Abstract
Shortly after his election to the papacy in 2013, Pope Francis made the following statement which has come to characterise his pastoral approach: ‘The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. … And you have to start from the ground up.’ The church being described here is one of hope, a place of healing, forgiveness, and love. A place in which all can find a home and begin to engage in the hard task of coming to terms with their trauma and learning to live with it.
Unfortunately, because of the broken nature of the world, such a place does not exist. Well, not yet. Instead, churches are themselves sites of trauma. As Bearing Witness demonstrates, churches inflict trauma in a number of ways. There are the obvious means that immediately spring to mind, such as clerical sexual abuse, church collusion in the residential school system, sexism, homophobia, and racism, which are all part of the fabric of people's experiences of church. And, even when the trauma being experienced is not inflicted by the church, the response is far removed from that pictured by Francis. Instead, as Karen O’Donnell and Katie Cross tell us, ‘Historically, explanations for suffering (theodicies) have dominated theological responses to what we know now as trauma. While this discourse has sought to defend God's all-loving, all-knowing nature, it has often resulted in answers that shift the blame towards the traumatised’ (p. 3). As a child, I remember the nuns that taught me telling me to ‘offer up’ whatever travailed me. In fact, I should have been helped to understand what was wrong and the role of God's love in this. Instead, I was offered an ill-formed shorthand for accepting God's will and made to feel guilty and unchristian if I could not accept this aspect of the church's teaching. Whilst there is no doubt that suffering can bring you closer to God, the traditional approach outlined above is not the path to a loving relationship with the Creator that can heal, or at least enable one to carry one’s burdens more easily.
I believe this collection of essays, so carefully curated by two compassionate scholars, O’Donnell and Cross, is one of the most important publications of 2022. This is because it takes church teaching back to its original roots: ‘we find the possibility for the Church to potentially be a witnessing community, as a body that is able to witness to narratives of trauma. Indeed, this is deeply rooted in the origins of the Christian faith. Those first witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection … were themselves witnesses, exposed to the traumatic death of their friend and family member Jesus. … They witness to the lingering effects of Christ's death, even as they know of love's survival’ (p. 4). Bearing Witness allows the true role of the church as a field hospital to be known and tries to understand the barriers preventing this from happening, and the routes that can be taken to make this a reality.
The essays that follow this introduction all define trauma in a similar way, with Nuam Hatzaw's definition being the most comprehensive. She states that ‘trauma can therefore be viewed as the nexus through which past, present and future collide in a volatile manner; trauma disrupts time. It does not always lie dormant in the past but can instead interrupt and interject itself into the present at unpredictable moments. Its presence lingers long after the event has passed, and it is the reliving and continual manifestation of the trauma that is the locus of pain for the survivor’ (p. 47). Bearing Witness asks fundamental and crucial questions such as who is recognised as a victim/survivor? How has the church (or groups within the church) inflicted trauma on marginalised groups? How do we rehumanise those that have been dehumanised within church settings? And, how do we deal with trauma inflicted by secular, neoliberal, and colonial forces? At first glance, this seems like a variety of questions too diverse for one collection of essays to answer, but Bearing Witness offers answers to them all with skill and a concern for the traumatised rarely seen in academic writing.
Bearing Witness is divided into four sections: Raced Reflections on Trauma Theology; Gender and Sexuality in Dialogue with Trauma Theology; Trauma Theology and the Whole Body; and Poverty and Privilege in Conversation with Trauma Theology. There are 16 essays written by both established and emerging scholars and which were gathered in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The approaches range from historical to practical theology, but all contain to varying degrees the themes of rejection, loss, the importance of first-person knowers, and the meaning of Holy Saturday in the lives of those living with trauma.
I cannot do justice to all of the essays in this review but would like to comment both academically and personally on a few that characterise the approach taken in this excellent collection. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that this is not just an academic book but one that ought to be read within churches in order to develop their responses to trauma. The first is the contribution from Anthony Reddie, ‘Why Black Lives Still Don’t Matter’. This essay outlines the impact of Christianity on Black suffering: ‘when you combine problematic tropes around Blackness with white exceptionalist forms of hermeneutics, linked to white European notions of manifest destiny, you have the ingredients for a toxic residue of epistemology that sees Black people as “the problem”’ (p. 18). He goes on to demonstrate the ways in which this has happened, before offering a liberationist alternative. He makes two statements which one would hope chimes with every Christian reading the Bible: First, ‘Black theology identifies God revealed in Jesus as committed to liberation and freeing Black people from racism and oppression’ (p. 24). Second, ‘Pentecost shows us that the Holy Spirit does not eradicate our differences; rather the Spirit celebrates them’ (p. 25). It is only by taking the side of the oppressed that we can truly come to know God and start to create a church worthy of Christ's sacrifice for us—a true field hospital in which all of Creation can be celebrated and healed.
In ‘“We Shall Not Be Eaten by Any Lions”: Healing Ugandan Queer Trauma through Creative Contextual Bible Study’, Adriaan Van Klinken demonstrates the horror and fear experienced by members of the LGBT + Ugandan community as a result of the infamous Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Once more, this chapter invites us to read the Bible through a new lens in order to understand the suffering of others, and in order to help people live with trauma. The methodology used in this study takes the form of contextual and creative Bible studies through which participants were ‘allowed to like the Bible again’ (p. 145). More importantly, however, is that in ‘working through, and overcoming such feelings [of trauma], several participants testified to have rediscovered God as a God of acceptance and love—not despite, but in recognition of their sexuality because it is part of how God created them’ (p. 143). As this essay so clearly shows, churches do have the skills and methods needed to help people learn to live with their new reality in the aftermath of trauma.
In her autoethnographic essay on autism, ‘Autism: An Autoethnography of a Peculiar Trauma’, Claire Williams provides first-person knowledge of how a person with autism experiences church within a charismatic context. Through this account, we are introduced to the feelings of silence, damage, shame, and peculiarity that she feels when attending services. Although these are feelings that no one should experience within a church setting, they do, especially given teachings that ‘disability is the result of sin in humanity and a flaw in the human’ (p. 198). In response, Williams asks ‘What resources exist to narrate a meaningful existence from this damaged, silent and shameful self?’ (p. 198) Her answer is one of love and acceptance, which reflects upon where we find God, and this is something that is sadly lacking in many churches today.
Chris Shanahan's powerful essay, ‘The Grenfell 72: Austerity, Trauma and Liberation Theology’ provides an example of ‘liberative, fieldwork-led contextual theology’ (p. 269) and is a lament for the 72 people who lost their lives as a result of capitalist greed, and those traumatised as a result of what they witnessed. In this essay, Shanahan shows how structural violence causes trauma and how society must recognise the damage that neoliberal economics are doing to the poor and marginalised. ‘The death of the 72 in the Grenfell Tower tragedy is more than the embodiment of austerity economics. It is a Kairos moment for contextual theology. The enormity of the moment cannot be addressed in a credible manner until the roots of the fire in endemic structural injustice, deep-seated poverty and neoliberal austerity economics are recognised’ (p. 279). He also offers hope by showing how faith-based institutions provided a response to the fire when the local council was unable to, the perfect example of the church acting as a field hospital.
Bearing Witness is a book that offers hope in the midst of a suffering that will never go away. It should be read by academics and church leaders alike, and churches in particular need to pay close attention to its findings and recommendations adapting their approaches to the people most in need.