A Way Past the Trauma

The Feast of Christ the King

Sunday, November 22, 2015

The Rev'd Dr Richard Smith

There are lots of good-hearted jokes about the memory loss that can afflict us as we age. Here’s one:

An older gentleman named Harry was telling a friend about a restaurant where he and his wife had eaten a couple of days before. Harry was trying hard to remember the name of that restaurant, but just couldn’t. So Harry asked his friend, “What is the name of that flower that smells so nice?” His friend says, “You mean a rose?” Harry says,”Yeah, that’s it! A rose.” Then he turns to his wife and says, “Rose, what’s the name of the place where we ate the other night?’

In today's gospel, Jesus says he came to testify to the truth. The Greek word he uses for truth means, literally, not forgetting. Part of Jesus’ telling the truth means not letting us forget. Not letting us forget what?

One theologian suggests what Jesus, in his entire life and ministry, is trying to keep us from forgetting is an ancient, primal trauma that occurred somewhere at the very beginning of the human story, an unhealed trauma that continues to distort every human heart to this day. That trauma --whatever it was, we’ll never know its exact historical details--is what the scriptures try to describe in a mythical way in the ancient story of Cain and Abel, the story in which Cain violently murders his brother Abel. That ancient trauma -- of a brother murdering a brother -- has never been healed, and so it still plays itself out very dramatically today.

Mental health professionals say that when we go through a trauma, whether physical or emotional, it can take some time and effort to heal. Sometimes children who have been abused can take years before they are able to speak about the pain they went through. The memory is too painful to bear, so they block it out, bury it. But eventually, if they are to be whole again, they have to recall the pain and the trauma and tend it in a conscious and loving way. If they can do this hard healing work, their hearts can become more supple and alive, forgiving and compassionate. But without that healing, the trauma continues to fester, and can explode like a grenade, harming them and those around them in addictions, violence, perhaps suicide.

A little over a year ago, on one Sunday after mass, we walked up to 16th Street where a young man, Bennie Martinez, had been shot and killed the night before. We prayed for him and his family. A few days later I went to his funeral at St. Peter’s. I learned that, when he was 11 years old, he saw his mother get shot and killed by gang members on the front steps of their family home up on York Street. Bennie had never healed from that trauma, with all its bitter pain. Eventually, to seek retaliation for what had happened to his mom and their family, it led him into the other gang, the rival to the one that had killed his mom. As a leader in that rival gang, he himself inflicted violence on others. So the cycle of violence continued and eventually he himself fell victim to it that night up on 16th Street. The ancient trauma of Cain and Abel playing itself out in our neighborhood.

Entire societies can go also go through trauma. Our own country did not heal from the trauma of 9/11, and because we did not heal, all our unresolved pain and anger exploded onto the world like a huge grenade in the invasion of Iraq. The effects of that unhealed trauma are now felt all through not only Iraq but also Syria and Beirut, throughout the Middle East, the city of Paris, and Africa. The trauma of Cain and Abel -- of a brother murdering a brother -- playing itself out today on the world stage.

We’re coming up on the holiday season, and maybe you saw the article about Pope Francis in the Chronicle. Let me read a portion:

In a mass Thursday, Pope Francis called Christmas celebrations this year "a charade" because so many nations wage violence, according to media reports.
...the head of the Catholic Church said God and Jesus were weeping "because we have chosen the way of war, the way of hatred, the way of enmities," Vatican news reported.
"Christmas is approaching. There will be lights, parties, Christmas trees and nativity scenes... it's all a charade. The world continues to go to war," he said,
It comes less than a week after terrorist attacks in Paris prompted nations to step up bombardment in Syria, where the United States has launched 6,300 airstrikes in the past 15 months, destroying 4,517 buildings, according to government data from November. Other nations, including Russia, France and Saudi Arabia, have also collectively dropped more than 1,000 bombs on Syria.
The offensive is meant to counter the Islamic State, or ISIS, which has expanded its reign of brutality across parts of Syria and Iraq, where sectarian violence persists more than a decade after the 2003 invasion [of Iraq by the United States].
Russia continues to support militant rebels fighting in Ukraine, Saudi Arabia has also recently waged a months-long bombing campaign in Yemen, and President Barack Obama recently announced indefinite prolongation of the 14-year war in Afghanistan.
"We should ask for the grace to weep for this world, which does not recognize the path to peace. To weep for those who live for war and have the cynicism to deny it," the pontiff said Thursday.
"What shall remain? Ruins, thousands of children without education, so many innocent victims, and lots of money in the pockets of arms dealers...
...The men who work war, who make war, are cursed—they are criminals."

