Abide With Me
by Jonathan
Shelly Rambo. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide
When other helpers fail and comforts flee
Help of the helpless, Abide with meI need Thy presence every passing hour;
What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?
Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.- Henry Francis Lyte
Hanging on my bedroom wall are these words, penned by Henry Lyte in 1847. Set to music, the words have embodied a spirit of consolidation and a reminder of divine presence. To the left of these words is a picture of my younger self, eager and expectant. On his shirt is a neon cross with the words Jesus Saves. The picture carries remembrance of life, before the death of trauma raged its ugly head against the young boy’s body, desire, and soul. Fast falls the eventide.
Where is God in our moments of deepest wounding? Where is the presence of the Spirit when all others fail and comforts flee? Where is she in the moments when the clouds refuse to pass and sunshine remains a distant memory?
I read Spirit and Trauma by Shelly Rambo as a man who has lived in the middle. Countless Friday evenings of violence and abuse were followed by the assault of Sunday mornings’ “narratives of victorious new life”¹ (p. 116). The Jesus closest was the one whose words spoke of suffering and loneliness, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” This Jesus knew what it was to be dis-connected from love and utterly confused. The Jesus who made himself the help of the helpless by becoming helpless was the presence I could touch. But even that Jesus seems to leave on Sunday. Is there any presence for those stuck between Friday and Sunday? I need thy presence every passing hour.
Shelly Rambo builds a theology from this liminal space of Holy Saturday. She actively seeks to slow down, even reorient, the rapid linear movement from death to life prevalent in our Christian teachings and liturgical practices. She weaves together the divine story of God and the stories of the traumatized: Paul Womack, a soldier in Iraq, Deacon Lee, a pastor and survivor of Katrina, and the little boy on my bedroom wall. In her integration of pneumatology and traumatology she seeks to illumine “aspects that would not otherwise be noted or recognized” (p. 32). Namely, that in the experience of trauma, death remains intermingled with life. She claims that “the haunting of the cross yields a truth about God and human suffering that cannot be contained within a redemptive reading of either Jesus’s passion or resurrection” (p. 158). It is this hidden, elusive truth that connects most deeply.
Many have been quick to offer solutions, fixes, and eschatological promises to this haunting. In my life and experience in the community of the church, there is rarely one willing to stay with me, to watch and pray. I’m drawn to how Rambo plays with the Johannine language of “abide”. The experience of trauma often leaves its victims feeling orphaned and homeless. The concept of abiding in Jesus, of building a home inside his scars, has brought me some comfort, yet Rambo’s theology speaks to something of God’s presence in the physical absence of Jesus (p. 101). This middle spirit is the one who is given over in the death of Jesus (p. 118). Rambo links the meaning of “abide” with “remain”, with the idea of survival. The presence of the spirit is the one that remains with those who are caught between death and life.²
I’ve always been drawn to the person of John in my readings of the gospels. His words are few, and yet he is at Jesus side at the last supper and again at the foot of the cross. Rambo proposes that John’s call from Jesus is to witness to the remaining love of God in the “aftermath of Jesus’s death” (p. 98). John’s call is to remain. John is one of the disciples who receive the “death breath” of Jesus in his last moment (pg. 118). I remain to consider what this reception might mean for Paul Womack and Deacon Lee. I remain to wonder what it might mean for me.
In John 14, Jesus says “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”³ I wonder if there is space in Rambo’s theology for an ultimate eschatological hope in the midst of Holy Saturday. Might there be a final day when all tears will be wiped away, when justice and mercy will kiss? Yet, in my present day-to-day experience of death haunting life, my longing is for the “persisting and remaining presence of divine love figured in and through movements of witness” (p. 99). In her conception of witness, Rambo creates a bridge between the shattering of trauma and the remaking of resurrected life. To witness is to be present to trauma and the suffering that remains.
When I witness the little boy on my wall and listen to his wisdom, I begin to comprehend the life of the middle spirit. When I resist the urge to cover my ears and look to an idealized future day where all things are made new, I receive the “persistence of love in the midst of suffering” (p. 159). When tears are allowed to flow from my body, I feel the abiding presence of the Spirit. In these brief encounters there are no answers, no fixes, no redemption…but there is a bit of presence. The darkness deepens, Lord with me remain.
…
- Rambo points out how certain theological “orthodoxies” tend to silence less victorious realities of ongoing violence and suffering.
- Rambo takes care to demonstrate how theologies of the cross and theologies of glory fail to account for the experiences of trauma.
- John 1: 18, NASB.
