christmas (the Incarnation), the sublime Psalm setting in church the night before that still rang in my ears, the rest day separating the 14-mile run from this exhilarating interval run, a sense of increased fitness....

But before any of that, I saw Eastern Bluebirds on the path. Four of them.

The last few weeks I’ve been spotting blue jays: first one, then two in the yard. Then, just after the turnaround point in a challenging long run, four blue jays swirled around each other, playing and dive bombing around. I’d never seen that many blue jays all at once. I took it as a good sign and acknowledged a budding kinship between me, blue jays, and running.

So I was not surprised yesterday, as I started walking down the running path, to catch a glimpse of flying blue in my peripheral vision. Another blue jay! Maybe two?

As I turned, and as flying became perching, I realized I’d seen a bluebird. Rarer and more beautiful than a blue jay. Next to that, another bluebird. Then two more! A total of four bluebirds.

I stopped walking and only watched. I tried to capture the stunning blue via iPhone camera.

After marveling at the bluebirds, I didn’t even feel the need to run. In those moments, everything was okay.

The four bluebirds were a gift: completely un-brought-about-by-me. They were mesmerizing. Four birds made everything else go away and summoned all my attention, settling me, centering me, nurturing me. I love them for that. The four bluebirds could have been “for the healing of the nations.”

Seeing and receiving the gift of four bluebirds—with the bonus gift of a pileated woodpecker!—reminded me how healing can be a gift, something to be received.

I work at healing—my own and that of others. But healing as given? Healing as outcome and not just process? Healing as being pulled out, and not just pushing through? A true delight.

Today I register gratitude for the gift of Eastern Bluebirds. I bear witness to joyful moments in which nourishment and healing come unbidden.

What unexpected moments of nourishment and healing have you experienced? And what is your favorite bird?

They’d had a difficult conversation about something the child did but wasn’t supposed to. At the end of the talk, the apologetic but still upset kid gave Dad a tearful hug and said:

“I want to hit you… and hug you… and run away… all at the same time!”

In prayers of lament—like Psalm 88—we may acknowledge: we want to hit God, we want to hug God, and we want to run away… all at the same time!

Psalm 88 and others like it don’t stop to ask, “Is it okay for me to feel this way? Is this an appropriate way to pray?”

Sure, there’s always the possibility of getting a word like Job did (“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth”) or like Isaiah did (“My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways”). God is still God. We are still not.

But lamenting prayers like Psalm 88 are urgent. I suspect the pray-ers knew: if we wait long enough to figure out whether it’s okay to pray this way, we might never pray at all.

So laments and lamenters come to God as they are: wanting to hit, hug, and run away all at once.

Psalm 88 shows that someone can pray while despairing even of God.1 Psalm 88 is the trend-defying Psalm of lament that does not end on a note of trust, or hope, or commitment.

“The darkness is my closest friend,” it concludes. Which is to say, “Some friend you are, Lord!” End of Psalm.

We don’t even get a Selah in there.

Coming to God angry and feeling betrayed—that might not be a time to do theology.

But it might still be a time to “pour out your heart in the presence of the Lord,” as Lamentations says.

I see Scripture and the witness of God’s people giving us permission to express our lament—our despair, our fear, our rage, our sense of moral injury, our experience of being betrayed—to God, even if we can’t end the prayer on a note of hope.

Psalm 88 may be the only prayer we can pray, if we can pray. It may also be the prayer we most need to say, to move into remaking, recovering, and healing.

(Adapted from a sermon I preached on Psalm 88: Praying Through Darkness)