The Bride’s Forgetfulness
Gabes and the MDiv’s, post #3
The immediate step after recognizing the Church as traumatized, both from a local and a corporate perspective, is questioning “now what?” Why is it significant to know that the Church is a traumatized entity, whose past impedes her ability to process and regulate.
Assuming that the Church is dysregulated (which is a topic far more extensive than the breadth of this paper), how might the Church be able to reach a “healthy” state? We arrived at a point of seeing how a lack of self-awareness or disconnection from one’s wounds perpetuates its consequences through time. With this collective dissociation, it will affect the way the Church succeeds and fails to hold the traumatized.
With her lack of integration, several problems cause the dysregulation which needs addressing. Such dis-integration can be rooted in how she (being the Church) has lost touch of how she resides in a specific context. But, she is also a universal and symbiotic network that affects each part — one local church has subtle and explicit ways of influencing another, and therefore, there’s a ripple effect that reaches the whole.
The Bride is prone to forget who she is as both a located being and that she is part of a broader and older story. How has this fragmented memory influenced her identity development? Is a manifestation of the Church’s dysregulation reflected in her disconnection from her entire story?
This disconnection is significant because it underlies what possibilities might exist for the healing of the Church. Historically, the Church has always known her story well. Hagiography and stories of martyrs circulated from the early Church onward, and still survive in several branches and denominations. As the church formed, labels and creeds quickly became important. In viewing herself, the Church needed a way by which to identify who she was and who she was not. However, fundamental to this development were the stories which she told herself. While these did include the accounts of Scripture, these also included the deaths of the martyrs, the lives of the saints, the miracles of the church fathers, all paired with icons and imagery which allowed for processing to take place. In addition to this dramatic telling, there was also a continuous dramatic retelling with the emphasis of the Eucharist. Such a practice repeatedly prompts the congregation to take the elements in remembrance of what Jesus has done and given, and who he is as fully human.
Walter Brueggemann repeatedly emphasizes in The Church in the Power of the Spirit that the church exists only in the light of a Trinitarian God. In other words, the church does not exist merely as an ontological reality but in a relationship with the other. Key to understanding who the church is — and thus who we are — is to know better God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
Overall, our group recounted the urgency for the Bride of Christ — which does not exempt us who are in the group — to rediscover and retell the story of Christianity in such a way that directly and intimately involves her — in all her beauty, wounds, successes, and misinterpretations (collective and local). Revisiting van der Kolk’s work in treating dissociation, he explains how association is the goal of treatment. This association happens when we integrate “the cut-off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life, so that the brain can recognize that ‘that was then, and this is now’” (p. 180). The Church is not impervious or peripheral to her story. While she may argue that the story of Christianity is solely Christ’s story, it’s also hers because of who Christ is. The story of Christianity wouldn’t be what it is apart from its two lead characters.
The church is in a state of confusion and dysregulation. When she better knows her past, and when she better knows the Holy Trinity, she will have the hope of entering alongside the other without being swallowed up.
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Bibliography:
Moltmann, Jürgen. The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A contribution to messianic ecclesiology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. NY: Penguin Books, 2015.
