As the body groans, so does the Spirit
Trauma + Theology: Tannerites meet van der Kolk
Bessel van der Kolk opens his book with stories of Vietnam veterans and their experience of PTSD. For many, trauma becomes a source of meaning for survivors. This meaning is manifested in the automatic physical and hormonal responses of the body. In essence, the body is the container of memory, a history book, of sorts, recording and remembering often without conscious awareness, the experience of trauma. van der Kolk writes, “For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present” (p. 21).
In an attempt to make connections with Kathryn Tanner’s pneumatology, we might imagine Tanner’s 2nd view of the Spirit is important to understanding trauma. This 2nd view of the Spirit is characterized by a gradual movement, through human fallibility, without final resolution. The beauty of this read of the Spirit is that human messiness does not impede the Spirit — she makes her way in and through our human processes. Romans tells us that the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. So much of our understanding and experience of trauma is without words, van der Kolk says trauma is “preverbal.” Yet the body speaks, groaning with what it remembers. The interceding and groaning Spirit somehow bears witness to the human experience.
Shelly Rambo’s work around Spirit and Trauma feels like an important key to the intersection of van der Kolk’s work around trauma and the body and Tanner’s reading of pneumatology. Rambo writes of the Spirit as witness. Her understanding of Holy Saturday is shaped by an understanding of the Spirit as the one who remains, bearing witness to the trauma of the cross and Christ’s wounds. In her lecture last fall, Rambo spoke of Christ’s “resurrection wounds” — different from the wounds of Good Friday, somehow transformed in the witness of the Spirit and the power of the resurrection. The scars of Christ’s wounds remain; his body literally bears the score of his trauma.
van der Kolk writes that victims of trauma and PTSD will never be fully healed, the wounds will never disappear entirely. Yet, part of trauma care is the work of narrating the trauma experience to a different end. In his book on Trauma and Memory, Peter Levin differentiates between reliving trauma and narrating trauma in order to heal through a different experience of the trauma story — one where the victim has agency, resources, and awareness.
If we return to the trauma of the cross, the wounds of Christ are transformed by believing in a different end. How we talk about the crucifixion totally changes when we believe in the resurrection. How we understand the wounds of Christ is informed by an eschatological hope, a Spirit who remains as witness. How does an eschatological hope change the way we understand trauma? How does a traumatized body hold hope? If our bodies are history books, do they also hold an innate, age-old knowledge that the body was created in wholeness, bearing the image of a creative God, and called good?
