An Unspoken Language
This week Colin’s Corner began their discussion in a manner befitting their name — in a quiet, cozy corner on the second floor of TSS. We began from chapter six of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score entitled, “Losing your Body, Losing Your Self.” We came ready to discuss relationships, embodied-ness, community and theology, and to experience one another. One of us had experienced the death of a family member and was consequently unable to attend. So our little body of four in the corner was incomplete. Now I wonder how each of our physical bodies felt and communicated their absence.
Each of us was drawn to the idea of “befriending our bodies.” Van der Kolk says that the greater our awareness of our body-based feelings, the greater our sense of agency in the world. In other words the more we listen to and love our bodies, the more we can exercise our free will in our environment and relationships. One of us told a story of a recent visit with a loved one whose body was dominated by psychosomatic manifestations of childhood trauma: asthma, migraines, and crippling pain. Doctors could not diagnose the cause, and so she lived in chronic pain, highly medicated, and with little hope for relief. Trauma had disconnected her from her body, and her body was crying out to be heard.
As we began to see how van der Kolk’s research was exemplified in each of our lives, we began to wonder about the body of Christ in our country. Colin Gunton describes the Holy Spirit as God’s agency in the world, the third relative of the Holy Trinity that mediates between Christ and his body. Paul calls our bodies “temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19). He dares to say that God is literally at home in our bodies. We wondered how a body of believers raised in a Hellenistic culture with and separatist view of the mind and body learns to discern the will of God. What if an essential part of discerning God’s will means learning to listen to our bodies, to our literal heart’s cry? We wondered how the Spirit might be groaning and crying out to us from within our bodies.
Van der Kolk says that the most natural way for human beings to calm themselves when distressed is to physically cling to another person. The Seattle School talks a lot about “holding,” how we learn to kindly care for our stories and the young, traumatized parts of ourselves. This language is embodied; it is more sensed than comprehended. It is fitting language because so much of our trauma is preverbal, deeply felt rather than consciously known. In the spirit of Gunton’s desire for the Christian life to be lived out in community, we wondered how we can “hold” one another psychically when touch is impossible or unwelcomed; how the Spirit’s love might be ushered to and from our embodied selves. This brought us to the boarders of language. And perhaps when language becomes lacking it is time to listen to what our bodies, our good and holy temples, are crying out for us to hear.