Or as we could say, these men are still caught up in the bitterness and pain of the ancient trauma. Not having healed from it themselves, they unleash that bitterness and pain like a grenade on the rest of the world.

When Jesus testifies to the truth, when by his life and teachings he refuses to let us forget that trauma that lies buried at the beginning of the human story, he does so to offer us a way past the pain, a way past that trauma. He offers an alternative to the violence and retaliation that is the way of Pilate in today’s gospel. He offers the path of nonviolence.

This alternative path of nonviolence is what Jesus is referring to when he says his kingdom is not from this world. Many preachers have taken his words to mean never on earth, but always in heaven; or not now in present time, but off somewhere in the future; or not a matter of the exterior world, but of the interior, spiritual life alone.

Jesus spoils all of these possible misinterpretations by going on to say, “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to be executed.” In other words, “Your soldiers hold me, Pilate, but my companions will not attack you even to save me from being killed. Your Roman Empire, Pilate, is based on the injustice of violence, but my kingdom is based on the justice of nonviolence.”

His kingdom is not from here. His is a different strategy. The strategy of nonviolence.
We’re about to immerse ourselves in that strategy once again as we re-enter the story of the incarnation, of God coming among us simply because he loved us, because he was crazy about us, loved hanging out with us, sharing our ups and downs, our joys and struggles. Sharing as well our own brokenness, including the ancient trauma of Cain and Abel. This is how he went about the task of healing.

This healing involved him breaking the cycle of that traumatic violence. Rather than striking back at the ones who sought to kill him, he submitted to it, dying at their hands without bitterness or retaliation, forgiving them, loving them to the end, loving them and not taking it back.

Through this path of nonviolence and love, he transformed the trauma into something life-giving. This is the story of his death and resurrection -- of violence being absorbed, suffering being redeemed, the primal trauma being healed, life and love having the final say. It’s a story we become part of each time we come to this table.

At the height of the civil rights struggle, Dr. King echoed this story of Jesus’ death and resurrection in these words addressed to his enemies:

We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children; send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities and drag us out on some wayside road, beating us and leaving us half dead, and we will still love you. But we will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.

I spent part of yesterday morning with the parents of Alex Nieto. They went through their own trauma over a year ago when their son was shot with 48 bullets by the police. I see them now so bravely transforming that trauma, redeeming the suffering. They show this in the compassion they show to other families who have lost children to police violence, crying with them, hugging them, standing in vigil with them, marching with them, working for the reform of our justice system.

Earlier in the week I was with two African-American mothers, Paulette and Maddie, whose sons were killed by gun violence. In each case, the pain is immense, sometimes feels unbearable. But I see how they, too, heal that trauma of losing their sons. They show it by their powerful and relentless work to end gun violence. They carry large pictures of their sons as they stand in vigils across the city, telling their painful stories to political leaders, often with tears running down their cheeks, calling for gun control laws, and doing so with great power and eloquence.

On this Feast of Christ the King, with Advent just a few days away, may we do as Dr. King, the Nieto’s, Paulette and Maddie are doing -- embracing once again the strategy of Jesus, letting love be stronger than the pain, doing what we can to heal the ancient trauma of our human family.