Alexithymia: The Sound of Holy Saturday

by Hannah Martin

Shelly Rambo. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

In 1969 Shusaku Endō wrote Silence, a novel chronicling the journey of a missionary priest (Rodriguez) in Japan who is captured and, in order to save the lives of the Japanese Christians to which he had ministered, forced to apostatize.¹ The struggle of doubt, questioning why God is allowing any of this or if God even exists, pervades the entire journey. The culmination of this occurs in the scene in which Rodriguez must step on the fumie (an image of Christ) in order to apostatize. At that moment of forsakenness and turmoil Rodriguez hears Jesus speak to him saying: “Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”² This depiction of the Divine is what the work of Shelly Rambo’s book, Spirit and Trauma, is restoring.³ Rambo’s theology of the Middle Spirit is one that dismantles the redemptive narrative, reading the Paschale Triduum through the lens of trauma and revealing a fragile God intimately connected to the human experience.

The dominant culture redemptive reading of the death of Christ does not speak to the reality of the events that are written in scripture nor to the reality of many of those who are on the outskirts of that culture. Rambo attends to the theologies of feminist, womanist, and liberation, revealing that the reading of the cross and the resurrection as the only events of the Triduum are actually harmful. She turns to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr to deal with Holy Saturday, a day on which the Divine goes silent and descends into hell.⁴ This day is one of trauma, of wordlessness, of the ultimate fragility of God being revealed. In addition to providing this new understanding of God, it also makes way for a reframing of the human condition in light of suffering and trauma. This day is when the Divine joins in the human condition, experiencing hell: death, isolation, abandonment.⁵ It is, to return to the example from Silence, that Jesus’ purpose is clear: he is to share in our suffering as he “walks the path of hell and, as a result, becomes the path on which we tread.”⁶ This is not the all-powerful, “mighty fortress,” protector that is expected but in fact, “these familiar assertions emerge from dominant redemptive narratives and may be complicit in covering over and eliding the suffering that remains.”⁷ Rambo’s work is to retrieve God from these narratives, she is un-naming the conventional Western idea of the powerful Divine. Instead, she navigates her theology toward the paradox of fragility that occurs with the Spirit in the Middle space of Holy Saturday.

Rambo outlines the Middle Spirit in three ways: Spirit is Breath, Spirit Moves Differently in Time, and Spirit is Love. At first glance, all of these speak to just how precarious the Middle Space is for theology. Breath appears to be something so light, easily taken from humanity. Time is ambiguous, something humanity is subjected to rather than something to be controlled. Love, when broken, is a gaping wound. This is one side of the human experience, though. The other side of is that powerful, gasping breath when one is called back to life (imagine any movie when someone is saved from drowning). The power of subjecting oneself to the mystery of time (think Arrival). And, even in heartbreak, the capacity and intensity that is the experience of love. Rambo portrays here that strength is in fragility, it is precisely because of the vulnerabilities of these attributes of the Spirit that the Spirit is able to remain. The paradox is revealed in that which we think most easy to destroy is that which persists.

Reimagining the experience of the Divine in this way dismantles many of the harmful attributes of God that feminist, womanist, and liberation theologies speak against. Rambo writes of the need for a third way made by new language, one that articulates that “God is powerful, not in God’s distance but in God’s intimate connectedness to all things…God is vulnerable to the world, affected by it.”⁸ I believe that this is what Rambo is doing through the theology of Holy Saturday and the re-imagining of a God that is not at work through traditional attributes of power and oppression, but rather through the intimacy and complexity of breath, time, and love. With the Middle Spirit there is room for the tragedy and shame that I feel when doubt prevails more than belief. When I skip Holy Saturday, the day which questions the existence of God, I gloss over my own dark moments of questioning whether God is indeed alive, in existence. Because of the Middle it is possible to say both “Death persists” and also, “love remains.”⁹

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1. Shūsaku Endō, Silence, trans. by William Johnston. NY: Picador, 1969.
2. Ibid.
3. Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 75.
7. Ibid., 156.
8. Ibid., 130.
9. Ibid., 172.

…

Bibliography

Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve (2016, USA: Lava Bear Films).

Endō, Shūsaku. Silence. Translated by William Johnston. NY: Picador, 1969.

Rambo, Shelly. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.